Around 1230 Summer offered to take me out on a walking tour of La Mariscal area as she is a tour guide and about to do her first private tour starting at the end of the week and needed to do a reckie of the hotel, cafes etc. She is American but has lived in Ecuador, Egypt, Turkey and Morocco for many years and can speak fluent Spanish, Arabic, French and Turkish and is married to a Moroccan where they spend half their time and the other half in LA.. We walked around for about 4 hours so I managed to get my bearings of where everything is. Quito is 2850m above sea level so I didn’t felt too great all day but its gotten better as the day went on. We went to a chocolate café where I managed to try all the free samples of Ecuadorian chocolate. It is just so yummy. It is sold according to area/region so each one tastes slightly different. I think I ate about half a block of chocolates worth. From there we went to a little side street café and I had a chicken empanada which was really quite yummy, a bottle of coke, a bottle of water all for US$1.50. Street food is cheap but generally everything is roughly the same price as what it is at home.
Apparently uni holidays started today which explains all the young drunk Ecuadorians out and about. It’s also the day before a 5 day public holiday when everything will be closed. The first public holiday is the celebrate the day of the dead so all families get together and go to the cemeteries with big feasts and sit around the graves of their deceased relatives and eat and drink and party. Glad I picked such a great time to visit! Hopefully some of the tourist attractions will still be open. The following public holidays are a combination of various holidays around the country and the President declared 5 days so people could go away.
Gabi is flying over to Bangladesh on Thursday to see her boyfriend for a month (which is where he is from and lives) so tomorrow I will move to a hostel and probably spend the next few days around Quito to try and acclimatise before heading out to any of the mountains. Gabi owns an Optometrist business two hours north of Quito. Apparently she only has to physically go into work on average one week out of every month and the rest of the time she can do what she wants. I’m guessing she is doing quite well for herself. Gabi decided to take us up the teleferiqo (cable car) but as usual she was running late so by the time we got to the car park it was dark. The cable car went up 2.5km to the top of Cruz Loma, flanked by Volcan Pichincha. It was lovely to see all the cities lights. We were up around 4100m and the air was thin and it was hard to breathe. It was cool but not as cold as I was expecting. We sat inside and Gabi bought me some traditional alcoholic drink. I have no idea what it was but it was very strong. We walked around outside for a little bit before heading back down to Quito.
Gabi had to take some clothes to her Mum’s place but I didn’t feel like doing that so stayed home and made eggs for dinner. I’m glad I didn’t go because she and Summer didn’t get home until 0030 and then cooked steak for dinner.
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