On Wednesday thru Saturday nights, from 6:30-10:00 pm, on the 2nd floor of La Vina Restaurant, at Luis Cordero 5-101 y Juan Jaramillo, the Jazz Society of Ecuador holds forth.
The group this evening is piano, drums, bass, and a tenor saxophonist who play mainstream jazz.
Having a restaurant downstairs, I can’t not take photos for Leigh
She is an artist, and artists like to see visions on walls as well as canvas. Both floors of this establishment are awash with art and it seems like a bohemian French cafe where crazy impressionist painters sipped absinthe and shattered old school standards,
The songs the band plays were written fifty years ago, or longer – ” Stella by Starlight “, ” Summertime, ” ” Night in Tunisia, ” ” Love Walked In. ”
They are played with reverence but played tonight with more rhythmic twists and subtle harmonic modulations than when they were new kids on the block. This is music I listened to while peers swooned over Elvis, Bo Didley, and Little Richard.
I never figured to hear live jazz in Cuenca, Ecuador.
The art on the walls is icing on the cake.
In the historical district are public mercados where vendors sell fruits, vegetables, meats, fish, and sundries from little stalls inside huge open buildings. There are modern groceries in Cuenca but visitors, and locals, like to shop in this old way.
On the square outside the Mercado are even smaller vendors selling religious artifacts, sunglasses, performing music, socializing, and today watching men change an electrical light on a next door building with a bucket crane.
Pigeons waddle in large groups on the plaza and lift into the air when little boys run through them with arms extended like airplane wings.
I have been told that bartering in Cuenca is the rule, instead of the exception.
It isn’t crowded this morning but women reach out to engage me as I walk down the aisles. They know if they get my attention, move me to look at their produce, I will buy something. The lady I buy the pineapple from, sells me, in quick succession, a papaya, a bunch of bananas, a bag of apples.
This trip to the market takes two hours.
Saving a few dollars on groceries may not be a good deal when I eat up 1- 12th of my day in the bargaining.
When people are shut out from having a say about what happens to them, by those they have elected, protests are inevitable.
Some protests move into chaos and violence,some are contained, others are snuffed out like the tip of a burning candle.
I make myself invisible, slip away, and don’t get home till late because streets are blocked off, going and coming.
Protests seldom lead to solutions, but they create emotions.
Governments can be toppled on emotion.
No government exists that will give us what we want without taking away what we need.
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There is political and social unrest around the world.
This protest in Parque Calderone centers around recent Constitutional Amendments approved by the National Assembly in Quito. Ecuador has a representative democracy and it is written in their Constitution that the people must directly vote on changes to their Constitution.
This protest focuses on four of 12 recent amendments. The first eliminates term limits for some elected officials. The second affects the right of government workers to organize and strike. The third concerns the use of the military for police work. The fourth deals with freedom of speech and press.
The police presence is odorous and they use tear gas, swat teams, and horses to keep protests isolated and small. People trying to join the protest, or see it, are diverted away from the conflict.
What is striking is how few come out to protect their rights being changed by the stroke of someone else’s pen.
Too many people aren’t protecting their freedom.
Too many people still fantasize that the State is their friend.
There are Christmas lights already being hung in Parque Calderon.
On balconies, in store front windows and living rooms, trees are dressed with lights, nativity scenes, tinsel, peppermint sticks and brightly colored Christmas ornaments.
This little parade, of two vehicles, is driving down a Cuenca thoroughfare and Santa, with his pink dressed assistant, is tossing candy to kids, adults, and spectators. Two elves take pictures with their cell phones and a cynic would swear that Christmas gets earlier and earlier each year and boys and girls are never nice enough to deserve treats.
Still, the Grinch is no where to be seen, busy plotting mischief for the more inopportune times.
This may be, after all, just a moving advertisement, but all enjoy the spectacle.
Watching a man with a white beard wearing a red suit and a red cap with a snowball on its end is infinitely more fun than filling orders, breaking out concrete or cooking soup for the lunch trade.
Tis the season to be jolly.
On a Carol tip, this event celebrates the integration of foreign ex-pats into the Ecuadorian community.
In a city leaning towards five hundred thousand there are estimates that twenty thousand Americans have relocated to Cuenca, not that many for Ecuadorians to be worried about. This event also celebrates foreign investment, transportation projects,and large business developments involving overseas partnerships.
The festivities take several hours to set up, several hours to accomplish, and several hours to break down. When the speeches are over there is food served. In Ecuador, pork is popular. and, this afternoon, chickens and cattle drink at the same bar and toast the pig for taking their sword.
Ex- pats bring money, know how, ideas to Cuenca but Ex-pats don’t always blend with Ecuadorian culture, language, or politics.
Americans must bend to meet Ecuadorians, but Ecuadorians know change is inescapable.
Their children have cell phones, surf the net, and live in a world turning into what their parents dread.
People and ideas have always migrated around our planet.
Smart countries are always concerned about the quality and quantity of those who cross their borders.
We aren’t talking Dr. Suess, but my Hat and Map belong in one of his books.
I don’t like maps because they are a pain to carry, unfold, find north without a compass. The streets on the map are hard to read and intersections look like rat’s nests. In the middle of a big city, a map, however, often helps get you where you want to go when people, you ask for directions, don’t speak the only language you speak.
A hat and a map also make good traveling company.
They don’t talk back, question decisions, or get tired.
As a traveler, looking at maps, spinning globes, surfing the net, talking to people who have been places, is part of what I do.
Dr. Suess understands how the world and people work, even if he writes for kids, and every cat, I know without asking a Doctor, needs a map and a hat.
Before breakfast, Cuenca is a blank tablet.
On the streets are a few people, stray dogs, taxi drivers, construction men headed for jobs. Churches aren’t open, retail shops are locked tight, and, as you explore, the Historical District is shut down tight too.
As people wake and go to work, traffic increases.
Walking past fellow pedestrians on narrow sidewalks is difficult. Even though Ecuadorians are shorter and smaller than Americans, there is still barely room for them to walk side by side, much less someone my size.
I stay to the right on sidewalks but sometimes move left and hug a wall. These sidewalks and streets are not made for American bodies, cars, or intentions.
First thing in the morning, the city is fresh.
By the end of the day, Cuenca’s tablet is filled with stories.
I stick with postcards and snapshots on Scotttreks.
It is a challenge to be short, sweet, to the point.
If you like strolling empty sidewalks with little traffic, and only a few walkers, seven in the morning is good in Cuenca, Ecuador.
It is a downhill jaunt from the end of Munoz Luis Cordero to the Parque Calderone. There are many General streets in this district but I remember Luis Cordero because at one end is Calle Munoz Vernaza, 3-46, where I reside for December 2015.
The Dorado panaderia I like to visit each morning is operated by the nearby El Dorado hotel and offers upscale breads and pastries, coffee and sandwiches. It has an upstairs where you eat or visit with friends and business associates, a clean bano on the bottom floor, modern decor, well presented baked goods.
One of the first things people ask me here is, ” Do you live here?, and, ” Do you like our city? ”
My standard answer is – “I don’t live here but I love your city.”
Even though Cuenca isn’t as big as Montevideo, it has a quarter million people nestled in between high Andes mountain ranges. It doesn’t spring from the indigenous jungle people like Costa Rica or Belize, or the cattle people of Uruguay, but from small, short stature, reserved people who live quietly in the high Andes and spend time growing crops on land that isn’t hospitable to farmers.
Cuenca is a city with a Spanish history rather than British, Catholic rather than Protestant. Ecuador shares more in common with Peru than Uruguay and more with Costa Rica than Belize.
If countries are determined by the traits of their indigenous peoples, Ecuador, and, by extension Cuenca, should reflect the mountain people of the Andes and it seems, to me, that this is true.
Geography does more to determine a countries character than all the books written about it.
Ecuador is now my fifth travel ring.
Leaving one place and moving to another is more difficult when you have enjoyed your stay. Then you have one place tugging at one arm and another place tugging at the other.
The Caribbean is worn, tattered, frayed, chipped, pieced together, bright colors, strange language, intense sun, stifling humidity, rain, mosquitoes, stewed chicken, rum punch, hesitation to do today what should have been done yesterday. The weather, people, traditions conspire to wring compulsions out of you like twisting a wet towel and snapping it in the air. Nature is everywhere; a lizard climbing up the front porch wall, a trail of ants along a fallen vine, fish in a bucket on a pier, a bird standing motionless in the sea until it sees its opportunity and comes up with a jitterbugging silver fish. The music is Latin, African, American rock and roll, Cuban and reggae. Rasta men stay to strict diets and a young crowd wears bling and attitudes more big city than island, more pretend than real.
The Caribbean is a worn pair of house shoes that you favor because they give you support but don’t constrict you. In the Caribbean, you find boundaries erased and a tolerance for eccentricity. You feel your mind slip and inhibitions drift away from their pier.
The vista changes as we fly. It starts with blue green turquoise water, small green clusters of mangrove islands, sand bars, and just above the water line, land. Then, sea and land is obscured by clouds. Breezing across the Caribbean we cut over Panama and Columbia down to Ecuador, over the Andes Mountains. Ecuador sprawls, the color of a leprecaun’s green patched jacket.
Over Cuenca, tonight, you see man-made lights that look like burning matches in a dark room. In San Pedro Town, you see what there is too see in a month. In a city the size of Cuenca, you can only see your small part of the reef, the little hump of coral around which you live, sleep, do your shopping, cultivate friends and neighbors.
We are going to be good friends, this city and I.
Not finding things to do here would take a monumental effort.
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