It's Sunday! I'm feeling better again, so I decided that I will partake in the Weekend Engagement Challenge. This time, I'll go with number 5:
What do you love about your city/town and what do you hate/dislike? Explain in both cases.
What I love
The survivability in case of a zombie apocalypse, but I already wrote about that, so something else. Two things come to mind, directly.
The water. Our water here has great quality, comes directly off the mountains and usually doesn't have to be spiked with any chemicals in order to be clean of bacteria and stuff. Filtering is enough. I drink a lot of water, and always like it better from the faucet. So I can easily fill up my bottle several times a day and be nicely hydrated.
The scenery. Being between two mountains is just amazing. It's not like the Alps in Europe where I get anxiety, but the valleys here are much wider. Since I have a rooftop terrace, I can see wonderful sundowns and ups (if I get up early enough). Taking that time from time to time, with a cup of coffee or a beer or a book, that's precious.
The cultural mix. Okay, that is more of a community thing, not really related to the city as an object. Cotacachi is a rural city, and has a wide mix of mestizos, indigenous and foreigners of all kind. You can hear all kind of accents and people are much more aware that there's a world outside then for example in Ibarra, the closest big city. Not like Otavalo, a merchant city were practically everyone has lived and worked abroad for a while. But it's always fun to run into a taxi driver who asks you where you're from, starts to smile like you handed him a candy and then says very proudly "Ein Bier, bitte!", followed by how he ended up in Germany and how long he was there and where.
What I dislike
I don't think I really hate, so it will be dislike.
The construction. Everything is facade only. Very few houses within the town have the whole building walls plastered, so there's a lot of very ugly cement blocks or bricks visible. Luckily, the city just passed a resolution that obliges builders to plaster everything on every new building. Unfortunately, it's not possible on the old ones, at least most of them. And after more than 10 years living here - yes, there's a metaphor in only making the front look nice while the rest is ugly.
Missing garbage bins. There are like 5 small, metal plastic bins in the whole town. It's a tourist town. They eat and drink snacks, a lot of them, and unfortunately most street food is served on plastic. Where shall all that go? But also, last time we had a lot of plastic bins installed, they were vandalized one after the other. The mayor is planning on doing something, at least he told me so last time we were chatting. It's a small town, so everybody knows everybody, which is great. Knowing the mayor is nothing special, it's just normal. I should write that on the plus side...
The noisiness. Although I must admit that this has gotten a lot better since the city forbid the fireworks and actually managed to make people comply with it. That was one if the bets I lost against the mayor, I would've never believed that they'd be able to pull that off. He got a loaf of bread for it. But besides the fireworks, there's still a lot of noise. Sirens blaring (and nobody cares because in 99% of cases they go off for no reason), parties with incredibly noise (when there's a party in the community 4km away, I can hear it closely), the regular religious 5am caravans (as well with blaring low quality speakers). But it's better than the big cities. A lot better. In comparison, I don't even know why I'm complaining.
So far my city! How about yours?