Catching up with Quito

The first morning in Quito, we were awakened by the once-familiar sound of voices of adults from "Peanuts" comics ("WAHwahwahwahWAHwahwah")--actually vendors mumblingly announcing their wares, which seems like a questionable sales technique but a rather effective alarm clock.

I decided to take Peter to the Parque Carolina, a gigantic park in the middle of the city. We hopped on the Ecovia, one of the many easy and cheap ways to make your way around Quito. We passed by a couple of smaller parks, the Museo del Banco Central, and were making our way into the Centro Historico, the old part of the city, when I realized we had gone the wrong way, and we had to go all the way back past our hostel. At least I got a quick refresher course on the city's layout.

Finally, we made it to Parque Carolina, which was as awesome as I remember, full of colors and tons of people of all ages playing--little kids on snail shaped play structures, older ones on gyroscopes, old men engaged in serious rounds of baci, and, of course, soccer field upon soccer field, for all ages, made of various materials, different sizes, and so on. People sell all kinds of street food (juices and fritada, hunks of pork served with potato pancakes, are some big ones) and delicious smelling carts line the avenues that traverse the park.

After wandering from one end of the park to the other, we reached our intended destination, the botanical garden, which has displays of plants and trees from all the major Ecuadorian climate zones--the Sierra, bosque nublado or cloud forest, paramo, coast, and jungle. At this time of year, many of the plants weren't in full bloom, so the garden wasn't quite as spectacular as I remember. The orchid section, though, was still really impressive, with many of the flowers in tiny, not-yet-full-grown size.