Cedulas again, Yuca, and Music

Wednesday afternoon, Jorge came to see us with a huge smile on his face and an envelope in his hands.  We finally received our cedulas.  They are here and in our possession, as are our passports.  What a relief.  Now, every time we make a purchase, the tax we pay is refundable to us.  Plus we get to go to the national parks - including Galapagos for 1/2 fare.  Public transportation is 1/2 off - including air fare originating from and returning to Ecuador.  There are a slew of other benefits as well.

We have discovered yuca root.  Not yucca - yuca.  It is also known as cassava, manioc and a few other things.  It tastes a lot like a potato but is much healthier for you.  It must be cooked as it contains Prussic acid (hydrocyanic acid) which cooks away.  It has been used as a staple for as long as there have been people here.  Our neighbor across the street is growing it along with a field of corn.  We had seen the plants growing and wondered what they were - now we know.  It seems almost all plants have some use around here - whether is be food, medicinal, fiber for weaving, etc.  We have so much to learn.

Steve was pretty bummed when he had to get rid of most of his CD collection when we moved here.  The man loves his music and he had a ton of CDs.   Well, I was fooling around on the computer a couple nights ago and went to Amazon.com looking for something - and noticed that they had a new ap called the Amazon Cloud Player.  I thought that looked like a good idea, because we could buy music, but not have to worry about them shipping us a physical CD.  They just put it in the "cloud" and play from the computer, or we can download to the computer to transfer to a CD or IPod or whatever.  So I downloaded it.  Along with 93 of his previously puchased CDs.  We have music!