Quito

We spent Yom Kippur in Quito. We didn't make it to synagogue, but we figured that, at over 10,000 feet, we were closer to the heavens and could thus cross being pious off our to-do list.

We liked Quito, despite a few misadventures. On our first day, we stepped out of our hotel (across from the presidential residence!) and took a walking tour of the old city with a very knowledgeable guide. Shockingly, understanding 100% of the features of baroque architecture of churches was not on Talia's bucket list, so she didn't totally appreciate our guide's encyclopedic knowledge.

After the somewhat tedious yom kipur “tour o'churches,” we headed to Teleférico, where we took a gondola ride up one of Quito's many steep hills. It was beautiful on the way up, but the extra few thousand feet threw Talia over the edge into altitude sickness. Plus, while we were exploring the peak, a thunder storm rolled in, the temperature dropped and sudenly we were being pelted with hail. We quickly boarded a gondola to head down the mountain but a few minutes into the ride, the lightening started and the gondola stopped running. We spent a stressful half hour dangling approximately a billion feet in the air in a small metal container during an intense hail/lightening storm before the storm passed and we started moving again.

After the gondola ride, we headed to "the center of the world" to straddle the equator. We took a somewhat cheesey tour there, which appeared to be full of all sorts of fake science. That said, I did manage to get an egg to stand on its end, so that was cool.

During our second day, Kyla had to work all day, so Talia and wandered the city on our own. We climbed to the clock tower in a basilica, explored botanical gardens, found a cool playground, bought a stuffed llama at a touristy artesenal market, and got our photo of the Quito sign (featuring me instead of Talia this time).

In the evening, Kyla joined us and we had a very strange experience involving ice cream (see the video).

From Quito, we headed to Cotopaxi, the subject of the next post.Read more