The Internet

It has taken us three different companies to find one that will give us a good connection to the internet. Part of the problem is of our own making by not understanding what we were being advised by the person we contacted at each company. We first tried Porta which required eight visits to the store at Mall del Rio before we were up and running. Each visit required us to get some kind of additional documentation including a statement from our Ecuador bank stating that we were customers in good standing. We left them a month ago because we could not get a Skype connection that would last more than a minute and, even more often, no connection at all. Then, on a recommendation, we contracted with Etapa, the water company, who are another local internet provider. It worked just fine for a week but soon developed a critical condition that prevented us from connecting any time of the day except late in the evening.  Another friend had suggested we try Empresa, the electric company. Today, we signed a year’s contract with them and think we finally understand the connection problem. The key is the usage figure that they all quote. It is either 8:1, 6:1, 4:1 or a commercial rate of 2:1 or 1:1. The first number is the amount of people you will share the connection with. Therefore, 8:1 means you will share the time you are on with up to seven other people plus you when you are all connected at the same time. The more people on at the same time the slower the connection speed. Of course, the price goes up as the speed increases and the rate decreases. The way to figure the best plan is to divide the receiving speed, say 512, by the usage rate, say 4:1 to get a number that will be 128 and compare it to another plan that will give, as an example,  384 speed divided by 2:1 or 192. 192 is a faster rate than 128 so is supposed be a better connection. This is probably the reason we had so many problems with Etapa at a speed of 1200 divided by 8:1 ratio which gave us a rate of 150. But, who knows. It might be something else. Once you sign a contract, a technician will hopefully come to your apartment or home within a couple of days to install the modem on your computer. Empresa, the electric company, is a huge organization but required us to walk two blocks to the nearest copy shop to get a cedula copied. This happens all over, at the car registration, at the hospitals, or at the utilities. Almost everywhere they will not use their copy machines but make you go out and get one at a nearby copy shop. These little frustrations are just part of life in Ecuador but the internet connection has become a major trial for us and we can only keep our fingers crossed that it is solved once and for all. 

Making a living in Cuenca

We have mentioned before the fascinating and complex intricacies of the Ecuadorian marketing structure. As in every country, there are the more familiar stores, markets, and a conventional infrastructure that provides access to almost anything you might wish to buy. This represents the successful and more prosperous segment of Ecuadorian society. However, there is another level of marketing, the Mom and Pop store. 

 

A typical Mom and Pop fruit and vegetable store

Thousands of $1.50 pirated music and movie DVD's 

Infinitely more in number than the big shops, the Mom and Pop stores line every block in the city. In these small stores, often one room with a grate in front where the article chosen is passed through to you in exchange for your money, you will find every commodity from auto parts to fruit to electronics to building supplies to cooked meals.  These stores are the real backbone of the Ecuadorian economy and provide a good living for the majority of the population in the city.

Then there are the open air markets. Some of the most famous are the flower market and the huge mercados selling food and commodities.

The famous open air flower market in the courtyard of the Santuario Mariano Church

The live animal area of the Frera Libre Mercado

With no building or store front, there are the people who seem able to make a living by selling a product or their talent almost anywhere. Here you will find the more marginal income producers yet, by being able to sell something on the street, they have found a way to make a decent daily wage.  It is a thriving economy where you will find someone selling something on almost every street corner in the city. Here are just a few of the street sales people whose ingenuity you have to admire.

Selling raw milk door to door

Alpaca rugs displayed on the street corner

Street jugglers with the baby in his carriage

Hammock seller

Selling kites in the street median

Football jerseys for sale outside the stadium

A little restaurant in the street median

Ice cream carts on almost every street 

Three soccer balls for sale

Selling sheets of lottery tickets

The sunglasses salesman

Trucks, large and small, roam the streets selling propane gas cylinders

A seller of chickens having lunch on the job

A woman with a bicycle cart selling fresh juice while carrying her baby

A friendly chat while waiting to sell fresh cut flowers 

A fruit stand at San Francisco Park

We hope this photographic essay gives you a little appreciation for the industriousness of the Ecuadorian people who are ingenious in finding ways to earn a living. 

The Expats

One of the wonderful things about Cuenca is the size and vibrancy of the expat community. Four years ago, two of our most prominent expats thought it would be a good idea to have a weekly gathering of expats who live in or who are visiting Cuenca.  The concept was to share experiences and create a network of friends. They spread the word around and a few expats started meeting at a local restaurant on Friday evenings for a glass of wine and conversation.  

Over the years, the venues changed frequently from the Eucalyptus Café, to La Parola, to the Eucalyptus again and currently, to Zoe’s Restaurant as different people came up with new places to meet. During the last year, some 30 to 40 people have gathered on Fridays at Zoe’s. Some are just visiting and have heard through the grapevine that it is a fun and informative evening. Some are renting here for a month or so and are trying to decide whether to move to Cuenca or not. These people are usually thirsty for information. Others are expats who are long time residents who have put down roots and expect to stay for years to come and who attend to meet old and new friends.  But almost all find it an interesting evening with many people willing to share information and friendship.  If you are presently living in the US, Canada, or Europe and thinking of an international move, one of the things you are probably looking for is information, current information that is valid and has no hidden commercial theme. From our experience, there is no better place than the expat community in the city or region you are investigating.  We looked at Quito where there are many expats in the Tumbaco and Cumbaya areas but, from what we saw, there is no organized expat community.  There may be but we could not find one. We looked at southern Spain, which still interests us and where there are many expats from the UK who have summer homes along the coast. But there seems to be no functioning group of expats in the areas we researched. Everywhere you look, there are good blogs, good sources of information, but a real expat community is often lacking. There is an argument against belonging to a vibrant expat community. It is that shopworn argument that “The last thing we want is to export the same life style we are leaving.” We have not found that to be the case in Cuenca.  Our group of friends are from all over the world and have brought their interesting lives with them. This is not an enclave of Americans huddled behind closed gates who seldom go into the Spanish world around them. Our friends are scattered all over the city. They are involved in cultural and charitable events.  They lead exciting lives. Just read some of the blogs about Cuenca to see how “out and about” they are. What the expat gatherings have done is provide a venue where we have gotten to know each other and sorted out friendships which have become one of the strongest parts of our Cuenca experience. 

A boy in the mountains

This is the story of a curly, red-haired, five year old, city boy spending an afternoon in the mountains.  While we were doing some work on our house in Challuabamba, Jonny went outside to play.  He would usually find sticks to play with or rocks to throw or just plain explore the great outdoors. 

The fields next to our house are rocky, filled with waist high scrub brush and tough wild grass. What more could a boy ask for to explore? A half hour later, we went outside to check on him and couldn’t find him. We called his name and, from a hundred yards away and out of sight over a rise, he answered.  We heard him climbing up the hill and talking to someone. Minutes later, he arrived, his shirt covered with burrs. Dust and dirt covered his hands and smiling face. “I’ve been with my friends,” he said with a huge grin. Behind him came two young children followed by a dozen sheep slowly eating their way up the hill. Jonny had been playing with and talking to two shepherds, a boy of about nine and a girl of possibly eleven years.  They were both dressed in long sleeve shirts and pants that had been washed so many times no color remained only worn cloth the color of tan dirt. The boy held a long stick, a staff, that he used to herd the sheep. Jonny ran up to us with a baseball sized rock in his hand, saying “He gave me this stone. It’s special. He says it’s part of the mountain and he gave it to me.”  The children stood nearby, passively, watching Jonny and us without a saying a word. We climbed into our car to head back to the city with Jonny clutching his magic stone. We all waved goodbye.  They waved in return and went back to herding the sheep toward fresh, new grass. 

This was just a moment in our lives but there were strong images that we will remember for a long time.  Something is happening to Jonny. After a long adjustment, he is comfortable using Spanish. He seems no longer to be frustrated by a lack of language and the ability to communicate easily with other children who speak only Spanish. He is much happier now than before in being able to talk to them. It has taken over a year but we hear him jabbering away in Spanish with an ease far more advanced than ours.  He asked if we could go back tomorrow so he could go looking for his shepherd friends again.  He sees no difference in them. They were just new friends. Jonny, by Ecuadorian standards, is a boy that comes from a wealthy family but cannot distinguish rich or poor. We thought about how this child of five has no class distinctions, and as yet, no rules of how to relate to others who are different. Where do we get this dividing line later in life of who we should be friends with and who is not acceptable? Class, race, status?  Where does it come from?

 We thought of the shepherd children and how different their lives will probably be compared to Jonny’s. What will their lives become? School is compulsory in Ecuador but does anyone check up in the mountains to see if these children were going to school? If they go to a local public school, it is obvious that the minute they get home they are told to take the sheep out to feed on the mountainside. We know of many people on our mountain who live in little more than shacks with dirt floors and an outhouse in the field behind. 

It is almost certain that these two children live in a similar shanty.  In the city, poverty is all around us but we seldom see a homeless person. Almost every poor person finds some way to sell something and survive. In the country, families scratch a living from almost vertical hillsides, raise animals, grow vegetables, scavenge the land for herbs to sell, collect firewood, and more. 

All is done without the need for a national safety net or welfare.  These shepherd children may, unfortunately, be a perfect example of how an Ecuadorian country boy and girl may grow up knowing little more than their mother and father’s existence and carrying on a life style that may never change. For Jonny, it is a different story. He is learning how to deal with diversity and poverty and friendship in two languages. With all of the problems of raising a child in a foreign country, an encounter like this probably has no match in the US. It would be all but impossible for Jonny to gain the same understanding almost anywhere else other than in the mountains of Ecuador. It is our hope that he will be a better person for this experience and many more to come. 

Neighborhood Apartments

One of the major tasks in moving to Cuenca is to find a place to live on a more permanent basis than a hotel or a short term lease that can be booked on line or with a real estate agent. 

Avenida Solano, our Champs Ellysees, on the South side of town

As we have mentioned before, finding an apartment for a long term is best done by going door to door and asking if something is available, following the newspaper advertisements, or just letting everyone you talk to know you are looking. Along these lines, we often get the question “Where is the best place in town to rent an apartment.” Once again, this is a purely subjective question and depends on your requirements. Do you want to live within easy walking distance of Centro or will taking a bus or taxi from a greater distance suffice? Do you want to live in a high rise building with a great view or would you prefer living on a lower, potentially less expensive, floor? How would you rate the security of the building you have chosen?  Do you want an outdoor terrace? How big an apartment in square meters (150 square meters is approximately 1500 square feet)? Would you possibly like to live in a house? On and on it goes and we can answer none of these questions for you. You have to come and look, ask, and do some real leg work.  Other than having a free standing home, most of the apartments you will probably find are in the newer, red brick buildings shown in these photos. All will have a doorman who is the security guard. All will have parking either underground or in front or back. And, many will have a reasonably sized gringo population. We are most familiar with the more residential parts of the city, the new part of town on the South side of the river and the West side of town, but there are many more apartment buildings scattered all over the city.

The River Tomebamba, separating old town from the newer South section

There are many apartments in the old city and we know a few couples who prefer to live there. But it was our choice to live across the river in the quieter, more residential area where there is a larger concentration of apartment buildings of our liking.

The above photo is of the area across the river from the old city and looking west. As you can see there are at least eight buildings visible in the photo. It is about a 15-25 minute walk to the center of town depending on how far west you are located. Shopping for food, appliances, electronics, and the Mall del Rio are here.

Here is a map showing in red the approximate area on the South side of town and across the river where many apartments are located. 

This photo is of the dozen or so apartment buildings in the Oro Verde Hotel area in the far west part of town on Avenida Ordonetz Lasso and is where many of the gringos have set up camp. It is about a 35-45 minute walk to Parque Calderon in the center of town.  There is plenty of shopping quite near plus the Coopera food coop and Sukasa, an upscale department store.

Above is a map showing in red the approximate vicinity of the Oro Verde Hotel and the nearby apartment areas on the West side of town.

We hope this very brief tour of some of the apartment areas of Cuenca will be of some help in orienting yourself when you visit and begin the process of apartment or house hunting. 

Newspapers, magazines, radio, TV, and the internet

Before we came to Cuenca, we searched everywhere to find out more about Ecuador. One of the things we wondered was if there were any online newspapers in English where we could take the pulse of the city on an almost daily basis. We found none. We have since discovered that there appear to be no newspapers written in English. There are a number of Spanish papers but our understanding of Spanish at that time meant that the newspapers online were of little use. You might like to check them out however. El Mercurio is a fairly conservative paper and probably has the largest circulation. You can find the paper at www.elmercurio.com.ec.

 El Tiempo is another paper and has a somewhat more liberal presentation at www.eltiempo.com.ec.  Recently there has been some government interference in the concept of a free press which, though subtle, has put something of a crimp on open journalism. Magazines are available at the Supermaxi’s and the random sidewalk stores though we have seen few that are sold. They are all shrink wrapped in plastic which prevents browsing and may discourage sales. Women’s fashion magazines appear to be the most prevalent just as they are in the United States.  There are a few US magazines like Esquire, Cosmopolitan, and National Geographic but all are translated into Spanish. Radio is a way of life in Ecuador and there are dozens of AM and FM stations broadcasting talk, news, Latin music, and a lot of American rock music. Probably thirty percent of the rock music sent out over the airwaves here will be immediately familiar to someone used to US radio. TV is very prevalent with even the most humble home often having a set. There is cable but it does not appear to be as expansive or reliable as the satellite programming from Direct TV, the preferred provider.  After contracting them they attach small satellite discs to your home or apartment. There is a good amount of English news through CNN and BBC along with a half dozen Spanish news programs from Ecuador and other South American countries. If you subscribe, as we do, to HBO and other pay movie channels, you will have a dozen channels of movies in English plus a dozen more in Spanish. At least another dozen sports channels are available many concentrating on Futbol, an Ecuadorian mania. Then, of course, there is the internet which we have commented on in past postings. It is quite reliable and not that much slower than in the US. There are lots of choices for a connection like the cell phone companies, the water company and the electric company. It does appear, however, that signing up with a newcomer in the internet connection business is smart because often a provider, who becomes successful and signs up a huge amount of people, find that their system is quickly overwhelmed and the connection bandwidth gets overloaded. The new kid on the block usually costs less as well. Seems the electric company, Empresa, is the hot new one to try. So, when you add it all up, communications with the rest of the world is quite accessible and much of it is in English, a real plus until your Spanish is up to par. 

Some corrections on old posts

Many of us when we first come to Cuenca are overwhelmed with the cultural change that differs from what we knew in the States, Canada, or Europe and we write about these wonderful sights, tastes, sounds and differences in blogs, websites, letters home, and emails. Unfortunately, some of our first impressions can be wrong or, at least, we have not been exposed long enough to make sound judgments.  We have looked at our postings written in this blog over the last year and would like to correct or expand on some of our comments.

On one of our postings on Animals, we said that the birds were not as plentiful as we were accustomed to in the States and we did not know why. It is possible that there are fewer birds here because there are almost no bugs or insects for them to feed on. Cuenca is a remarkably bug free city where we have no screens on our windows and seldom see a fly or mosquito.

On a posting about Children, we spoke of the German school, CEDEI, and the American School. We have looked carefully at all three and have found each lacking for Jonny in some way or the other.  A friend who travels extensively with her children told us to look at schools with the IB (international Baccalaureate) certification. This certification means that a high school graduate’s IB diploma is accepted by almost all colleges in the world. Two schools in Cuenca have an IB rating, the German School and Santana where Jonny will go in September.  We are hopeful that by going to a school that aims for an IB diploma, it will give him a universally competitive education.

Under a Cost of Living post, we said that the protective tariff should soon be repealed but it is evident by prices on imported goods that the tariff is still in effect. Also, we’ve found that our monthly food costs are around $500 not the $800 we reported as we have learned to be more frugal.  Yet, our purchases still include wine, fresh vegetables and fruit at the coop, pan at the bread store and fewer visits to Supermaxi.

Under Indigenous people, we made the mistake of saying Indigenous Indians and have found that the indigenous people do not like to be referred to as Indians.

We are certain there are many more comments that deserve review but these are a few that jumped out when we looked over old postings.