We had a slow start this morning, didn't leave the hostel until about ten. We walked to the Basilica, Quito's big cathedral and our second stop of the day (the first was breakfast in this pretty little cafe with bright orange and blue walls). The Basilica is a fantastic cathedral with some great South American flair: for example, the gargoyles adorning the flying buttresses are all native animals.
Albatross! Possibly cormorants! I don't know enough about birds for this!
The catacombs were open today, which is apparently a rare occurence. We wandered through there and saw all the plaques for the interred people. They were all really new, many in the last decade or so and very few earlier than the 1960s. Possibly because of that, with surviving family members, they were much more decorated. Most of them had flowers on them, and some even had little wreaths or notes. Stark contrast to the British churches I saw two years ago where there wasn't a plaque less than three hundred years old and consequently they were all weatherbeaten and some hardly legible.
We got tickets to go up the tower and hopped up the stairs (okay, no, I huffed and puffed because altitude is hard, man). There were neat places to stop and take pictures along the way (and take a water break which was much appreciated), such as the viewing area out onto the main hall of the church. It was quite the view.
Cathedrals are one of my favorite parts of Christianity.
I turned around 180 degrees from this view and was treated to a massive rose window close enough to touch (I didn't, though). It was gorgeous, full of flowers (orchids were on there maybe? I should bone up on my botany).
So many flowers!
The next flight of stairs took us to a balcony which looked out south to the Panecillo, which is a big hill with a statue of a madonna on it. She's supposedly the guardian of Quito.
There's a bit of a joke that she's got her back turned to southern Quito, which is apparently the less nice end.
We then crossed over the ceiling to the other side of the cathedral, where the single tower is. It was a long wooden walkway, slightly rickety, but it was cool to be walking over the top of the cathedral hall.
The stone underneath the walkway is the top of the Basilica's main hall!
Then we got to the other side and took three very steep staircases up to the top. From there the view was awesome. We couldn't see the very northern and southern ends of Quito since it's so long, but we could see a ton of it. There was the National Assembly and the current central bank, and lots of other neat buildings.
Looking south to the towers, the Panecillo, and a friendly photobombing helicopter
Then we went down and went up the other tower accessible to tourists (the one on the left in the above image). On the way we passed a gift shop and a little cafe. Shops can be anywhere here; there are little souvenir and cell phone shops under the government buildings and the Basilica and pretty much anywhere you can fit them.
We took the stairs back down and went to the bus stop, hopping on one that would take us to Ofelia, a transfer station that had buses going to Mitad del Mundo (locally, the equator is called the Middle of the World because the Spanish word for equator is, well, Ecuador). We took that for an hour or so and then stepped off a bit early because Patrice was worried the bus was going elsewhere. It wasn't, but we got a nice walk and had lunch at a place called Vicentes where I enjoyed an empanada con morocho (for those of you who don't know, an empanada is a Spanish version of a Cornish pasty; if you aren't familiar with a Cornish pasty, there's no help for you) and a jugo de guanabana, which is guanabana juice. There isn't really a translation of the name (apparently it's also called a soursop, and if you've heard of that before kudos to you!), but it made me think of pina coladas and it was delicious.
After lunch we headed west and a bit north to the MITAD DEL MUNDO, a big park with lots of different little museums and also of course a big monument and the Big Line marking the equator. We started with some fun photos at the line in case the weather turned, although technically it's not actually the equator--the 1736 expedition to determine 0 degrees was off by a bit and the real line is actually 240m north. But who cares? There was a line to stand on.
Of both hemispheres and of none!
The Burgervillain is disappointed at the inaccuracy but still enjoying itself.
It was really fun to ski-jump back and forth across the line saying "North! South! North! South!" and then in German and a little bit of Spanish.
We visited all of the museums in the park: there were five or six little buildings about different things, such as Oswaldo Guayasamin (Ecuador's most famous artist), the influence of the French on finding the equatorial line (that one was partially funded by the French embassy), some interesting stuff on an ancient culture of the area that had been conquered by the Incas. The monument itself was also a museum; the top half was about the different cultural parts of Ecuador, and the bottom half was all about geology and electromagnetics. We could get on a scale and see our weights at the equator, the North Pole, the moon, and the sun (my solar weight is over 5,000 pounds!). My favorite exhibit was about wireless electricity; there was a plasma ball encapsulated in a big plastic sphere and we could take lightbulbs (the coily fluorescent kind) up to the plastic. They lit up! More interesting to me was that they lit up a bit more when I was touching the bit you screw in.
After wandering around and playing in this neat little playground (we climbed the rope ladder and went down the slide and played on the swings and generally let our five-year-old selves out) and stopping for some helado de paila (it's like gelato but less cream and more of the frozen fruit juice), we headed home to relax a bit, shower, and get ready for Argentine tango. This is Patrice's dance; she's really good at it. I sat at the table eating empanadas and drinking mulled wine while I watched her and journaled. She pulled me out for a couple of dances which was quite enjoyable, and then at the end the DJ threw up an endless mix of merengue, which we danced for a bit (it's literally the easiest partner dance in the world, which makes it really fun to lead because you can do pretty much anything as long as you keep stepping). After we tired we headed back to the hotel to collapse. Next day, an early morning to catch the bus for Quilotoa!
Dude. Equator. SO COOL!
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