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Published: September 15th 2009
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So we finally made it to Quito late on Tuesday evening. The bed in L’auberge Inn was definitely a blessing after attempting to sleep upright in hard aeroplane chairs! For anyone going to Quito, I would recommend the L’auberge Inn as it is cheap and cheerful. It has a great vibe with many friendly travellers passing through! Plus there is internet and a great cafe that serves delicious fruit salads and fresh juice for breakfast, or pancakes with maple syrup if you’re not on a health kick!
Our first day was spent soaking up the culture and size of Quito. To say it is enormous is definitely an understatement as it’s around 50km long! The buildings are beautiful, especially the cathedrals and the pace is slow... which is great. We are definitely in too fast a gear in England. Life would be much more stress free if we could just slow down a little. Even in the square of the capital of Quito, people are just strolling along as if they have not a care in the world.
We made a typical schoolboy error, which I am hitting myself for as I should know better after being in India,
but a young shoe shining boy repeated ‘picture’ to us, but after we’d taken his picture he made it quite clear that he was after our money in return for the picture! I thought it was unusual as Ecuadorians don’t typically like having their picture taken as they believe that it captures a part of their soul apparently? Nonetheless, at least we have a picture of a cute young Ecuadorian boy!
The most interesting part of the day had to be the ballet we went to. We managed to acquire free tickets to see an Ecuadorian ballet to which we invited two guys we met in the lodge to. We all thought it was a bizarre experience as going to an Ecuadorian ballet is definitely one of the last things I expected to do, despite my love for ballet. It is so different to British or Russian ballet, which is all I’ve ever witnessed. There seemed to be an Irish folk dancing influence in there, as well as some gay kissing. Like I said, it was bizarre!
Going up to the statue of the Virgin Mary overlooking the city was definitely the highlight of the day though. The
view from there was incredible, just as the statue itself was. It was beautiful and pretty enormous as the pictures show. The view from the teleferico (cable car) was even more mind blowing though. You got off at the top from where you could see the entire length of the city as we were 4100 metres up! It was actually pretty difficult to breathe there and extremely windy, so if you go, take a jacket and don’t wear heels as I saw some South American women doing! Crazy!
Quito is a city is much like all the others though. It’s pretty built up and has your usual chains... e.g. KFC and McDonalds. This has its perks though as we spent one lazy afternoon in the Coffeetree bar abusing their wifi and drinking many 2 for 1 cocktails! If you’re after home comfort and a lively atmosphere head to this park of town, La Mariscal, where you’ll find many western international style bars and restaurants.
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