Ecuador--First Impressions

With a heavy heart we said goodbye to Erin on Wednesday morning, October 31st.  Her faithful "Mexican Dad", Rosalio, drove us to the airport and we were sad to say goodbye to him as well.  We had had a wonderful time in Mexico and had become very fond of Erin's friends and adopted "family".

We had done quite a bit packing the night before, but spent much of Wednesday morning packing, repacking, and weighing as we knew from the airline's internet site that there were weight restrictions for our bags on the flight to Ecuador.  When we arrived at the airline's check-in desk, the employees were extremely nice, gladly accepted our bags for the flight, and the weight didn’t seem to be a concern to them—so much for extensive suitcase balancing.  The flights to Bogota and then on to Quito were pleasant and blessedly uneventful. Having left Erin’s apartment at noon,  we arrived at our Quito hotel at 11:30 pm--it was a very long and tiring day.

LAN Airline made traveling on Halloween more fun.

 We spent only one night in Quito, since November 2 is Independence Day in Ecuador and we were told that everything would be closed, including our realtor's office.  We had only a few morning hours in Quito November 1st, before flying on to Cuenca, but the small area we saw around our hotel was lovely. 

Flying in it was clear that Cuenca is much bigger than we had envisioned, and our first few days of exploration have certainly confirmed that.  Cuenca is indeed a major city, the third largest in Ecuador, and even though we have confined much of our exploration to the historic center, it is a busy and bustling environment and quite different from the ambience that you find in places such as San Miguel de Allende, Mexico or Antigua, Guatemala.  And it has taken us a few days to adjust and get our bearings.

Parque Caldron, Cuenca

 Cuenca hosted a citywide Independence fiesta and celebration November 2-4, and there seemed to be bands, performing groups and artisan markets in every park and square.  There were throngs of people walking everywhere throughout the historic center, and wherever there were performances and exhibitions, the crowds were even denser.  We were a bit shocked to find Cuenca so intense.

We also were a little disappointed in our apartment and its location, at least at first, but the realtor has been very nice about fixing things and buying some items like a coffee pot and plastic patio furniture, so it is growing on us.  We are doing little things to make it more homey, like bringing out the photos and knickknacks that we carried from home, getting fresh flowers and planning to weed and perk up the small garden in our outdoor patio (which, by the way, contains an old cement sink and washer and dryer under a tin roof held in place with huge rocks).

View from our Quito hotel--quite a contrast with our neighborhood in Cuenca.

Entrance to our apartment--the balcony belongs to the apartment upstairs--we share the graffiti.

 The apartment is on the edge of the historic district, yet not in one of the more picturesque parts of that district—we are surrounded by auto parts shops, car seat upholsterers as well as other hardware type tiendas. We are serenaded about every hour or so with a car alarm going off. With the graffiti on the walls, including our building, and bars on every window and door, it feels a little ghetto like.  We don’t feel insecure, although the young woman from the realtor’s office told us not to go out after dark.

We have done a lot of walking since we arrived here and are feeling a little bit more at home.  We found the central market on our third day, so we now have a stock of fresh fruits and vegetables. On the first day we visited what we thought was a supermarket, but it seemed not to have many things that we would expect to find in one, including meats and fresh vegetables and fruits.  The answer is that here in Cuenca, most supermarkets don’t carry or compete with the items that you find in the central market. 

It will take us some time and effort to understand the workings of the market. A large, covered but otherwise open building, part of it is devoted to fruits and some vegetables and the other to meat, poultry and fish.  There is not a lot of refrigeration, so there are lots of chickens and slabs of meat out in the open—not something that we Americans are used to.  We were not brave enough to buy a chicken that had been sitting out in the open for we didn’t know how long, but we did buy some fish and shrimp that looked really fresh.
 
We were also mystified by why the fruit and vegetable vendors didn’t have a larger variety of vegetables, but we have discovered that outside of the market on the streets surrounding it, there are lots of vendors who have a larger variety of vegetables, like celery, broccoli, cauliflower, and beets.  Clearly understanding the reasoning for these separations will take us a bit longer.  Searching for butter was also a challenge—most people seem to content themselves with margarine or lard—but we did finally find a store that sold “mantequilla de leche” in a large one pound ball in a baggie.

Fruit & vegetable part of the market

On Sunday, much of the freneticism connected with the festival seemed to have died down.  The streets were much quieter and the central square clearly had a lot fewer families and visitors. After spending a leisurely morning in our apartment, we wandered out for a late lunch and then decided to take the city bus tour.  What fun! It took us all around the city, including the outer “suburbs.” As we have indicated, Cuenca is so much bigger than we had envisioned—there has been a lot of growth and development in the last decade or so, and we saw that very clearly on the tour.

Cuenca, a small village of only 500,000 people.

 One of the nicest parts of the tour was getting to meet a lovely Ecuadoran family—Santiago and Sylvia and their two daughters, Isabela and Valentina.  They were delightfully friendly and welcoming, and although we began our conversation with them in Spanish we ended up talking, at least with the parents, in English.