So a bunch of random things about Quito. It's the second highest capital city in the world, which makes it both hard to draw a full breath and makes some of the settled areas very veritical; the shots below were not the most straight up, but those were on roads where I couldn't get the camera angled enough to get a good shot. In particular, the skyscrapers built on the edge of a cliff in a city within spitting distance of two active volcanos seems like poor planning.
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There were a lot of wild buildings in Quito, from mutli story office spaces build on a stem to odd little fairyland castles jammed in random locations between the ancient looking stucco one or two story buildings.
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Alison's Spanish instructor lives in Quito, which is not coincidental; Alison wanted to brush up on her Spanish so, well before the trip, I found a site (preply.com) that provides on line Spanish tutors. There were several Ecuadorian instructors, but Salomé had two degrees and teaches Spanish professionally. Alison had several months of lessons before the trip, and she told Salomé we were coming. So we met her for lunch in a giant shopping mall that would have been the envy of most malls in the US.
This is a thing I didn't know was a thing; clipping padlocks to a fence as a sort of "I was here" signature.
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The bottom follor of Spanish buildings is "PB" even though all the other floors are numbered (I suppose that's not that different from "Lobby" but it looked odd to me). And on the PB of the Swissôtel we stayed at was a five and a half foot tall Easter Bunny made from chocolate, which was even odder.
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And there's nothing like seeing a Celebrity X Cruise tour in the middle of the Andes Mountains.
The dessert (video)
We ordered a special Ecuadorian dessert called "Helado De Paila," which is called ice cream but really isn't (no dairy in it). But it's made by turning a copper plate on a pile of dry ice and adding fruit juice until it turns into an icy mush. We were not prepared for the particualry presentation made at this restaurant however (and, as it turns out, only during the week of Palm Sunday.
Street vendors abound (ed?) with a variety of different food stuffs and items. And from one, we learned the Spanish word for Guinea Pig ... Ganado, or "live stock."
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It was Palm Sunday while we were in Quito. The Cathedrals were full, and there was a procession that marched through the streets in a long wave of people, bands, police and military marching units.
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Count on Alison to find "The Engilsh Bookstore" in Quito and in that bookstore, find an out of print book she'd been looking for.
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KFC is big in Quito. Very big. Where are the US Chicky Parks?
Last day of the trip, we went to visit a indigenous technologist, which turned out to be more a faith healer using traditional indigenous musical instruments, supplimented by Baoding balls. The guy was exactly what you would expect from countless movies whose premise was that these techniques had some mystical quality that gave it power beyond that of traditional medicine. Having had our own semi-mystical experience with a buddist monk in Mongolia, however, I have to say it was interesting but not compelling. Maybe because ... really, Chinese bell-balls?
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Faith healing (video)
We ate at a lot of fancy restaurants like this one, built around a colonial era fountain. And one shot of clouds boiling over the Andes because it was kind of cool.
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