Visiting Around Quito

Over the last couple of days we´ve taken in many of Quito´s attractions. Yesterday we took a series of local buses out to the Equator Park, El Mitad del Mundo. Aboard the bus were mothers nursing babies, women with pails of mangos, a guy trying to hawk embroidery thread, and an endless supply of guys selling little packets of potato chips. The park was a bit empty in that it was a weekday, making it easy to take lots of clear photos of the monument. The monument itself houses an impressive exhibit featuring dioramas of the many tribal peoples of Ecuador. After looking through a well-designed exhibit on the history of man´s efforts to measure the earth (beginning with the Greeks and featuring lots of French scientists) and poking around many of the gift shops we headed back to our hotel in Mariscal district of Quito. Rather than another colorful busride, we shared a cab with a delightful couple from the Boston area that we´d met on the flight to the Galapagos.

Today I again attempted public transit, this time on a metro-bus over the the Grand Plaza. It´s an impressive set of government buildings, churches, exhibition halls and of course a well-appointed plaza. After surveying a heavily gold guilded church, I found my way into a photo-exhibit featuring winners of the world press association´s annual contest. It was an amazing display, some of my favorites were tourists (in bathing suits) attending to African refugees on an island off of Spain and the wedding photo of an American girl and her Iraqi war vet husband whose face was so mangled by injuries he barely looked human.

In the afternoon I hooked up with Andy for a visit to Quito´s Cultural Center which houses museums, a dance company, a library and a theater company. We spent several hours looking through a fabulous museum which looks at Ecuador´s social and artistic history, beginning with pre-columbian artifacts, onto the Spanish conquest (with all of its challenges) onto Simon Bolivar´s successful fight for independence and finally a selection of work from a variety of contemporary artists.