Yellow balloons in Cuenca

Woke up Saturday morning to the sounds of a marching band outside our hotel room. We'd been upgraded (just because) to one of the best suites in the Hotel Santa Lucia, housed in an 18th century mansion in the center of Cuenca's old city. I swung the wooden doors to the balcony open, stepped out, and saw a parade passing by the adjacent block.

So we walked down to see the parade. When we got there, an all-girls Catholic school was marching, all dressed in matching red sweaters and each with a yellow balloon tied to her wrist. And they kept coming and coming, getting progressively younger and shorter, until all you could see from one end of the street to the other was a sloped carpet of bobbing yellow and red. An unexpected way to start our vacation.