A Day in Cuenca

12 Feb 2010

Today, we only booked a half day of cases.  The long days we’ve been putting in don’t leave much time for seeing Cuenca, which is fine- we’re here to work! but I am curious about the clinic side of things (we have providers running clinic to find our surgical patients, as well as medically manage as many patients as possible), so today, we’re going exploring!

In the distance there is the New Cathedral:

whose domes are covered in these really cool blue tiles!

From the front though…

the towers here could not be completed as there was an error in calculation and the completed towers would be too heavy for the foundation.  Oops?

Also, fun fact, if you melted down all the gold in the altar area, you’d have enough to pay off Ecuador’s national debt:

Iglesia Santísimo Rosario:

Flower market at Santuario Mariano del Carmen de la Asunción:

Entrance to our clinic:

Bodega where supplies are stored:

(other groups come through running various clinics throughout the year and we all bring supplies down- some get used (like what we need in surgery), but spare supplies are kept here)

Then, we hopped on a bus:

for a tour of Cuenca and the surrounding countryside:

Water fights for Caranaval were a pretty common sight:

Maybe not the most conventional way to transport a chair, but effective and it keeps your hand free:

I’m not sure of the meaning of this sculpture:

Our tour took us up the mountains to a pottery shop:

And a stellar overlook of the city:

I had assumed Cuenca was a little town with dirt roads in the middle of nowhere…

I was wrong- Cuenca is a sprawling city of like half a million people!

Our final stop of the day was at the Panama hat factory:

Fun fact: most Panama hats actually come from Ecuador!

Cute, but I’m just not a hat person:

Then we headed back to Cuenca: