Neato Quito

Quito, Ecuador 

Meg here today.  It’s been an emotional day for me.  It started out with Dean and me in a spat regarding some of the blog obligations -- Dean doing all the work, me feeling like it was an awful lot like a job to him and consuming a vast amount of his time.  While I know that his awesome effort will be treasured for the remainder of our lives, the here and now is being taken from us.  Anyway, thanks to teamwork and a lot of love, we were able to come up with a solution that will work for all of us.

So it was with happy hearts and empty tummies that we made our way to a well-recommended café a few blocks away.  When we got to the actual restaurant, we discovered that desayuno (breakfast) was not their strong point.  So, we snuck off to the next-door café and ordered a typical Ecuadorian breakfast, complete with a very tasty tamale wrapped up in corn husks and tasting like very moist cornbread with cheese.  Yum! 

Triple section city bus!

Ecuadorian breakfast

After breakfast, we kept walking toward the huge gothic church about half a mile down the street.  This being Holy Week, I wasn’t sure we’d be able to look around, but luckily, we were early enough to enter the Basilica del Voto Nacional.  The outside of the church, we all noticed, had nifty Ecuadorian “grotesques” (think gargoyles) depicting marine iguanas, armadillos, crocodiles, rams, and tigers.  Ok, so maybe not all the animals were Ecuadorian….  To our surprise, the inside of the cathedral was quite pretty.  The stained glassed windows were exceptional and, in a rather different take on the Gothic Style, the alter was smack-dab in the middle of the church as opposed to sitting at one end.  As I’ve done for every church we’ve gone through, we lit votive candles and took a minute to send up some hearty thanks for our time together along with thoughts of family and friends near and far. 

After exploring the innards of the church, we were able to get to the upper parts, thanks to some well positioned and STEEP steps all throughout the upper rafters.  Dean got some neat photos of Quito spreading out before us.  It was a beautiful day with blue skies and pretty clouds.  With warmish temps, I’m thinking that once we are down at sea level for the Galapagos, we’ll be happy to be on the water – if not in it!

Walkway through the top of the church

Next up on the “to-do” list was to get Dean and Dex haircuts.  As Dean was in the chair, we discussed all the places they’ve gotten their haircut this year.  For Dean, his first cut was in Oslo, in August, with Cam manning the clippers.  September was Dex's turn in Cape Town, then Dean again in Mumbai. In December, they both got rather severe (but effective) buzz cuts in Laos.  Today was the final cut of the trip, after which we headed off in search of lunch. 

The afternoon was spent back in the hostel with the kids playing with their KinderMen, while Dean and I read some news and reviewed our upcoming expenses for the next week.  Ecuador uses US dollars, which is kind of a bummer because that is one thing that is always fun about being in different countries – checking out the colorful money and figuring out the coins.  They adopted the US dollar as the official currency after a devastating bout of inflation some years ago.  We now know where all the Sacajawea dollars have gone. They even use US coins including fifty cent pieces, which you never see back home. There are Bolivian coins as well which mimic the sizes of quarters, nickels, dimes and pennies.

Toy collection

For dinner, we checked out a very popular destination, Calle La Ronda.  As tomorrow is Good Friday (and a holiday), the bars were hopping.  We had a great pizza and nacho dinner and as we were leaving the restaurant, there was a parade, complete with a Virgin Mary mannequin with angel wings, much like the statue up on a hill not far from our hostel, and a replica of Jesus carried in a glass coffin. We don't usually see that back in San Jose, It’s stuff like this that I’ll definitely be missing back home.

Virgin Mary with wings