July 1
Quito, Ecuador
So far, so good.
Today was lovely. We had planned for today to be completely unstructured. Besides the crankiness which we expected, it was a great day. Our main goal was to explore our surroundings.
We went to a cute little mini supermarket and bought some ingredients for breakfasts and lunches. It was a small little store, and we had 4 very excited boys. They weren’t quite sure what to make of us. We are staying in an apartment in a busy residential and business area. There are no tourists. We definitely do not blend in.
We walked about 20 minutes to a park called Parque La Carolina. We were really impressed, It had everything you could want in a community park, and was full of people. First we took advantage of the many mini turf soccer fields to play a family game of soccer. A few people stopped to watch and one of the park workers took photos of us playing. The game didn’t last longer than 20 minutes as some of us were feeling the effects of the 2900m of altitude. There were also basketball and volleyball courts open to the public. There were informal games of soccer happening all over the park in the open spaces. The boys also spent some time rock climbing on some large sculptural piles of rocks put in the park specifically for climbing.
We also took advantage of a huge exercise park. There was all sorts of work out equipment there: chin up bars, giant truck tires to flip, climbing ropes, rings, hurdles, ellipticals, stairs, among other things. It was like an outdoor community gym. Almost everyone was doing things in their street clothes, but there were some serious people doing cross fit or kick-boxing training in pairs.
From there we went to a surprisingly great, but very small museum of biodiversity. Ecuador has a huge variety of geographic areas. They have the coastal area, the Andes with 43 volcanos, and of course, the Amazon rainforest. Although the museum was entirely in Spanish, we got a lot out of it. There was an interesting collection of specimens from insects, butterflies, fish, animals, birds, reptiles, amphibians, rocks, shells and minerals. One of the coolest things for the boys was their collection of skeletons.
We also rented a pedal boat in their man-made moat. Features of the park we did not get to do were an outdoor animatronic sea monster exhibit, a botanical garden, a cultural centre, and the many street food vendors. It was a wonderful afternoon.
We finished off our day with dinner at a delicious Italian restaurant and then we hand washed some laundry and hung it up to dry on our makeshift clothesline strung across the kitchen. Tomorrow we head to Otavalo, a huge open air textile market.