The first part of today was pretty unremarkable - wake up, breakfast, walk through the city under an overcast sky, have lessons with Pilar. By the time class was over, however, an amazing thing had happened. As you can tell from most of my photos, it´s been cloudy almost all the time here, and it usually pours at least once in the afternoon. But today as I went back to Casa de Isabel, the sky was blue and sunny.
Since I didn´t get to see much of the Centro Cultural Metropolitano plaza on Monday, I decided to take advantage of the nice weather and go back there. I ran into a bit of a snag when the taxi driver not only didn´t know the place I was talking about (it´s a well-known part of the city, and both the previous drivers I´ve gone with knew it), but took my being out of breath from walking in the hot sun to mean I was lost and terrified. Once I showed him the map in the guidebook, though, he managed to get me there, and finished the whole encounter by overcharging me.
Things didn´t go much smoother once I arrived. The place I most wanted to visit was the Iglesia de la Compañia, a church that´s famous for having seven tons of gold decorating the interior. When I got there, though, they must have been setting something up, because there were workmen carrying things inside, and they told me and the other tourists waiting outside to come back at 4:30 (it wasn´t even 3 yet, and the tourist hours end at 4). Not having much choice, I milled around taking photos of the outside, and then went to check out some other places.
That huge white building I took pictures of on Monday is the Catedral Metropolitano, usually just called ´La Catedral´, and that´s where I headed first. The guidebook described it something like "the Sistine Chapel of the Americas", and the name is well-deserved, because La Catedral is amazing almost beyond words.
For one thing, it´s enormous: it fills something like a third of that giant building, and that arch is its main entrance (we tourists entered through a tiny side door). But much more than that, it´s beautifully decorated, with lots of gold, columns, painting, and a ceiling made up almost completely of ornate woodwork. There are lots of painted statues, done at about 2/3 life size, in the alcoves, and a series of biblical pictures done in portrait format, but as 3-D painted woodwork. Of course, there were also lots of huge Renaissance-style paintings: my favorite was one of the Last Supper that was extremely similar to Da Vinci´s, except that people were sitting on both sides of the table.
Even better than the decorations was the history. I got to see the tomb of Antonio Jose de Sucre, one of the top guys in the South American independence movement after Simon Bolivar, and both the sarcophagus of President Gabriel Garcia Moreno and the place where he died after being shot and stabbed as he was leaving the cathedral.
Maybe it´s just as well they don´t allow photographs, because my camera would have never stopped flashing.
After I left La Catedral it was still too early to go back to La Compañia, so I wandered the streets around the plaza, looking for stores that might sell sunhats. But no luck - the fashion for women in the mountains seems to be a fedora-like hat with a brim about an inch wide, no good at all for keeping the sun off. I don´t want a baseball cap, so I´ll keep looking, and maybe they´ll have something better down on the coast. I did manage to find some more kneesocks, though, and two very nice headscarves to add to my collection.
Wandering around during this time gave me a chance to reflect on being a foreigner. Over 80 percent of Ecuador´s population is mestizo or indio, so when I walk down the street, almost all the people I see have dark hair and skin in shades of copper and bronze, and my mind quickly comes to think of that as the norm. Then there comes a moment when I´ll pass by a window, or look down and see my hand, and I´ll realize that my lily-white, light-brown-haired self stands out like a caribou in a herd of gazelles.
Actually, that´s not the best comparison, because my height is the one thing that doesn´t make me stand out. I´m five-six, and growing up I was always one of the tallest kids in the class, but here in Quito I´m about average - when I pass people on the street, I´m usually the same height as the women and either the same or shorter than the men. The only real exception to this are the indio women who work as street vendors: these people are tiny. The lady I bought the scarves from didn´t even reach my shoulder. But I´m the gringa here, so I guess I have no place to talk.
Eventually 4:30 rolled around, and I was able to check out La Compañia. Not more than a glimpse, though - since it was technically past hours, there was a small service going on at the other end. Once again I wasn´t allowed to take photos, but I did stay long enough to see that they made the most of those seven tons of gold: the entire inside looks like it´s made from gold filigree.
After that, it was a taxi ride back to the mall, a walk back to Casa de Isabel, an evening with Los Simpsons, and early bed.
A few photos:
A small statue I saw when I was looking for the entrance to La Compañia.
Some shots of La Compañia´s outside.
Yes, that´s a rooster. They love roosters here.
The Banco Central, down the street from La Compañia. Why can´t we have banks like this in the US?
The mall I´ve been visiting. Like I said, it´s an Orwellian concrete block.
