quito, the half of the world and cafecito

well, i made it to quito. quite the journey really. i was expecting a quiet ride on the bus from guayaquil, a midnight special with what i heard were seats that practically went all the back to horizontal. this, as most things are around here, was not to be.

earlier in the day we had our final presentation of sorts at ecotec, the politectic that is officially in charge of our internships. we had made up a little powerpoint ditty and went through the slides with our audience of three when andy and a few guys showed up from stancia. apparently andy was specifically not invited because the meeting was supposed to be an opportunity for us to speak our minds about the internship without fear of reprisal (like i've ever feared reprisal from andy, the pussycat of guayaquil). anyway andy showed up as we were making the transition from jane's part to mine and he seemed all right just listening and playing with his hair and had little to say until the questions part at the end when he launched into a big ol things went sour at times because of this and that and really it wasn't my fault and such.

you could feel the eyes of the gathered big wigs from ecotec boring into andy but he's somehow impervious to that and grinned and continued on with his vision for the future. paola galvez, the new big wig in charge of interns at ecotec seemed mostly interested in the work i'm trying to do with milagro and the schools in canada.

ok, so that out of the way i rushed home and then went to this place near san marino for a beer or two (two) with meagan and paul. we also used this opportunity to trade our books back.

after that it was just a matter of hitting the road. i headed over to the terminal and spent the next 15 minutes trying to find my bus and following the kind but misguided advice of people inside the terminal.

once on board i tried out the seat and although it did indeed go back a lot farther than most seats it was still an incline and my body, being as it is affected adversely by gravity (a little less today however when i was on the equator), still managed to slide downward every time i tried to go to sleep. i think the bus staff realized this and therefore decided to try and keep me awake as long as possible. to achieve this they decided to play the movie tears of the sun starring bruce willis. not only was the movie dubbed (the ominous voice that gave us "lágrimas del sol" was eerie) but the action was not conducive to good sleeping. about an hour in one of the passangers complained that he couldn't hear and so they pumped the volume up and the gunshots were that more spine shattering.

so i tried to sleep but really didn't succeed too well. i might have got a couple, maybe three hours all night and these were pretty unpleasant. i arrived in quito sleepy and in need of coffee.

tomorrow i'll fill you in on the mitad del mundo (wonderfully translated in some tourist literature as the half of the world) where i chatted about art history and watched in awe as leafs failed to swirl about in a tank as they drained but went straight to the bottom (a lot cooler than it sounds).

actually i'll start it now... i'm pretty sleepy but we'll see how far i get.

so after the bus arrived in quito i got out and made my way through the tourist quarters to this breakfast place and had a pleasant if unexciting meal before walking about 10 blocks to the corner where buses that go to the mitad del mundo monument pass by. this allowed me to walk by a few interesting stores, one of which was the tokio phone place that for some reason had a huge canadian flag in it's name, and the even bigger canuck banner in a bar-b-q place named after that famous bar-b-q bastion - toronto. yep, can't make that kind of stuff up. i will try and get a pic tomorrow.

so the bus shows up and i trudge on and for the next 45 minutes i am witness to about twenty random neighbourhoods of quito and the surrounding hillsides. the city is a series of hills and no one really bothered to level the land so houses are glued to slopes that must be pushing 60 degrees at times. finally we reach the monument which is really a bunch of buildings and small museums cluttered about with a series of souvenir stores and restaurants. the monument was erected where a french mission declared the equator but really they got it wrong and the whole thing is about 200 meters to the south of the real line (which was discovered just in the past 20 years or so using gps). no one was there when i arrived - just about 20 minutes after it opened, and i walked about and snapped a few pics but really nothing was all that interesting. then i remembered this other museum just outside the gates of the complex. that i will discuss later on.