Quito Ecuador

I flew to Quito this morning. I've done this stretch between Quito and Cuenca a few times now. A beeline as the crow flies over the inter-Andean valley between the cordilleras. Skimming the cream off the clouds and watching the sun highlight every billowy shadow of a vast white blanket stretching to the horizon. The heavens, wispy, celestial, ethereal bathed in bright white light. It was so beautiful it almost made me cry.

The other times I've arrived in Quito it has been late at night by taxi watching the lonely streets pass under the suspicious gaze of lamp light. Now, it is mid day on a Friday afternoon and the streets are choked with the color and commotion of busy passerby. The sun is shining and it feels so much like a warm spring day I cannot help but smile. I dropped my bags at what is becoming my regular haunt in the Mariscal district and said hello to Hernon. I have never had a chance to exploure Quito, one of the major cities of the Andes, and so I came here early. The next two days are all mine to explore and I have a list of recommendations and things to do from Catherine. Here we go...

Wandering the Banco Central Museum I cannot help but dork out on art and anthropology. I love visiting museums in foreign cities. I mean it's the artistic and cultural patrimony of millions who have lived and died through centuries and ages. Here in the midst of the Andes there is a wealth of pre-Colombian artifacts, from early hunter gatherers of the coast to the rise of the Inca empire spreading North from Peru. Pottery, ceramics, gold, and the strange shapes of men and animals blended into both the beautiful and grotesque. I cannot help but wonder and imagine at the artists who made them and the cosmology and life of the people through so many generations past who once roamed and shaped the cultural landscape. This is ancient art.

Walking into the modern, through history the contrast between the time up to the Inca to the Spanish conquest is stark, alien, contrasting in every way. Now there is but God. The elaborate dress of the Spanish viceroyalty side by side with the Christ supplemented pious and violet on the cross. The Christian's have arrived and this world is changed forever, one culture subordinated to the other. Imperialism and tyranny under the banner of heaven. Later still this rigidness gives way to more liberal expression with the passage of time. Now I am catching glimpses into early society, politics, commerce, and daily life. Simon Bolivar, old family portraits, epic landscapes, and the first ripples stirring social change manifest in powerful paintings of the indigenous by painters like Oswaldo Guayasmin. A trip through history in a few short hours. And this is why I love museums. I love interpreting, unraveling, learning.

Later still I hailed a taxi catching glimpses of the city stretching its shadow across the valley before dipping down narrow cobblestone roads into the historic district. Wandering the plaza of San Francisco, the great church. Late afternoon sunlight, children at play, shoe shiners, flower sellers, and great flocks of pigeons scattering here and there like buckshot across the plaza. I wandered into mass in the great church doors meandering quietly along the edge catching the eye of old angel wood buttresses, tarnished paintings of the Virgin Mary, and the Christ looking down nailed bloody to the cross.

I ended the day at Catherine's suggestion at a spot near Parque Itzimbia to watch the sunset envelope Quito at a little Greek-Ecuadorian café with the best views of the whole city. And so, I ordered a beer and ate kebabs while people watching on the patio waiting for the slow slip of the sun over the city. The colors fading to black and then fire yellow as street lamps began winking on like fire flies illuminating the entire valley from end to end. Respiration of the city.