Up valley from Cuenca

Azogues reminds me a little of Butte, MT—a blue collar city, set in a beautiful high mountain valley.   Many of the buildings and homes are non-descript 1960’s constructions, but there are also many colonial buildings made of adobe with grass-thatched or tile roofs.  There are the expected exhaust-filled, very noisy streets downtown, but the character of the people walking the streets softens the blow—everyone is invariably friendly, always stopping to chat when they run into someone they know.

While there is a palpable industrial feel to the center of this small bustling city, there are many farmers from the countryside dressed in their traditional hats, skirts or farm clothes, that recall an earlier life.  Despite living downtown, we wake up to relative quiet, roosters crowing in the distance, the Chihuahua puppy racing across the floor in the apartment upstairs, then later comes the din of early-morning traffic.  When we walk to school in the morning, the number of kids on the street far out-number adults, all in their trademark uniforms that are unique to their respective schools.  I never thought of myself as a uniform guy, but the kids sure are cute when they’re all dressed up that way.

Because Azogues is a little like Butte (not quite as quaint as the nearby town of Cuenca which is more comparable to Bozeman as a picturesque town that tourists enjoy), we rarely see other gringos on the streets.   But that doesn’t mean no one speaks any English here—we occasionally here someone answer back to us in a few words of US street-lingo, with a Brooklyn accent.  It seems like every other person has spent a few years living in Queens, NY, (not sure which person from Azogues many years back might have started the migration pattern to that specific place), making a go at the American dream for a while, then returning to live the more relaxed life back home with their family.