When the ashen clouds that crept in around lunchtime give way to evening thunder and patterned puddles and the hushed static of drops on tin, it is time to scurry those five cobblestone blocks to the yellowing light of the Cafe Austria. Sit back, breathe deep, let her light the white table candle.  Order something hot.  It is here that the memorable moments that you've strung so carefully out behind the day's mission - its drive, its momentum - finally come tripping back in to the frontal lobe, collapsing in to one another until they're just a shimmering heap of happy sighs that deflect any of that careful intercultural analysis that you'd sworn, mere hours before, would be the real work of the day. Two eyeballs, one brain. It hardly seems fair.

But now the rain is coming down in sheets and even the two guys under the pizzeria awning across the street (slouched silhouettes, cigarettes dangling expertly a la Brando or Dean ) keep looking skyward with impressed expressions. Turning back is simply out of the question. Engage the heap. Set down a few words in honor of that electric instant this morning that will henceforth be known as the Official Moment of Arrival.

This arrival in particular had not been terribly forthcoming. Not sure why, though it could have been any number of things: the confusion inherent in Spanish sharing as much phonetic territory as it does with Italian (which by now sounds familiar indeed), the unavoidable bubble effect of traveling as a couple, the unsettling ease of our arrival in Cuenca, or - most likely - our seven hour stint in the Quito International Airport, which happened to take place within acoustic fallout zone of a Johnny Rockets burger joint . (Four hundred and twenty minutes of nonsleep while a ceaseless loop of golden oldies boomed and bounced out across an ocean of white tile and glass. If subjected to another barrage of Don't Be Cruel right now, I might actually suffer a nervous breakdown.) Whatever the cause, this failure of my brain to arrive on the scene nearly seventy-two hours after my body had touched down was an item of no small concern when we set out in search of groceries today, just after noon, heading east.

Arrival No. 2 even featured an airport. Halfway to the curiously distant Gran Aki (a forty minute walk though the parts of Cuenca not featured in the Lonely Planet highlights map) we spotted what appeared at first to just be a cluster of vegetable stands, but were - we realized after crossing the street - merely the gatekeepers (the forward guard!) of an enormous, hanger-sized market: four-story ceilings and crumbling brick walls, a huge high cave filled to the brim with a warren of butcher stands, spice stands, vegetable stands, pasta stands, home supply stands and a lonely looking lady at the back entrance selling warm beer. Pidgeons fighting over spilled grain and kids hiding under benches with purple fistfulls of bleeding berries. Our surprise could not have been more complete - it was like wandering through a barn door and in to the Taj Mahal. Gasts properly flabbered, we set about finding some lunch.

Now, if we're mincing half-seconds here, I'm going to say touchdown was the moment my rear end did in fact touch down on the plastic pillow covering that concrete seat, but stretch that second back to give it some context, and we're walking past a row of food vendors feeding the vegetable vendors who are taking quick breaks from their tables - each high with the ripe and rosy product of an Ecuador we have yet to meet - to grab a midafternoon bite from this guy. He smiles. I smile back. He's my age, standing in his stall maybe halfway down a line of ten, wearing a grey sweater and the look of a man about to make a sale. A quick conference confirms that there is no way I am not going to sit down on that bench, and I point at Other Guy's plate : "un piatto come questo?" and smile hopefully. Italian? Eh? No matter, this guy knows a hungry customer when he sees one. "¡Por supuesto!".

And yes I know it's cliché for some first world newbie to breathlessly describe that one meal of fresh vegetables he spooned off a chipped plate and washed down with the mysteriously speckled juice of a fruit he'd never heard of (that was yes ladled from a plastic bucket) as the best meal of his not-so-young-anymore life, but I'm not here to break new ground. How a pile of curried potatoes and beets nestled in a mountain of fried rice could register so high on the magic scale is utterly beyond me. And it wasn't just spoonfuls of spices. The blue painted Jesus staring down above the sink was delicious too. As was the teensy TV someone had stashed on the third floor of a spice shelf, playing a Spanish language episode of Futurama that flickered back and forth between color and not. Or the huge leafy plants between stalls that dangled low enough to touch the fedoras of our fellow patrons. It all helped. The scratched bumper stickers of bygone soccer stars; the bubbling pots of broth-softened bones; the sheer dollhouse scale of the whole operation (1 cook, 4 patrons); the drying rack of dinged up pans or the smiles that emerged after a few minutes from under those fedoras. All of it, heaped on and mixed in to my plate of potatoes.

Wheels touched down with a skid, the engines reversed and the whole creaky craft shuddered with the changing of speeds. Two more bites and all the constituent fragments suddenly snapped in to place: a new synaptic constellation has formed that will be pointed at and whispered about in the dark reaches of this cerebral dark for many moons to come.