Our Daily Life in Cuenca, Ecuador

For the last six months we have called Cuenca, Ecuador home. And while we haven’t been churning out regular blog reports or many social media posts, it’s not for lack of content. Quite the opposite! Somewhere amidst the struggles and joys of learning Spanish, homeschooling the girls, finding our favorite restaurants and places to workout, comforting the girls through bouts of loneliness and frustration (life is hard for tweens forced to live abroad!), adventuring within and outside of the city limits, trying new hobbies, and never forgetting to put our used toilet paper in the trashcan, we have created a home and life we enjoy. Now, as we are preparing to return to the States, we’re looking back fondly at our time here and wanted to share a bit of what our life in Cuenca has been like.

Cuenca: a UNESCO World Heritage Site

Home to just under 700,000 people, including the immediate surrounding areas, Cuenca is the third largest city in Ecuador and is situated in the highlands of the Andes at 2,560 meters (~8,400 feet) elevation. The word ‘cuenca’ in Spanish means basin or watershed and indeed, the city is beautifully situated around the confluence of four rivers. Its historic center is also its business center and is incredibly well-preserved, earning its recognition as a World Heritage Site. Historically, the area was settled by the Cañari people, followed by the Inca and then the Spanish, becoming independent from Spanish rule in 1820.

The city is incredibly clean and has a laid back feel. The temperature is pretty much the same year-round: ranging from 40s-70s degrees Fahrenheit. During the rainy season it rains frequently, in short bursts; because of how close we are to the equator though, even when there are clouds in the sky, it’s still bright out. It’s a rare day where it actually feels gloomy.

The buildings of the historic center vary from very run down and old looking to carefully restored colonial beauties-often side by side. It’s not unusual that a boring-appearing entrance belies a vast space for living or working, surrounding an internal courtyard.

Our Apartment

Our furnished apartment is located in a newer, secure apartment complex ideally situated just above the Tomebamba River. The backdoor of our complex drops us onto the riverside walking path while the front door leads us directly onto one of the main streets in the historic center. We have all of the luxuries of modern living: dishwasher, washer, dryer, microwave, TV, etc. The main difference from our home in Tahoe is that, here, we cannot flush toilet paper in the toilet. This is pretty typical of most places in South America and using the trash bin instead was a pretty easy habit to form.

From our shared terrace we have views looking south over the river and onto the University of Cuenca with the rest of the city beyond. Walking time from our apartment to nearly everything we need is less than 15 minutes, including the giant grocery store, several parks, Spanish school, and a myriad of restaurants.

Day-to-Day

After flailing a bit in the beginning of our time here, we’ve settled into a pretty good routine. Most mornings we are up early and heading to the nearby park, Parque de la Madre, to run or workout on the exercise equipment. The park has a 470m track dedicated to Ecuador’s gold medal Olympian, Jefferson Perez. We are usually surrounded by groups of exercise enthusiasts and dogs alike. The dogs are all friendly and happy to chase each other around the grass. The zumba crew kicks on the music and starts shaking at 6:30 every morning, rain or shine! When we’re not at the park you can find us suffering on the nearby stairs.

A few hours later we’re out the front door and heading to our Spanish School. Our route takes us past the flower market and Parque Calderon. Over time we’ve found our favorite places to buy treats, recharge our SIM cards, or peruse trinkets. We will vary our path though to find new stores and restaurants to try out. In the beginning the girls were pretty hesitant and nervous with all of the car and bus traffic and for good reason: lights and signs are more suggestions here than rules and pedestrians don’t always have the right of way. By now though, the girls are pros at juking and jiving with the traffic to cross the streets and have no problems navigating the maze of the city center streets to get to where they need to be.

Our Spanish School has become the primary constant of our time here. During our first three weeks we spent four hours a day focusing on our Spanish basics. Since then we have decreased our class time to two hours a day, five days a week. When we arrived, the girls only knew some basics they had learned from the Duolingo app. I had a bit of medical Spanish knowledge but not much else. Andrew was the most advanced of us, having taken several years of school Spanish. While we’re no where near fluent, we’re all able to converse comfortably now and owe a huge thanks to our incredibly patient teachers!

After Spanish school the girls do their regular, homeschool work. Four afternoons a week they follow this with soccer practice at a nearby training facility. The coaches are patient and inclusive and keep the kids moving for the 90 minutes they’re on the pitch. The girls are the only non-native Spanish speaking kids and are sometimes the only girls. Despite this, they’ve made friends, kept up with their soccer skills and often consider that time the highlight of their day!

Food

Our experience with food in Cuenca has been a mixture of trying new things and being comforted by old favorites. The city is home to several large grocery stores that would rival any in North America, in terms of variety and quantities of food choices. In addition, there are many markets spread around town containing fruits, meats, and grains-often this is the cheaper option than buying in the grocery store. Along the sidewalks you can buy fresh fruit, fried goods, and snacks of all types. Prior to eating any of the fruits or veggies, we clean them with a store-bought food wash. The only food that we’ve had trouble easily acquiring is good, sharp cheddar cheese!

When we don’t want to cook at home we have seemingly endless choices of good-quality restaurants to choose from. A typical Ecuadorian lunch consists of soup, a main that includes rice, meat or veggies and fried plantains (called patacones), a drink and a desert. These lunches typically cost USD $2.5-$4. In addition to the Ecuadorian food you can find any type of food your heart desires. We have found our favorite places to get Thai, Italian, Mexican, and Chinese food, to name a few. One of the best vegetarian restaurants I have ever been to is just a 10 min walk from our apartment!

Given how important food is to any culture, it has been fun learning about and trying new foods. We have enjoyed traditional foods and drinks including colada morada and pan de guagua during Soul’s Day (Day of the Dead), pan de pascua and canelazo around Christmas, and fanesca (traditional grain soup) around the Easter holiday. Our school helped introduce us to some of our new favorite fruits and snacks, such as humitas-yum! For the non-vegetarians in the family, our favorite food that we eat over and over again is trucha or river trout. We will order it when out hiking or in towns near the mountains and streams where it is caught-to-order from nearby stream-fed ponds, and grilled to perfection!

One of the more interesting traditional foods is guinea pig (called cuy). Cuy has been a food source for the Andean people dating back to 5000 BC, before cattle replaced them as the main source of meat. It is roasted on a spit and quite expensive by Ecuadorian standards, so not a day-to-day meal. If you drive anywhere outside the cities of Ecuador you will see roasting cuy on the road sides leading into and out of all of the smaller towns. We also saw it carried in by many people in the Christmas Eve parade, as a symbol of prosperity.

Around Cuenca

If you google ‘what to do in Cuenca’ you’ll find lists of dozens of sites to see, museums to visit, Inca ruins to meander through, vistas to take photos from, parks to picnic at, and much more. The Cajas National Park is only 30 minutes away and the beach, only 3.5 hours by car. During the weekends we would explore different sites and sometimes just meander around to look at the street art or see what we’d find. For as many places as we visited though, we simply didn’t have the time to see it all!

All in all, we have thoroughly enjoyed our time living in Cuenca and have zero regrets about choosing this place to spend our Sabbatical! We will miss it, for sure.