Expat Life

By Christopher Lux In the United States, my meat came from supermarkets. Wanting a little ‘security’ and familiarity for my meat purchases after I moved to Cuenca, I continued to seek out the supermarkets. While my produce comes from local markets (mercados), I was less confident about buying meat there. Having spent a lot of...

By Melina Marks Sometimes, our greatest interests are not discovered until a life-changing event makes us notice them. Some people are good at math, others are exceptional at science. Some, like me, who aren’t too fantastic at either of these things, have talents in other fields that aren’t so ‘textbook’ oriented. Before moving to Cuenca,...

By Karla Freeman Ecuador: Come sick, get healthy. No, I don’t mean cure your arthritis or cancer, although that may happen too. I mean get healthy from all the stress-related attributes of Western culture that, in my opinion, cause a lot of our problems, both physical and mental. So what are those attributes and conditions...

By Viktoria Vidali 
Knowledge is the spring of creative talent. As it expands, it engages the artist’s deeper self and flows into a river of new combinations and relationships, from the quest for peaceful pathways to powerful reflections in color, motion, and feeling. This has been the profound personal experience of painter Janda Grove, native of...

Editor’s note: CuencaHighLife’s newest columnist, Dave Nelson, spent 30 years growing up and getting educated in Oregon before moving to the Oakland, California and the East Bay area, where he practiced worker’s compensation law, representing injured workers, for 40 years. When he retired from his legal practice, he worked another nine years as a part-time...

Editor’s note: Canadian sociology professor and researcher Matthew Hayes has studied Cuenca and the impact of North American expats on the city for several years and, last year, published an article in the academic journal, Ethnic and Racial Studies about his research. His article is titled “‘It is hard being the different one all the...

Former football star Oswaldo de la Cruz, 53, offers football classes to the youth of Cuenca. He is married and has two sons. You may have seen Oswaldo performing his talents with the soccer ball in the streets of Cuenca. If you do see him, be sure to say hi, he was once a player...

By Chris Gerakiteys Before, it never occurred to us that we were expatriates when we lived away from home; we all laughed at the same jokes, we all drank copious amounts of beer. Sure they had a funny accent and ate cheese out of a jar, but the cultural similarities between countries with European tranditons...

There are an estimated 7.6 million Americans living abroad and a new survey by Greenback Expat Tax Services found that 58% voted in the last Presidential election. Called U.S. expats, this block of voters could have an influential voice in the next Presidential election. Eighty-six percent of respondents said they don’t feel well-represented by the U.S....