Quito, Ecuador

My first morning in Quito I was booked for a walking tour of the old town. My hotel was very close to old town so it was a good plan. I had a good healthy breakfast with lots of fresh fruit and some nice oatmeal. The coffee was great too. Then my new guide showed up to pick me up. She was very nice. She spoke a mixture of English and Spanish before asking me if she could practice her English all the time. I asked her how was I ever going to learn to speak Spanish if everyone always wanted to speak English with me. She laughed and we ended up speaking Spanglish as a compromise.

We started our tour at, you guessed it...the Cathedral. It was another nice Cathedral and then we went to guess again...the main square. You are a fast learner on these city tours. We also went to the presidential home, a museum, a handicraft center (she did not tell me if it was her uncle's shop or not), an art museum, walked around the old town streets, had coffee at a nice cafe and lunch at a nice little restaurant. We drank a bottle of wine with the lunch. We were having a good time. My guide was much more experienced than my other guides had been. She was older too at around 40. She seemed to be having as good a time as I was on our tour. After we exhausted the old town area for the most part, we jumped into her car and went on a drive up to the top of the city to look at the views from on high. Quito is a sort of sectioned city mostly due to its geography of mountains that pretty much go through the city itself. There are areas that are mostly poor and of course there are the posh areas but also areas with dense condo style housing and areas of homes, new and old areas and overall a good mixture of everything. There should be a place that appeals to almost anyone somewhere in the city.

I was pumping my guide with questions. I didn't ask the usual questions about the history and politics of Quito. I wanted to know about healthcare, social security, taxes, family income, religion in daily life, love, sex and other personal things about the people. She was pretty cool with some of my tough questions. The overall impression I got from her was that the general population was very Catholic with a large swing to other missionary religions recently. They lived their lives in a pretty strictly christian manner and most of them attended their respective religious services regularly. This was different than say Mexico where everyone claims to be Catholic but almost nobody actually goes to church anymore and their lives are much more secular than Christian. She told me the health care in Ecuador was very good and very accessible to even the poorest people. She claimed there was nobody going hungry because social services were readily available to help the less advantaged people. I had to agree with her after looking around the city during our tour that most of the people seemed healthy and happy if somewhat reserved in their happiness. She told me that any deviance from the norm like homosexuality was looked down upon strongly as was divorce, abortion and any other sexual deviance or radical view. Politically she called herself a moderate and told me the country was very stable at the moment politically. She told me a story and showed me an art piece to demonstrate how the people feel towards adultery. The art piece was a cot with a man and a woman tied to it naked and face to face with the two bodies all dried out and mummified. She told me that adulterers were tied up like that and then placed out in the hot sun until they were mummified as a penalty for their sin. She said the punishment is still in use today although it is illegal. It did get her point across about the attitude to "sin." Pretty gross if you ask me. I can't imagine dying such a slow agonizing death with a lover like that.

When my tour with her was over I had some time off. I was beat up from walking too much in my physical condition but I still went out for a few drinks that night at a place my guide had pointed out as a good place for me to go. I met some other Americans that were living in Quito and they loved the place. We talked for a few hours over some local beers and then I went back to my hotel room to try to recover.