The wall around Ávila, Spain.
I spent the night in a hotel near the airport, grabbing bad wine and bad garlic soup for dinner and a good open-faced toasted sandwich and good freshly squeezed orange juice for lunch the next day before heading to the airport...where there was a good three-hour delay, most of it sitting on the plane. Once we landed, though, everything went smoothly for the eleven-hour flight [I watched two and a half movies and did several sudoku puzzles] to Guayaquil, where they had held the plane for all of us going on to Quito. There, the son of my Airbnb host picked me up from the airport and dropped me off at the apartment, where Pily explained everything to me before I crashed.
The next afternoon [I slept in and then had to take care of some stuff online before I could really head out], I went into town. On the way, I stopped for lunch at a little place that seemed to mostly serve actual Ecuadoreans. Their lunch special included fresh juice [strawberry and banana passionfruit (that's one fruit - not banana and passionfruit)], soup, an entrée, and a small dessert - for a grand total of two US dollars. [Speaking of which, the US dollar is the currency in Ecuador - they accept all bills and coins printed/minted in the US and also mint their own coins. They much prefer one-dollar coins to bills - I've seen more Sacagawea coins in my few days here than I have in all the rest of my life.] At first I didn't know it included juice, so I asked for something to drink, and the woman suggested guanábana, and I went for it. When she brought it again, I asked her to repeat the name, and she started telling me about how delicious it was - and how expensive. There's a less tasty version from the interior, but guanábana [which, I just found out on wikipedia, is often called soursop in English] is from the coast and very very expensive. I was starting to get nervous about how much she was going to charge me for it... It turned out to be $1. Relatively a lot, considering that's half of what the entire meal cost me otherwise, but...not quite an arm and a leg.
I continued on into town, planning to check out the various churches and so on, but I got distracted by a monument up on a hill in the distance. I wanted to go there. Along the way, though, I ended up walking by pretty much everything else I had wanted to see, anyway.
The enticing monument off in the distance.
Two monuments, checkin' each other out. While I was in this square, I heard a vehicle approaching with a guy saying things through a microphone. I thought it would be something political, but when it drove by, I saw that it was a truck with the back door open to display a functional, full-sized soft serve-style ice cream machine and a guy standing next to it ready to sell cones.
La Basílica.
Stores on the ground floor of the Basílica.
A view of Quito from outside of the Basílica.
A square in historic Quito.
La Compañia.
The little bit of the inside of La Compañia that I could see from the outside. Apparently it was worth actually going in and seeing the rest - lots and lots of gold - but I never quite made it back.
Views from the way up.
Maaaaaaany steps later, I made it to the top, having survived a neighborhood that looked a little questionable but not too bad and one growling dog.
La Virgen del Panecillo - the Virgin of the Little Bread Roll, because apparently the hill it's on looks like a bread roll. I saw it from above later, and I'm not convinced - and/or feel that pretty much any hill could be said to look like a bread roll. She's got a pet dragon and is standing on the world.
The view of Quito from the top.
At the top, I offered to take a picture of two girls and started talking to them - Valery from Montreal and Alana from Australia. We decided to all get a drink afterwards, but first we had to get down from the hill. After being offered an exorbitant price by a taxi driver and being approached by a guy who negotiated a reasonable price but then turned out to be driving a private car, we decided to walk back down.
We went to La Ronda, a street below the main grid that was recently renovated to feature restaurants and little stores mostly run by locals. We stopped at a place that looked particularly cute to share a pitcher of canelazo, a hot alcoholic drink. Really, it was a little warm for a hot drink, but we had to try the local specialty. Valery and Alana got food, too, and were a bit surprised to find chicken feet in their soup.
Donkeys in La Ronda. If there are sea horses, there must be sea donkeys, too, right?
Two accomplishments of the day: El Panecillo and a tasty adult beverage.
La Ronda at night.
We caught a cab back to the area we were all staying in, La Mariscal, also known as Gringolandia - it's where all the hostels and restaurants with foreign food are. After we stopped at a liquor store, I noticed a Quebecois restaurant, which put Valery in a tizzy. We got an order of poutine [French fries, gravy, and cheese] and a beaver tail [fried dough with sugar and jelly on top] to go and headed back to their hostel for our gourmet meal. And by gourmet, I mean pretty disappointing. I've only spent a total of about three days in Montreal, and I was still disappointed. Restaurant not recommended. But it looks cool!
The Quebecois restaurant, with Quebec, Ecuador, and Canada flags and a bear eating French fries - well, French Canadian fries.
After dinner, I went home to find Pily chatting with a friend. I told them that I had walked up Panecillo, and they got horrified looks on their faces and started telling me how dangerous it is. ...Oh. I was retroactively a little freaked out - but I had survived! [But for anyone else thinking about walking up - don't! It's not a good idea and I was lucky.] Time to crash again.
The next day, I wanted to find Parque Metropolitano, the biggest urban park in Ecuador or all of South America or something, and go for a nice run. It was a longer walk than I expected, though, and the sun was strong, and the park is higher than most of the rest of the city, and the altitude was working my lungs something fierce, so I was already a little tuckered out when I arrived - and then the park turned out to be more wild than I thought, with lots of ups and downs and woodland trails and so on. I decided to turn it into a walk instead. And it was definitely lovely - until I got a little lost, walked by a potentially sketchy little settlement in the middle of the park [but had already looked online and seen that there was no safety concern in the park, so I wasn't too worried], found civilization but saw a whole group of sketchy-looking guys in the way and decided to go back into the woods again, got lost some more, found more civilization that actually looked like a pretty nice neighborhood and figured out where I was and that it was even farther than where I had originally entered the park. And I wasn't really wearing sunscreen either, since I had only been planning on a quick little jog. So the experience made me nervous and tired at the end, but the park itself is very nice.
A bit of the park.
Sculptures in the park.
Llamas! Made the whole thing pretty much worth it.
A view from the park.
A few cows among the trees made me almost feel like I was home.
The next day and a half or so, I gave in to the tiredness and the panic about all the stuff I had to take care of and the freaking out about everyone telling me how unsafe everything was all the time and mostly hung around the apartment, occasionally going out for food and a drink with Karla, another guest at the apartment, who's from California but whose parents are Ecuadorean. We also tried to go to the gym Saturday night, but it closes at noon at Saturdays, so we skipped that part of the plan and went right to the grocery store for dinner. We went home, made dinner, made fresh pineapple juice and added a bit of vodka to it, and invited a friend of a friend of mine over for drinks.
One night, Pily recommended a restaurant just down the street, Manestras del Negro. It looked fast food-y, complete with ordering at a counter before sitting down with a number, but the food seemed fresh and was well cooked and flavorful. I also got a juice made with naranjilla, a citrus-y fruit that's a little more sour than oranges and so on but still pretty good.
These two places were just down the street, too. I hope they have organized fights between employees dressed up in big chicken suits every week.
The next afternoon, after the rain cleared and I had grabbed a late lunch at a bakery down the street [with delicious cookies], I took a walk to make sure I knew where the hotel was where I was going to meet Mom and her students. On the way, right around Calle Jorge Washington, I saw this fun-looking building. I've always wanted a tower/turret on my house when I grow up.
On my walk back, though, I saw a guy and a girl arguing, with the girl standing against the wall of a building. All of a sudden, the guy reached out and shoved the girl's head right into the wall - I actually saw her head bounce against the cement wall. She started crying, of course, and he didn't do anything - just kept looking at her. I didn't want to get involved, because I don't speak the language enough and I was worried about getting involved in something where one of the parties was capable of that kind of violence, but it was a few doors down from where I had lunch the first day. I looked in there and saw a group of women, probably all part of the family that ran the place, and told them what was happening as best I could in my broken Spanish. They called the police and kept an eye on the couple - even at one point saying the girl was doing her fair share of shoving, too - but they also said, as kind of a sad joke, that the police probably wouldn't come until tomorrow. I didn't know what else I could do - I asked whether I should stay to talk to the police, and the women said no, the girl would have to make her own statement, if she even wanted to - so I continued home, worried and shaken up.
On my last full day in Quito, Karla and I joined some CouchSurfers for a hike up Pichincha. After accidentally riding the bus all the way to the last stop, we finally made it to the world's second highest cable car, the TelefériQo. At the top, we met up with Mario (Ecuadorean), Stefanie (German) and Stefanie's friend (Czech). The altitude quickly caught up to those of us with less experience, and Stefanie and her friend turned back part of the way up. I carried on with Marco and Karla and enjoyed the great views - until the fog rolled in. We made it to a cave that was pretty much our finishing point anyway and took shelter from the worsening weather with a few other hikers. When it started hailing and didn't seem to be letting up any time soon, we decided to just go for it and head back. It was a tough walk back, with hail hitting us hard straight from the side and a muddy trail [I fell once and Karla fell twice] - but we made it!
The bottom of the cable car.
A view of the city.
A view of Pichincha.
The first snow I had seen in over a year [strange circumstances for a Wisconsin girl] - enough for someone to have made a sad little snowman!
The fog rolling in.
Taking shelter.
Covered in hail.
The weather cleared up a bit near the end and we got some great views on the way back.
After we came back, muddy and tired, I made my way to the hotel, where, after some confusion about whether Mom and her students would be coming that night at all because of a long string of problems with their flights, they finally showed up around 1:30 a.m., giving us all a few hours of sleep before we had to head to the airport.
Overall, I had a bit of a tough time in Quito. A lot of the time I was really worried about safety problems and wondering how people even handled living there - Karla told me that even a fair number of her relatives, locals, had been mugged, drugged, and so on - but I also saw a lot of beautiful things and met a lot of really nice people. There are a lot of places that I visit once and then yearn to return to - but Quito, unfortunately, is not one of them. Maybe I'll be able to give it another chance in the future and I won't be in as much of a worried culture shock funk. We'll see.
No matter...next stop: Galápagos!
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