Cuenca is so different to Quito, more of a large town feel to it, much more relaxed, feels safer, lovely colonial architecture, more comfortable to walk about. Having said that, while the advice in quito was to never walk at sundown, Cuenca was very deserted not long after and when we walked back to the hostal after going to an internet cafe, we felt a little nervous. The hostel, Macondo (presumably named after the Marquez novel I´m reading right now), was a beautiful colonial building with fantastic, enormous rooms with high ceilings, courtyards and a welcoming kitchen. Here we could have good coffee and in the evening share some wine with a fellow englishman, who now lives in switzerland. He was doing the reverse journey to us, heading northwards, having come from Argentina.Like everyone else we´ve met so far, he eulogised about how beautiful, safe, friendly and cheap Argentina can be. We had a great evening listening to the ricky gervais/karl pilkington podcasts from his ipod, regretting that we didn´t sort out podcasting before we left. The problem would always be subscribing to the latest ones when on the move, because you have to synch your ipod to a pc (which is restricted), but he had found a way around it using juice, xplay and podnova. We also met an american family who were staying there for two months to learn spanish, both parents were doctors and had a young son. They confirmed the need for nurses in the states and that some can get paid as much as 90$k a year. Nice, interesting people.
The indigena are still quite visable here, but it stuck me that they are very much like ghosts walking alongside the modern world, reminders of a lost ancient world and connection to nature. It is if, they are not real and if you attempted to touch them your hand would go right through, only the odd mobile phone in their hands, says any different. In this way, it is like being in a marquez novel when in south america. Imagine walking down a central london street and in the background, always there, are poeple from dickensian times or earlier, 17thC peasants rubbing alongside us, worlds apart.
a travelogue in the time of the information superhighway
1994
My story starts in drizzly, dreary, grey England. I worked as a nurse in a specialist cancer hospital in Manchester. One day, I suddenly entered her world, there she was. At once beautiful, but decaying visibly. Eyes that melt you, fumbled for reasons. High on morphine, she slumped on the chair. Her legs, previously long and graceful, were now fat and full of fluid. She was loosing her hair, something that upset her most. We all witnessed her struggling with the remains of her dignity and modesty, but she carried on fighting. Her mother applied facial cream like a corner man at ringside, her father just looked lost. She was a twenty seven year old woman, right before us, dying in her prime. She seemed to hold up a mirror to the thoughts sailing across my mind, a metaphor for what we've all become and what will become of us. So much potential, so much waste. It is at moments like this that we can take the looking glass to our own fragile existence, and ask questions of it. Cancer had infiltrated her womb, the very giver of life. I became aware of a feeling that her death had released something else, a thirst for living itself. She haunted me. Four months later, I set out on an adventure to view the world that she would no longer see.
Posted by don quixote
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
1 comment:
Nice posting Alex. An interesting point about the indiginous people from Argentina, is now, they do not really exist, and thats not entirely due to the wipe outs from our friends the Spanish. During the early 19th Centuary, the immigrants from Europe, mainly Italians and Germans and also from the Iron Curtain practicaly invaded Argentina, and saw the population grow from 1 million to 7 million within 40 years. Now nearly 200 years later, alot of the inginous looking people (darker skin) will have surnames ending in sky or ianni. Most of them still reside in the north of the country as the south is very harsh. The south does contain the only Welsh speaking colony outside of Wales though, but I guess they are used to the rain and cold, best place for them really.
Post a Comment