Happy New Year from Cuenca!

Happy new year! I’ve been in Cuenca since Thursday night and I’m enjoying the city. I start Spanish classes on Monday morning.

On Wednesday, I checked out of the place I was staying in Quito. I had the same cabdriver who picked me up from the airport take me to the bus station. I could have taken local buses to the bus station, but I concluded that it wasn’t worth it when I had some large, heavy baggage. I decided that since it’s such a long trip from Quito to Cuenca, I’d break it up into two days, staying overnight in Riobamba.

In retrospect, this wasn’t the best way to do things. First, there was the four-hour bus ride to Riobamba, which wasn’t bad. But my time in Riobamba was so brief that I didn’t have much of a chance to explore it. I did very little beyond eating and sleeping. Then I got on a bus in Riobamba bound for Cuenca, which took seven more hours. About five hours in, I went to the back of the bus to use the bathroom, but found it wasn’t working. So I was more than happy to pay the attendant at the Cuenca bus station 15 cents to use the men’s room. (Reminder: Ecuador uses the U.S. dollar, so there’s no need to convert prices. The big difference is that they use dollar coins far more often than dollar bills and they mint their own coins of less than a dollar, which are used interchangeably with U.S. coins.)

I took a cab from the bus station to my hotel, checked in, then went out to grab some food. It was pretty late by then and I was ravenously hungry, so I went to a nearby fast-food place and got some chicken strips and fries.

On Friday, I tried to take care of a problem that came up Thursday night – my Microsoft Surface wouldn’t recognize the physical keyboard attached to it. The Surface is a tablet computer, but you can attach a keyboard that fastens to the tablet with magnets. But it wouldn’t work starting Thursday night. I tried various things, such as disconnecting the keyboard, turning off the Surface and turning it back on again, checking for software updates, etc., but to no avail.

I figured I’d see about buying a new keyboard, in part because the old one was giving me trouble, but also because the keyboard I have is marked with an English layout. Thankfully, you can type “ñ” and other Spanish characters by switching the computer to the Latin American Spanish keyboard. But then you’re having difficulty typing special characters such as quotation marks and apostrophes because they’re not where you expect them to be. The keyboard is marked with an English layout, but the computer is recognizing the Spanish layout. So if you want to type an apostrophe, for example, you have to hit what’s marked as a hyphen key.

Fortunately, Cuenca has a lot of electronics stores. Unfortunately, none of the places I went to had what I was looking for. I tried narrowing it down a bit by asking only in stores that were selling computer keyboards of some sort; this eliminated the places that specialize in cellphones. Still, no luck.

Thankfully, the Surface will still kinda-sorta work without the external keyboard. It has a touch screen that will put a keyboard on the screen. But it’s a real pain in the butt to work that way. Thankfully, you can adjust the size of the on-screen keyboard so it isn’t taking up half the screen, but it’s really hard to type that way. It’s fine for watching YouTube videos or whatever, but when I got an email message that needed a reply, I got so frustrated that I used my phone instead.

I tried a variety of fixes and none seemed to work. What I think did the trick (but I’m not certain since it didn’t work right away) was advice to clean the sensor that connects the keyboard to the machine with rubbing alcohol and a Q-tip. I didn’t have either of those things, but I figured alcohol-based hand sanitizer was close enough and I could apply it using my finger and a piece of cloth. This didn’t work right away, but it was working again a short time later, and I think the sanitizer is what did the trick.

For New Year’s Eve, I was interested in seeing the practice of lighting papier-mâché creations known as “manigotes” ablaze at midnight. Sometimes these creations represent a hated politician, so it’s essentially burning an effigy. Sometimes they are of favorite superheroes or cartoon characters; I’m not quite clear on why those would be lit on fire, but apparently those are popular with kids. However, it seems that Cuenca has placed a limit on this type of celebration because of COVID-19, though there was some speculation that there was no way to enforce it. But people were lighting firecrackers throughout the afternoon and evening of New Year’s Eve.

I looked for a nice restaurant on Google Maps, walked there, and found that no such place existed. However, there was a good Indian restaurant nearby that had good curry. After that, I walked back to my hotel.

I was pretty tired by this point, so I went to bed a little after 9 p.m. and didn’t wake up till a little past 6 a.m., which was a little surprising since I figured I’d be awakened by a lot of fireworks at midnight. Nope.

This morning I went out in search of breakfast and once again was led on a wild goose chase by Google Maps. No problem, though; I just kept walking until I found a place. I was a nice vegetarian restaurant where reviews said it was great for vegetarians and pretty good for vegans. I could see why; my breakfast was heavy on yogurt and cheese. Vegans would need to have a decent command of Spanish to get a meal without dairy products there. But it also contained a whole slew of fresh fruit. They billed it as “desayuno super nutrivo,” or “super-nutritious breakfast,” and I’m sure it was infinitely more nutritious than what I would typically make when cooking for myself.

A lot of things are closed today because of the new year, but I went walking around. I went down a long staircase at the end of Calle Hermano Miguel to the Tomebamba River south of the historic city center, crossed the river and found Parque de la Madre (Mother’s Park), which contains a planetarium. It also contains a running track and a bunch of exercise equipment, which were in use.

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I’ve been walking a lot since arriving here, but I haven’t been running. I think I’m going to need to start the “None to Run” program from scratch since I get tired so much more easily at this altitude. None to Run is a program that has you combine running and walking, starting with 30 seconds of running interspersed with 2 minutes of walking, then repeated a bunch of times. Each week you run more and walk less until you’re just running. After going through that program, I got to a point where I could consistently run a 10-minute mile. That’s not remotely close to the performance of a high-level athlete, but it’s pretty decent. But there’s no way I can do that at this high altitude – at least not yet. Might as well start Week 1 of None to Run while I’m studying Spanish.

Speaking of which, my classes start Monday. I’ve walked past the school to make sure I’ll know where it is. I’ll check out of my hotel early Monday and head over there, take my first day of classes, then meet my host family.