Cuenca!

When the super-groovy team of Team Oisin team up for a team outing to a little town called Cuenca, you just know that awesomeness will accompany us on an awesome trip of awesemic proportions! Bow down to the awe! (or stop and have a coffee while soaking up the daintiness and ignore warnings that sunscreen might be useful.)

Dainty, ain't it?

Cuenca is famous really for one thing (I'm sure it's famous for many more things, but as I lie here with my girlfriend still in her pj's at 16.30 (doing a sudoku), I figure that you haven't heard of Cuenca or even of the single famous thing about it) - the hanging houses. The land is a mish-mash of cliffs and steep hills, so some architect high on LSD and suffering through some serious desert-heat sun-stroke decided that the only solution was to build a town full of houses hanging precariously off the side of these cliffs, so that some day a group of nationality-confused tourists may take a few snap shots and buy a sandwich or two (and maybe a fridge magnet for Lady PJ's mum). The awesome famousness:


It's a nice town, 2 hours east of Madrid, and there is a hell of a lot of walking up steep slopes and narrow, twisty streets. Think of a hundred kilometers worth of this picture, all looped around so that the only useful form of navigation is the sun.


You can also admire the view from under Jesus from the top of one such cliff, and then you will no doubt feel a little peeved when people drive up to the top, while you had to slug it out at 14.00 under the sun. Yeah, guess who got a little sunburned? Grrrr.


There isn't much more to say, except that there was also a church where you had to pay to enter. Since it was that or buy lunch, we decided that a sandwich was more important. We also tried breaking into a convent, but there were stories of ninja-nuns that trained for hours every day just waiting for an unsuspecting guy to walk inside with his camera, so some of us had to run as fast as possible....back into the sun.


There are five ninja-nuns in this photo. I bet you can't even see them, they're that good!