Posts:
The fun just keeps on a-comin’! Last Tuesday, Cuenca celebrated Pase del Niño Viajero, one in a series of Pases celebrating the birth of Jesus that will continue until Carnival. The first of the festivals began on the first Sunday of Advent. The second was the big...
By David Morrill Give Vadim Avdeev two minutes and he can steal your cell phone number and call you from it. Give him five and he can shut down the accounts of thousands of Cuenca internet and utility customers and erase any evidence that they ever existed. With a...
I don’t remember not knowing about the Holocaust. My father, Rolf Gompertz escaped from Nazi Germany with his parents. They came to the U.S. in his eleventh year after a childhood marked by state-sanctioned violence and persecution. His parents lost everything except...
By Aja Romano For a long time now, the cross-generational dialogue between baby boomers and millennials has been built atop several recurring themes. Boomers — the generation born roughly between 1946 and 1965 — scoff that millennials expect “participation trophies”...
Susan's note: This is the third in a multi-part series on fats — In Part I I wrote about trans fats, or hydrogenated fats, and how they transformed the processed foods industry — and how increased consumption of trans fat was linked to the rise in the incidence of...
By Rob Bell There are at least two things about Ecuador that I, as a U.S. expat, have difficulty understanding and getting used to. It seems to me that Ecuadorians are extremely fatalistic about what they expect from their elected government officials, and from their...
Susan's note: As reported in the journal Endocrine Reviews, the treatment of obesity continues to be a major challenge. Obesity is now pandemic in the United States as well as in other nations. In the United States, it is now more common to be overweight than not;...
The UK’s tradition of giving small gifts and leftover food to servants, squires and bicycle messengers on day the after Christmas is celebrated across the Commonwealth to commemorate the Boxer Rebellion. The tradition is often attributed to Roger Ring, Sir Loin of...
Author's note: This is an update of my original story of "The Gift" that appeared two years. The original appears below it. Hi everyone! I hope you’ve all been sufficiently naughty or nice to get some Santa action coming your way. Over here, we are more than ready....
Alpaca milk, beaten thin by unknown hands, is rolled down the paths of mountains as alabaster mist. It then rises from creeks and fissures to mingle with smoke twisting from distant chimneys across the valley. Trees come and go from one world into another, first a...
According to the Ministerio de Salud Publica (Ministry of Public Health) all of Ecuador’s 24 provinces are ready for the flu season, and from now until February 28, 2020, is offering the flu vaccine free of charge to seniors 65 and over, to children, pregnant women,...
I grew up in a small town, Tillamook, on the Oregon coast in the 1930's and 40's in an intact family of mother, father and three evenly spaced boys. Aside from the normal disagreements within a growing family there were no major disruptions. We were friendly and...
Most know me as artist, writer, adventurer, but I love to ride my competition bike. It’s a cross-country bike style called a Specialized Epic Comp. I put 15 miles on it almost every morning riding up into the Andes Mountains. My favorite route is to follow Via...
By Tom Larsen Susan McBride is no stranger to awards. She was the 2018 Cuenca Governor’s Expat Humanitarian Award winner. On December 17, National Immigrant Day, Susan will receive special recognition from the Ecuadorian government in the National Assembly session in...
Editor's note: This is the first of a two-part series on shearing alpaca I posted in January of 2018. I’ll be back in a couple of weeks. Alpaca are shy. The rancher, more so. In order to maintain a degree of privacy for my friend and host who invited me to participate...
Many years ago, I spent a few cold January days in Stockholm, Sweden. Gray, eerie and beautiful, the city appeared to be skating on an endless sheet of Baltic ice. Around 2 p.m. the gray sky dissolved into purple haze; within an hour the night was painted so black...
A favorite expat online forum carried a post with a simple query: “Do we need proof of current yellow fever and typhoid vaccinations to enter Ecuador from Colombia?” (No). This simple question escalated into an epidemic of opinions, some backed by facts, some by...
Does the phrase “random acts of kindness” register with you? Have you ever performed one? How did it feel? Would you repeat it? How come? When Anne Herbert wrote the phrase “practice random kindness and senseless acts of beauty” on a placemat in Sausalito in 1982, I...
By Andrea Navarro San Miguel de Allende oozes old Mexico charm. There are the cobblestone streets, the colonial-era buildings and wrought-iron balconies, the neo-Gothic steeples soaring high above the pink-sandstone church anchoring a corner of the main plaza. Travel...
By Jeff Salz Storytelling is the most ancient form of human communication. According to science, it remains the most effective. Ever notice how facts, data, ideas, and opinions all bounce off you, roll away and disappear while a good story (or even a well-told bad...
