Reflections on Cuenca

Tonight is our last night in Cuenca, and tomorrow morning we head for Loja, which is supposed to be about a four-hour bus ride south of here, and about 2000 feet lower, at around 6500 feet. However, before we leave, I thought I should record my impressions of Cuenca.

Before we arrived here, people told us that Cuenca would be a little colder than Quito, and it has been. We have seen temperatures in the mid 70's here, but today I don't think it got much above 60, and the sun barely came out. It rained last night for a good part of the night, just a slow drizzle, but still, it was chilly. We are certainly glad that we brought jackets with us to Ecuador, as we have worn them sometime almost every day we have been here.

Other than cooler, Cuenca is an old city, at least in the part where we are staying. It reminds me very much of the old parts of towns in Italy, with narrow cobble-stone streets, with frequent buses and taxis, and cars parked wherever they can get away with it, although they don't park on the sidewalks here.

And the sidewalks. They vary from barely a foot or two wide to more than ten feet wide, often in the same block. The curbs tend to be fairly straight, but the fronts of the houses do NOT form a straight line, and the sidewalk makes up the difference. They often have potholes, cracks, and other uneven features, so it is important to watch where you are going and where you put your feet. They also feature inclines cut into the curbs wherever cars need access to inside parking [i.e., behind doors], and these can be hazardous if you are not looking, especially when wet. Many of the sidewalks are paved with tile, very nice when dry, but almost like ice when wet.

The people of Cuenca are mostly quite nice and willing to be helpful if asked, but the social standards and expectations are not the same here as in the US. When meeting people on the sidewalk, you should not expect them to look ahead and defer to you if one or the other of you needs to yield for a narrow space. Actually, all the rules of the road, whether on foot, or in a car, are different here, and I have not been in Ecuador long enough to have any confidence that I can predict what others may do. I can cope with this on foot, but I would have to be here a lot longer than I have been to even think about getting behind the wheel of a vehicle.

Like most third-world countries, there is a lot more impromptu commerce than we would expect or tolerate at home. There are people selling grapes, strawberries, and other fruit out of wheelbarrows on the street corners, and others who seem to just set up impromptu merchandise stands wherever they can find a place. On the other hand, they don't appear to be desperately poor, or desperate to make a sale. There was a woman selling grapes by the large bunch, at a dollar a bunch. They looked good, but I didn't want a large bunch, so I asked her how much I could get for a quarter, and she wasn't willing to sell any less than a dollar's worth.

They do a lot more repairing of things here, though. There are at least two shoe repair shops within six blocks of the Hostal Macondo, as well as a few shops that perform sewing repairs on pants, shirts, and who knows what else. I have also passed at least three shops selling coffins, and we passed a building in Ambato, where people appeared to be carrying out the body of someone who had died. In the US that would be handled by ambulance or medical crew, but here it appears to be the responsibility of family members or friends.

As I have mentioned earlier, there are numerous Internet cafes here, where you can access the Internet for 50 cents to a dollar an hour, and most of them also provide phone booths where you can make local, national, or international calls for various rates. Calling the United States can cost anywhere from 5-25 cents per minute, and we surprised my dad with a call this afternoon. And some others of you may also receive calls if we feel so moved, but don't count on it!

Old and new are also superimposed in many instances here. There is a shop just down the street from Hostal Macondo where they have high-tech computer-driven sewing machines that can stitch on patterns of sports teams, family names, or any other graphic designs that they have in their computers, onto any fabric, baseball cap, etc., that you may want. The storefront looks as old as any others around it, but the technology inside is quite current.

And the medical technology appears to be quite good. One of the other guests here, named Peter, had an appendectomy yesterday. He had been suffering abdominal pain since Thursday evening, and finally went to a doctor on Saturday. They immediately diagnosed his appendicitis, and had him in the hospital and removed it within the hour. They told him after the surgery that it was good that he had not waited any longer to come in, as it was close to bursting, and that would have made it far worse. He was already back to the hostal this afternoon, and once again had a smile on his face. I asked him his impression of the hospital, and he said that it was first rate, fully equal to hospitals in the United States. And the cost for everything, testing, surgery, a night in the hospital, etc., came to about $1400.

Cuenca is cleaner than many cities I have visited, although I am not sure whether that is because the inhabitants are careful with their waste, or if the occasional street sweepers that we see are able to keep up. We try to be very careful to place our waste in the garbage cans that are fairly common on street corners and such, as behavior that may be common in locals may nonetheless arouse ire when tourists are casual with their trash. Besides, we really do appreciate the cleanliness, and want to do our part to keep it that way. It is far from perfect, but still pretty good.

The rate of violent crime here is very low, at least according to reports, and we certainly have not felt unsafe at any time during our visit. However, there are reports of pickpockets, and sometimes there are people who will spill something on you, in an apparent accident, and then as they attempt to help clean you up, they clean you out instead. We have not seen this, much less had it happen to us, but the hotel staff did warn us to be careful.

They also have a very good symphonic orchestra here, and performances are free. We found out about a performance that started at 8:00 p.m. on Friday [from a guest here who attended the same performance on Thursday], so we went. It was very good, fully as proficient and good as we would expect from a similar orchestra in a college town of half a million or more people in the US. They were more casual about allowing people to enter after the performance arrived than we would consider usual, but it was not our place to try to correct or educate them. We just focused on the music and tried to ignore the people coming in late.

In conclusion, we have really enjoyed our time in Cuenca, and would recommend that anyone visiting Ecuador plan to make a stop here. There are a lot of things to do that we have not yet gotten to, including visits to the nearby hot springs, and the nearby national park, with hundreds of lakes, local weavers, potters, makers of Panama hats, and such. So, we may have to return another time.