Posts:
I enjoy walking around El Centro on Sunday mornings to surround myself in beauty while meandering quiet neighborhood streets. I often see whole families dressed for church, reminding me of when I was little, kicking my way through autumn leaves so deep it caused a...
By Ashley Rogers There’s something about living abroad that changes the way you experience certain days — and Mother’s Day is one of them. It’s not that the meaning disappears. In many ways, it deepens. But instead of a shared meal or a familiar embrace, the day often...
By Jeremiah Reardon In preparation for the arrival from New Mexico of Belinda’s brother Arnold Owens and his wife Deborah Van Buren to Cuenca, my wife and I had painted our outdoor patio. With the help of our mechanic Julio, and using Sherwin-Williams paint, the...
By Tim Brinkhof One night, while backpacking in Guatemala, I was woken up by a pain in my leg. Nearly bumping my head against the upper bunk of the hostel bed, I pulled away the blanket only to find nothing. Confused, I tried going back to sleep, but couldn’t. The...
If you spend enough time observing relationships abroad, you may begin to notice something that is not always visible at first. Some relationships are easy to enter. They feel natural. They develop without much friction. They fit the moment people are in. However,...
I had been living in Cuenca for four months when I submitted my first story to CuencaHighLife. That was 10 years ago; the best 10 years of my life. The fascinating culture of celebrations requiring both prayer and parades still thrills me. I was captivated by the...
By Liam Higgins When expats dream of retiring in Cuenca, the vision usually includes strolling along the cobblestone paths of the Tomebamba River, enjoying the spring-like weather, exploring the historic center, and stretching their retirement dollars in a beautiful...
Sherlock Holmes is almost certainly the most famous detective who never existed. He has been portrayed on screen more times than any other fictional character, which is a remarkable distinction for a man who lives only in print, but the version that fixed itself in...
If you have lived in Cuenca for any length of time, you have almost certainly had at least one close encounter with its sidewalks, pavings, steps, or street furniture, and if you have not, you are either very new here or unusually nimble, and the odds on the second...
By Mark A. Mahoney, Ph.D., R.D.N. The necessity of understanding how to maintain good hydration is an important one for maintaining good health and needs to be reiterated due to the importance of adequate hydration for our well-being and health. A lot of misleading...
If you spend enough time observing relationships abroad, you may begin to notice something that is not always easy to define at first. It is not just how relationships form. It is what seems to sit quietly beneath them. At first, everything looks natural. People meet....
By Garry Vatcher Some projects begin with a plan. Others begin with a moment. The Amazon Fundraising Mural Project began with many moments - walking jungle trails, traveling rivers by canoe, sitting with community leaders, listening to mothers, watching children, and...
From time to time, an article or column surfaces or resurfaces warning expatriates that they will have to learn the hard way, that time works differently in Latin America. The warning is often delivered with the authority of someone who has just been embarrassed by...
Editor’s note: Originally from California, Rick Ingle describes himself as a “student of expatriation.” Rick has lived overseas since 1984 in the Philippines, Singapore, Spain, Panama, and now Ecuador. He has lived parttime in Cuenca since 2011. He's currently...
Feeling heartbroken, in the fall of 1980, after breaking up with Gwen, my Vermont girlfriend, and with nothing to keep me there, I traveled west to try to reconcile with her. She had returned to her job in the oil fields of southwest Wyoming. My friends, Tom from New...
When V. S. Naipaul sat down to write The Enigma of Arrival, he was already some distance from where he began. Born in Trinidad, of Indian descent, he left his island and moved to England on the strength of a scholarship to Oxford University, and much later was awarded...
In a recent column, I wrote about the point where living in Cuenca stops being the question and becomes something more personal. If you stay with that idea a little longer, something else begins to come into view. Not all at once, and not in a way that calls attention...
There are restaurants in the city center where for $3.50, a man in a white apron will place before you a bowl of soup, a plate of rice with something on top of it, a small salad of red cabbage, grated carrot, and papaya with half an avocado pressed into a rough...
I was invited to speak at the monthly “Storyteller’s Night”, at IdiomArt (Mariscal Lamar 14-25 y Estevez de Toral the other night. It was a totally cool evening hosted by my new neighbor and soon-to-be good friend, Barry Callen, who mc’d this second-Thursday-of-the...
There are certain songs that do not so much belong to a period as continue living inside it, like a station clock that still keeps perfect time long after the timetable has ceased to matter, and Chattanooga Choo Choo is one of those, appearing simple on first hearing...
