Posts:
Most people who move to Cuenca know about the first suitcase. It holds the practical things. Clothes. Documents. Medications. Chargers. A few favorite items from home. Maybe a sweater for the mountain evenings and a pair of shoes that will survive uneven sidewalks....
One of the many head games I play while wandering in the kaleidoscope of mayhem surrounding the Rotary Market is imagining (and occasionally wildly exaggerating) the personal lives of couples who capture my attention. High on my list of likely suspects are couples who...
By Victoria Waldersee Daniel Northover left his home in Liverpool this month, which marks the 10th anniversary of Britain's Brexit ​referendum, to move in with his 80-year-old mother in Turre, a town of 4,500 people in Andalusia in southern Spain. After his stepfather...
I had spent much of the day supervising the head of housekeeping at Larga Towers who had today arrived with a five-year-old assistant already surprisingly competent in wielding a broom and a mop. The child attacked the rugs and the floor with the focused seriousness...
Most of us arrive in Cuenca carrying a list. We may not write it down, but it is there. A better climate. A lower cost of living. Less stress. More freedom. A fresh start. For some, the list is practical. For others, it is deeply personal. A difficult chapter has...
There is a particular kind of energetic expat who hits the ground running in Cuenca on Monday, buys him or herself an alpaca wool hoodie on Tuesday, and by Wednesday morning is ready to reorganize the bus system, modernize the electrical grid, improve customer...
My long-ago girlfriend, Sherry, finally won me over. I remember distant times when I could hardly wait for my girlfriend to get home so I could re-play the latest singer-songwriter album I found that moved me nearly to tears; I was always scouring the bins of our...
A few weeks ago I nearly became part of an inauguration ceremony myself, though not through any ambition on my part to mingle with visiting heads of state. I was halfway across the road when a presidential motorcade rounded the corner like a fire brigade racing to a...
Author's note: This is the third of a four-part series about how an expat with no culinary credentials somehow found himself judging one of Cuenca’s most beloved traditional. It’s also a story about the generosity of strangers and the adventures that begin when you...
There are people alive today who genuinely cannot imagine a world without television. To them it is like asking somebody to imagine life without weather. Television simply exists and as far as we know has always existed. It lives on walls in airport lounges, above...
Most of us arrive in Cuenca paying attention to the big things. The lower cost of living. The colonial architecture. The mountain views. The promise of a different pace of life. We compare prices. We admire the churches. We take photographs of blue domes and flower...
Author's note: This is the first of a four-part series about how an expat with no culinary credentials somehow found himself judging one of Cuenca’s most beloved traditional foods. It’s also a story about the generosity of strangers and the adventures that begin when...
My father ran a grocery store in England in the 1950s. At some point he converted it to self-service, which is what we would now call a minimarket. He did not do this because he had read about consumer psychology or operational efficiency. He did it because his shop...
History reveals that for countless generations, a practice of remarkable simplicity commandeered the ebb and flow of urban life throughout Europe and large swaths of the developing world. It was a principal source of immeasurable personal comfort while simultaneously...
By Frances A. Hogg Corazónes de Oro (formerly Hearts of Gold Foundation) provides services to struggling Ecuadorian families. We vet potential clients (many of them referred to us from other organizations) for our programs including All Children Deserve to Dream, and...
Realizing that my wife Belinda and I may one day need living assistance, the Los Jardines Geriatric Center on Cuenca’s west side presents such an opportunity. After relocating from California thirteen years ago, we have made Cuenca our home. Our fifth-floor apartment...
A recent comment on one of my Cuenca High Life articles stopped me in my tracks. The commenter argued that artificial intelligence is advancing so quickly that many of the skills people spent decades developing may soon have far less value than they once did. After...
There are moments in Cuenca when you suddenly realize you are no longer living in the sleepy colonial retirement brochure sold on Facebook by people wearing alpaca sweaters and holding cups of artisan coffee the size of flowerpots. One of those moments arrives every...
By Garry Vatcher Several years ago, we attended an international conference in Munich. It was an eye-opening experience. The funders we met there were very familiar with Ecuador and the challenges organizations face. One issue stood out immediately: in most countries,...
It was probably sometime around June or July in1982, when I was working in Bermuda, that I was invited to the house of someone who had a satellite dish to watch a World Cup football match. During the afternoon I was introduced to a friend of a friend who worked as a...
