Living La Vida Loca

This was our first full day in Quito and we hired a guide so we could get a local perspective on this very diverse city. Luis, a native of Quito, turned out to be a great guide and had a wonderful personality that matched ours well. He was very willing to let us practice our broken Spanish and his English was quite good from having lived in various places in the US. We told him in advance that we were less interested in the typical tourist attractions and we hoped to experience more of the various cultural areas and sites in the city. He got it.

Our first stop was at the mercado (market) closest to the apartment where we were staying. It turned out to be the neighborhood market where locals did most of their shopping for amazing produce, seafood and meats. It also is known for being the best market to get typical Ecuadorian breakfast made of pork, potatoes and spices, called hornado. We found out that there are more than 200 different types of potatoes grown and cooked in Ecuador as well. Obviously it is a staple food and shows up in many native dishes. Interestingly, while the coast is where fish are caught in abundance you can get amazing fresh seafood of all kinds in landlocked Quito. The main roads in Ecuador are actually really good – you can get from the coast to Quito in four hours…except on holidays when everyone heads to and from the beach! We saw some very interesting, colorful, and very much still alive crabs ready to be purchased. Luis did take us to a restaurant for lunch that had terrific ceviche and calamari.

Our next stop was the equator. Apparently, the monument that is best known by tourists is not actually the real equator. Many years after the original monument was built and tourists flocked there (and still do), military GPS was used to confirm or dispel rumors that the first installation missed the mark! So, Luis took us to the Real McCoy…

This is the Ecuadorian emissary that greeted us as we entered Museo de Sitio Intinan that is really located at “ground zero” latitude! We joined a small group led by an English-speaking young man who took us through the exhibits that helped us understand more about indigenous cultures in Ecuador. We learned first about an Amazon tribe that to this day still practices creating shrunken heads. Fortunately, this tribe is deep in the Amazon – not on our current itinerary.

Yep…that is a real shrunken head… and a shrunken sloth thrown in for good measure.

Below is a quick video of the process – don’t try this at home. Please.

The rest of our tour was much less ominous. Our guide walked us through some of the science that explains life on the equator. Through some hands-on activities we experienced the lack of magnetic pull, the ability to balance and egg on the head of a nail, and watched water drain directly down a sink without swirling. You had to be there. We also realized the obvious…that the sun rises and falls at the same time every day all year. Think about it.

Our next stop was in a lovely neighborhood called La Floresta that has welcomed street artists to paint incredible murals on the walls surrounding homes. It reminded me of the up and coming neighborhood in Miami – Wynwood – that Ruthie loves so much. Both places have given young artists an urban palette they might not otherwise be able to have for expressing great talent.

Then we were off to see the old center of the city. Luis regaled us with some of the history of the country, we walked through some of the wide variety of churches that populate center city, and enjoyed lots of people watching as today is part of the festive lead up to their version of Ash Wednesday. We did stop at the main cathedral just outside the old city. This one had the most unusual gargoyles in the shape of animals native to Ecuador and to the Galapagos islands.

One of the churches that we visited was built by the Spaniards who came to Ecuador and basically made the indigenous people into indentured slaves. One of the murals in this church depicted all light-skinned people ascending to heaven and dark skinned people descending to hell. Not a good way to endear your neighbors. This church was literally encrusted floor to ceiling in gold. As you can imagine native Ecuadorians do not have much good to say about the Spaniards of that era.

(I hope Luis – and the devout Catholics in Ecuador – will forgive me, but I did sneak a photo of the ornate gold. Too pretentious to pass up)

And so our tour concluded…but not without a small world encounter! As we left the golden church we spotted a young woman wearing a University of Michigan hat. It turned out that she and some of her travel partners attended at the same time as our eldest, Ari and his wife, Lauren! And one of them knew Lauren from their mutual sorority. Always amazing.

Until tomorrow…

Esther