- in Quito and Guayaquil you may expect that some people speaks English. But do not expect a large percentage of the population to speak it. So you would like to learn a little bit of Spanish or use hand gestures and signs to communicate.
- local currency is USD
- Vacation Rentals, Homes, Experiences & Places – Airbnb.com and Booking.com
- Uber and Cabify works as well and I recommend them as you will be much more secure than with other transportation means.
- If you are visiting the highlands (Quito, Ambato, Riobamba, Cuenca, Loja, Ibarra, etc) you don’t have to worry about mosquitoes. But if you visit the jungle or the lowlands you maybe would like to bring a repellent (or buy it here).
- It is rather cold in highlands (+8 to +10C at nights, +18 to +24C in the afternoons). But it could be rather hot in the lowlands, galapagos islands and jungle (+20 to +36C)
- If visiting highland cities try to walk slow in the beginning until you get used to the altitude.
- Food is good (nice in my opinion) and you are plenty of restaurants all around the country. I suggest to enter where you see many people eating. Why? If there are a lot of people eating it means the food “cycle” very often, I mean: it is not stored. So there are good chances it is fresh.
- There are hospitals and pharmacies all around the country, with big full serviced hospitals in the biggest cities.
- There is no need to bring your passport everywhere: if you are going to walk around a given city you better leave your personal belongings at your room. Nobody will ask you for your ID and, if they ask, you may ask them to go with you to where you are staying for you to show them your ID. Or better: carry a copy of your ID. Of course: if you are going to fly or to travel to another city it is better to bring your passport with you.
- If you are going to pay by credit card the seller will ask you for an ID: a drivers license should be enough.
- Credit cards are not accepted everywhere, but in most of the cities they are accepted at hotels, restaurants, shopping malls, etc. If unsure ask before ordering.
- Airport is far from the city, like 35kms. Uber works ok as well as cabify. And there are official taxies at the airport. Charges for a trip from the airport to Quito will be around 20 to 30USD depending on the season, time of the day, etc.
- There are buses as well from the airport to a station in Quito, it will cost a few dollars but I suggest to take a cab if you arrive at night.
- Oh, the sun raises at around 6am and sets a bit after 6pm, each and eeeeeveeeeeeeryyyy day. We are in the Equator so you will barely notice the difference, it will look the same all year long.
- What else? if I remember I will edit the question… if you have specific questions just let me know.
Monthly Archives: August 2019
Why did you learn Morse code?
learnt morse because it intrigued me…
Extract of my history on how I started in Radio:
One day, back in… 1984, 1985 maybe… when I was 10 or 11 years old, while walking around my home city Camagüey/Cuba (300000 hab), I saw thru a windows a room full of telegraph keys, it was a semi-military organization’s office named SEPMI that used to teach parachuting, how to shoot, swimming, telegraphy and maybe several other (semi)military related activities for civilians. So I asked my mother what were those thingies screwed to the tables? She told me it was an ancient way of sending telegrams, and told me that Agramonte, the chief or person in charge of the local post office was a telegraphist himself, that he used to send telegrams for the local post office. As she worked in the same company with him, we went to where Agramonte, and he was more than happy to talk with me about quite unknown things of telegraphy like dots and dashes, the correct way to hold the key and move the wrist.
Agramonte told me how was his work back in the 40’s and 50’s, etc., how he used to transmit at around 40wpm and write directly the telegram using a typing machine.. how it evolved in the then modern teletypes, he was even smart enough to read the teletype tape directly. Do you remember that teletype stripe with 5 holes in a colum representing a letter? I think it was kind of a baudot code. Well he was able to read directly from that punched tape and I was like “WOOOOOW”!!
Well, he then showed me what they used for sending telegrams, what a vertical key is (and other types of key), and showed me some sort of artifact that made sounds when he pressed the key. TACK tack tack, TACK.. or something, it was not dit/dashes but TACKs. It has a coil and some sort of metal bar above and the coil circuit got activated by the keypress and the metal bar slammed on the coil. Well, he gave me an old vertical key as a gift, a key I still have… someday I will polish it because it needs it. I used that key when I started in radio as CL7PE… I screwed that key to a thick piece of wood and glued a rectangle of the inner tube of a car tire to the bottom to minimize the key to “walk” around the table when using it and it still like this as of today.
I then learnt the code, I went to the SEPMI to learn and also Isidro, a friend of my parents, soldered and prepared for me a small CPO so I could practice at home with myself.
How did the US acquire Guantanamo from Cuba, and what became of the Guantanameros?
My mother is Guantanamera. She is, in fact from Caimanera, the cuban town next to Naval Station on Guantanamo Bay. My grandfather was a commuter worker, travelling daily from Caimanera to the Naval station for ~15 years
Guantánamo in Cuba is a city (Guantánamo City), the capital of a province: Guantánamo Province, where a Bay is located: Guantánamo Bay. So Guantánamo is not only the Naval Station.
The Naval Base is a portion of land on, or around the Guantánamo Bay, in Spanish we say “the mouth of the bay” where the bay connects to the sea, both sides of “the mouth” are currently part of the Naval Station, the rest of the Bay is Cuban territory as well as the rest of the province and the capital of the province, Guantánamo City are part of Cuba. And yes, cuban boats can sail from inside the bay to the open sea.
Guantánamo province has 6164 squared km, and the Naval Station has 49.4 squared km (the land part), so Guantanameros, even when not happy with the naval station, still have some space to live in.
Oh, the last time my mother (and I)visited her home town was around 1978–1979, I was pretty young and remember the fenced border a bit far from the road to Caimanera, and some other small details (the cementry), we were allowed to enter Caimanera Town because she was born there otherwise we wouldn’t be able to, at least at that time only persons born, or living there, or doing business there were able to enter Caimanera Town.
Do children in Cuba learn a foreign language at school? If so, which?
Currently they are taught English from primary school onward. As there is not a day to day contact with foreigners they usually does not practice English except with themselves so the quality of spoken English is far from perfect.
Most academic literature is in Spanish and English. Very few books are in other languages, Except from 50+ years old persons who studied in the Soviet Union or who learn Russian because they really wanted to, russian is almost unexistant.
Now a little bit about my personal experience:
Back in my era (I’m 45 years old) you were taught foreign language courses from middle school on.
At that time (1986–1989) most of the students were taught English as a second language during middle school. And yes, the rest were taught Russian at that age. It was a very basic English, and very basic Russian (things like saying hello, thanks, verbs, how to construct sentences, and so on).
I remember the first year I took English we wrote nothing. I guess this is the way little kids learn as they are not born knowing how to read/write. After that we learnt how to write and read.
My high school was from 1989–1992 and it was in a special school where we were taught the usual courses other high schools get + some special courses.
They are or were called: IPVCE. In my case I chose Biology so my class had a big emphasis on biology (50% biology, 50% other courses, 10 to 11 hours a day) and oh!! We were taught English (from scratch again) AND RUSSIAN (from scratch). I guess it should have been from scratch as there were some of us that were learning English in middle school, but others were learning Russian.
Those were the final days of real socialism in Europe and we were actually not interested in learning Russian at all. BTW: classes were very simple, much more simple than the English ones we were taught at the same time.
As of now: I know how to read a text in Russian and even mock the pronunciation but just reading, because except for very few words I don’t understand it.
Regarding English classes: we were fortunate to have a very very very good and devoted English teacher: Gavira…. he came the first day to class and promised us we will learn American English, he taught us in American English, to pronounce correctly (not separating one word from another, trying to speak not thinking in Spanish and using proper English) and a big bunch of activities (listening songs, mocking conversations between us, reading book extracts in English, etc, etc). He never ever talked to us in Spanish… I can not recall how he pronounces Spanish, at all.
Foreign languages at university: 1992–1997: Fortunately we were not taught Russian!!! But English teachers were not as good as Gavira… I made an initial test and passed those exams in 2 of the 3 semesters of English (I was not required to go to English classes)… the last teacher lost my exam and I was forced to attend. 50% or more of our textbooks were in English (Systems Engineer) so we had a daily contact with English (reading mostly).
Can someone learn more than 10 programming languages?
Before starting university I had a solid knowledge of MSX Basic (as well as GWBasic, visual basic after the university and Gambas several years later).
Back at University we learnt:
- Pascal (turbo pascal, borland pascal, borland delphi)
- Assembler (in real mode)
- Prolog
- Lisp
- C
- FoxPro (and dbase and foxbase)
- ohhhh and SIMAN.
- After the University:
- Progress 4GL
- Perl
- Python
- Shell (bash) Scripting
not a big deal. The point is knowing the algorithms, learning how to think and use the language structures. Well:Except for prolog, it was sooo… different.
Anyway: I no longer program these days, but if I wish to… I can simply learn a new one. But the point is making a good use of them.
¿Cuándo y cómo usaste Internet por primera vez?
Abril o Marzo del 96, estaba en La Habana en 4to año de la carrera. Un amigo que trababajaba en otro departamento, nunca he vuelto a saber de él, Manuel se llamaba, me preguntó: ¿quieres entrar a internet? Pasa más tarde por mi oficina y te enseño.
Yo esperaba que fuera él a conectarse a Internet e “iluminarme” con lugares dónde obtener conocimientos… sin embargo llegué y él estaba de apuro, por algo, no recuerdo pero en fin, no me pudo mostrar cómo, solamente me dijo: en “tal programa” (hiperterminal? algo de modem? no me acuerdo) marca tal número de teléfono, el usario es tal y la clave es mascual, anota.
Le dí las gracias y salí corriendo para mi laboratorio…. oh!! regresé y le dije: pero cuando entre a dónde voy? Me dijo: “abre el netscape y escribe Yahoo.com”
5 ó 6 horas después, ya de madrugada, logré a través de poner el programa del modem en modo debugging, ingresar manualmente el usuario y la clave y pude escribir doble ve, doble ve, doble ve, punto, yajú punto com en el navegador… salió algo así:
Yahoo! https://web.archive.org/web/19961017235908/http://www2.yahoo.com:80/
Fue, fue un momento maravilloso: era una página web muy limpia, fondo blanco, íconos pequeños. Fue una puerta al conocimiento abierta! Ahí mismo me abrí mi primera cuenta de correo (que de alguna forma conservo al día de hoy) y comencé a buscar todo, quería buscar de todo a la vez… chat? mail? información? noticias? Era increíble.
Esa madrugada no dormí, ni las siguientes. El modem era un modem de 9600 baudios sin control de errores, así que iba abriendo varias páginas a la vez y leyendo en lo que las otras se abrían.
Desde ese día quedé prendado de Internet.
Curiosidad: tanto fue el vicio que una vez una compañera de trabajo muy revolucionaria y combativa me preguntó mi dirección y le dije mi email de yahoo (algo como [email protected]) y ella se rió y me indicó que lo que necesitaba era mi dirección física (la de la casa) y luego se ocupó de hacerle saber a todo el departamento que yo tenía problemas de socialización porque pensaba solamente en Internet. Mi combativa compañera ya no está en Cuba y la combatividad se le acabó… parece que algún cable se le cruzó en el cerebro con el paso de los años.
En el celular, comencé en 2003, cuando me mudé de Cuenca a Quito, a mi casa no llegaba Internet por dialup, ni dsl, ni por cable y lo necesitaba para mi negocio, así que no sé cómo me enteré que mi telefónica Bellsouth (luego llamada movistar) por un valor muy alto!!! me daba internet como a 64kbs… creo que eran 60 u 80usd/mes y a través de mi teléfono motorola podía conectarme a internet a través de su red CDMA, eso estuve usando casi 18 meses para conectarme desde la casa hasta que me mudé y pude contratar el servicio con el que permanezco hoy. (claro que ahora con mayor ancho de banda que en aquellas épocas).
Curiosidad2: entré al IRC pocos días después y entraba a los canales de Cuba (#cuba) y cuando decía que estaba en La Habana sólo recibía impromerios e ironías (“saludos a fidel”, “eres soplón porque sólo los soplones tienen pc en Cuba”, “mentiroso, los comunistas no tienen internet”) y una serie de cosas que me permitió conocer un poco más “el mundo” y darme cuenta que Internet estaba llena de sabiduría pero también de imbéciles. Terminé yendo a chats de México o de España para leer y conversar.
Curiosidad3: Antes de TODO esto, desde 1995 si mal no recuerdo o 1994, teníamos un servidor de correos a través de UUCP con los nodos del Joven Club, de infomed y de CENIAI Internet. Ellos tenían acceso a Internet y, a través de este sistema de correos usábamos www4mail o web2mail si mal no recuerdo para hacer búsquedas y bajar páginas de Internet, si eso era acceder a Internet (que me parece que sí) pues accedíamos desde antes.
¿Cómo se repobló la URSS luego de la Segunda Guerra Mundial?
Varias fueron las formas.
Nacimientos fuera de matrimonio (pocos hombres, muchas mujeres = había que servir a varias). Luego del 44 no responsabilizaban a los padres de hijos fuera del matrimonio, el estado les daba apoyo financiero a las madres hasta que estos cumplían 12 años.
Matrimonios con diferencias de edad (mujeres de más edad casándose o relacionándose con hombres más jóvenes que no habían quizá sufrido tantas pérdidas pues eran <17 durante la guerra)
Política de promoción de la natalidad (la hubo) con premios monetarios, deducción de impuestos o subsidios a madres con más de 3 hijos, etc.
Impuestos a quienes permanecían solteros o con pocos hijos.
Esto vale la pena leer:
¿Los automóviles eléctricos reemplazarán totalmente a los automóviles de gasolina en un futuro cercano?
Cercano no. Debe tomar unos 50 o más años a qué se sustituya buena parte del parque de combustión. Fíjate en algo: más de un siglo después hay lugares donde se siguen movilizando a caballo. Algo tan “anticuado”
Los vehículos de combustión interna todavía tienen para rato. Y tendré que seguirlos oliendo y oyendo en las ciudades.
¿Son seguros los vehículos eléctricos?
Tan seguros como el chofer lo maneje:
1-si se lanza contra una pared a 100km/h seguro va a tener problemas
2- si gira en una curva cerrada a 140km/h seguro va a tener problemas
3- si frena repentinamente a alta velocidad en una autopista llena de carros por todos los lados seguro va a causar problemas
Ah, vamos ahora a los mitos:
1- “si cae un rayo te electrocutas”
2- “si pasas por un charco de agua te electrocutas”
3- “Si tocas el metal del auto mientras apoyas la otra mano contra el piso te electrocutas”
4-”Si hay un accidente y el auto se inflama y coge candela los bomberos se electrocutan”
Las 3 primeras: no, no es asi
la última: primero se inflama y se incendia un auto normal antes que el eléctrico. Y de ser así habrían miles de bomberos electrocutados por autos híbridos que igual manejan voltajes y baterías como los eléctricos, y llevan años de años en el mercado.
As an adult, have you ever been in so much despair that you couldn’t possibly imagine things getting better? How did things turn out?
oh yes, when I arrived to Ecuador (August 1999) my then wife, after 5 days told me she didn’t want to continue living with me, so I was left alone in a country under a severe economic crisis.
I was alone, until i found a friend from the university. And I started working at a company that did not pay me for 6 months, I was living thanks to the savings I had before coming here. Oh, and I loaned the owner of the company all my savings (around 700USD, don’t ask me why I did it.. I just did it) except for a couple of hundred dollars. Ok, it was a country you could live (back then) with 40USD/month… but after 4 months I was having only 40USD… it was January 21th, 2000 and things were not getting better… that night the president was overthrown. So things, instead of getting better were going all way down, 40US, 6 months waiting for my payment, the person I lent the money was not paying.. and a government being overthrown, so in the next two or three months things will not improve, for sure!!: Change of ministers, directors.. all the government stopped, no new government contracts, maybe not payment for teachers, doctors, etc… things were turning very ugly.
And then… my stomach started, somehow to hurt.. lower right part of the abdomen. Don’t even think on seeing a doctor.. I just applied myself a mental medicine “it is not appendicitis, it is not, I’m OK, I’m OK, there is nothing bad”, etc, etc.
And then… the only person I knew, my friend from the university, the only that helped me on those times. he actually had appendicitis. I was soooo concerned: i had no money to help him… and he was the only person that used to help me… I was at the bottom of a very deep hole, no lights on sight, no nothing.
I cried, a lot, of course.. I was awake the whole night thinking on what I will do.. how to solve this situation.
But.. after you hit the bottom, the only way you could take is going back up again…
After 15 or so days my friend called me and told me he was offered to teach some 64 or 128 hours of a programming language I was using (I was programming back then) and asked me if I wanted to be the teacher for those 2 courses…. of course I said yes! it was 4 hours a day and every 3 hours of classes I was earning enough to pay a monthly rent… I started to think in terms of monthly rents… 128 hours=40 months of rent. Then after 2 or 3 weeks I got another offer from another university around the same hours and rate. After a month another offer from another university and suddenly I was overloaded with work… and man: that is nice… to suddenly have something to think on, to concentrate on, to expect some payment at the end of the month.. to start seeing the light at the end of the tunnel.
Oh, I then met my current wife and she guided me on how to do things in the proper way, like for example recovering the money from the bastard that was my boss. After a few days I got a check from him to be payed in 30 days, back then if someone did not honor a check he will go to jail, for sure and for real. So I went to the bank, the account has no money, I then went to the police and bring an officer with me to the company. He shi**ed in his pants and in less than an hour I had my money!! Finally!
