My mornings in Cuenca

The excitement of living in Cuenca is wearing off and I’m settling into a daily routine.  Thought I’d share a bit about it.

I’m living in a 3-bedroom apartment in a residential section of this city of 500,000.   My apartment is upstairs, above the apartment of my American friends, Peg and Mike.  Here's a photo of the apartment with Peg and Mike outside our gate.  We are well fortified against "ladrones" (thieves.)  Like most Ecuadorians, we not only live behind a locked gate, but the downstairs windows are barred and each apartment has two locked inner doors as well.

We live across the street from a public elementary school and around the corner from a private school. The first thing I become aware of in the morning is the sound of children’s voices as they gallop down the street or pile out of cars and into their schoolyard.  Yesterday I watched a taxi pull up in front of the school and eight children emerged from it!   

The kids in this school wear a uniform of sweat pants and athletic jackets.  Other schools have more formal attire, typically plaid skirts & sweaters for girls and pants & blazer for boys.  There’s one school downtown where all the students look like little doctors because they wear long white coats over their clothing!

School starts at 7 a.m. and school traffic noise must begin a good half hour before that.  If I should happen to sleep through the noise of cars and kids, the P.A. system will surely wake me up.  The entire school seems to gather in the courtyards for morning announcements which often go on for a half an hour.  I can barely understand a word—due to the terrible quality of the broadcast system more than my elementary Spanish.  Occasionally, a tiny squeaky voice comes on.  I figure it must be a prize student whose reward for good work is the privilege of addressing the student body.  I always smile when I hear this child’s voice first thing in the morning.  Here's a view from my window of the rather dreary school playground.

The school play yard is nothing more than a muddy field with one moveable soccer goal.  I’m reminded of the great creativity of kids as I watch them running around chasing a ball with no semblance of structured teams, or throwing the ball over the goal as if it were a volleyball net.  They all seem to have a great time.  Interestingly, the private school around the corner has a manicured play field with well-maintained playground equipment.  A visual reminder of class differences.

At 7:30 am, without fail, I hear a new sound—seven car beeps in a row followed by about 4 seconds of silence. I’ve learned that this strange Morse Code of Ecuador signals the arrival of the gasman.  Most houses, ours included, heats our water with gas canisters that are hooked up to “on demand” water heaters.   When we no longer get hot water we know it’s time to flag down the gasman to get a new canister.  He hoists it on his shoulder, practically runs up the stairs with it and carries the old off to be refilled.  The only problem with this system is that I never know when the hot water will stop functioning.  I keep fingers crossed it won’t start running cold when my hair is full of shampoo!

Speaking of plumbing (one of the essentials of life, of course), it took me a few days to master the art of shower taking.  Found out that in order to get hot water in the shower, you have to run the hot water in the bathroom sink at the same time.   None of the plumbing in Ecuador is up to the task of handling toilet paper, so all of us gringos have to develop a new habit of putting TP in the waste basket.

I don't start teaching until 3 p.m. on weekdays, so I usually can have a leisurely start to my day.  My morning routine includes making myself a cup of coffee using the ingenious invention of a "coffee sock"--a reusable cloth coffee filter on a metal frame.  Here's a photo.

Until yesterday, I was making due with a tiny apartment-sized refrigerator, but Peg and Mike have just improved my life immensely by buying a full-sized one for this apartment.  I cook using a 4-burner hotplate, but so far I haven’t really missed an oven.  As I do my morning dishes, I can look out the back window and observe the activity of the mini-farm behind the house.  Our indigenous neighbors keep busy tending their chickens, calves, sheep and lovely golden retrievers.  They make a little extra money running a car park for teachers of the private school in the empty lot next to their house.  Here's the view out my kitchen window.

So that's how I start the day!  I'll write more about my teaching experience in my next entry.