Ecuador: July 9, 2012 - Teleferico, Iglesia de La Compañia de Jesus

July 6, 2012: The Day Before

July 7, 2012: Traveling
July 8, 2012: First Day
July 9, 2012: Teleferico, Iglesia de La Compañia de Jesus
July 10, 2012: The Basilica and the Stolen Backpack
July 11, 2012: Last Day in Quito
July 12, 2012: Travel to Loja
July 13, 2012: Catamayo
July 14, 2012: Loja and Alfredo
July 15, 2012: Church at Semilla de Mostaza
July 16, 2012: Back to Quito
July 17, 2012: Traveling



Note:  Many of the pictures in this blog series are taken from the internet, because we had our camera stolen halfway through the trip.


At 8 AM we are served the same breakfast as yesterday:  Bread, scrambled eggs, and juice.  The juice isn’t OJ today, but “tree tomato.”  I don’t like it but I drink it anyway, along with about five cups of black tea.  This is tree tomato, in Spanish tomate de arbol.

The guest house is full tonight so we need to find somewhere else to stay.  We get on Angelica’s computer, but the internet keeps stopping and starting and we can’t make online reservations for a hotel.  It’s our goal to find the cheapest hotel that employs an English speaker, because, I tell Joe, there’s no way I’m making a reservation over the phone in Spanish.  I can communicate if I can see a person and we can point and stuff.
A “motel” in Ecuador is not a cheap hotel, but a seedy place where you bring your mistress for the night.  A “hostal” is not a “hostel,” but a bed-and-breakfast.

I call the Best Western.  A woman answers in Spanish.  Holding my breath, I ask for an English speaker, and she says, “One moment!”  Ahhh, the stress melts away.  The rate is way more than we thought we’d pay for a Best Western, but I guess it’s actually a fancy Best Western Plus.  

Check-in isn’t till 2, so we go out for lunch at a cafe where we have my favorite “empanadas verdes con queso” which are empanadas made with plantains (aka “green bananas”).  The food’s good, but right as we finish a waitress comes and places a small dish of orange salsa on our table.  We speculate about what it could be, and what it’s for, and why they give it to us after we finish the meal.  Do we eat it with a spoon?  Does it cleanse the palate?  Strengthen the stomach?  I ask a waitress what it is, and she tells me it’s a type of salsa.  Then I notice that she is placing the same dish on every table, even the empty ones. She’s just preparing for the lunch rush, and our salsa dish isn’t actually intended for us.  We feel like dumb tourists for exclaiming over a dish of salsa for five minutes.

We walk to the mall, find a bookstore, and buy a Spanish dictionary and a touristy Quito book with lots of maps.  I use the mall bathroom, which has an automated toilet paper dispenser in the main area.  I watch one girl hold one hand under the machine and gather her required TP with the other, then take it with her into a stall.  I try to duplicate her actions, but I can’t get the toilet paper to work.  A cleaning lady helps the gringa.  I get in line for the bathrooms.  A stall opens up, so the woman at the front of the line goes down to it - and immediately comes back, wrinkling her nose.  “It smells bad,” she tells me in Spanish.  I laugh.  After she uses a non-stinky stall, she holds the door and calls for me, assuring me that she didn’t stink it up!


I am reminded of the rule in many South/Central American countries: Don’t Flush the Toilet Paper.  The sewage systems are weak, and everyone puts their used TP in a trash can next to the toilet.  I never quite recover from the disgusting things I see in the open trash can next to that stall...it seems like people would at least want to cover up the offensive poo-and-worse, but no.  Wipe and toss, wipe and toss.

Back to the guest house, pack up, and to the hotel!  It took a while to flag down our first taxi.  But when we did, I was proud for communicating well.  I told him where we wanted to go, asked him if he would please use his taximeter to calculate the price, and when he said it was broken, asked him how much it would be before we got in the cab, so I had a chance to bargain if we were going to be ripped off.  $1.50 for the 15-minute trip!  Not bad, and we give him $2.00 since he helps us with all our bags and stuff.






We happily check into our lovely hotel room with its air conditioner and privacy.  When you enter the room, you insert your card key into a slot inside the room to activate the electricity in the room.  Nice way to avoid losing the key while saving the planet.  

We visit the Teleferico, a gondola system.  

 

Quito itself is 9,350 feet above sea level, which makes it hard for me to breathe while walking around.  Teleferico takes us to over 14,000 feet, the same height of Mount Rainier.  We walk to a few vantage points, but I’m like an old lady, walking slow and bent over and holding onto a handrail and pausing every couple of steps.  Everywhere are signs warning visitors not to run, to walk slowly.  Joe keeps telling me, “In through the nose, out through the mouth.”  I get annoyed and use precious breath to snap at him - “I AM!!!!!!  Just because my mouth is open doesn’t mean I’m breathing in through my mouth!  It takes too much energy to close my mouth in between breaths so just LEAVE ME ALONE!”  I don’t feel quite as triumphant as I thought I would after my outburst.

We duck under a barbed wire fence to get to a particularly nice vantage point, where we take lots of pictures.  We see a cute little chapel, but it’s closed.  We take the Teleferico back down and get some ice cream and sit and wait for a taxi.  A van pulls up - we assume it’s a taxi van that specifically takes people from Teleferico, since there isn’t a steady stream of taxis this far from downtown.  He charges $1 a person and takes three other visitors and us.  The other three people are from Austria and Germany.  The van drops them off, and they say, “This isn’t our stop,” and the driver’s like “Yeah, just walk two blocks that way.”  I don’t blame them for being annoyed when they reluctantly get off.

I tell him we want to go to Iglesia de La Compañia de Jesus, a fancy Jesuit church I visited last time I was here.  After seeing the fate of the Europeans, I specify that I want him to drop us off at the DOOR of the church.  Not two blocks away.  We explore the beautiful, fancy church, surreptitiously taking pictures against the rules.




We return to our hotel and decide to eat dinner there, and we head to the elevator.  When taking the hotel elevator from the first floor, you have to slide your card key before it will let you select a floor, but if you’re already on a higher floor, the elevator assumes you’re kosher and will take you wherever you want to go without verifying your identity.  We see a sign in the elevator informing us that the hotel restaurant is on floor PH, so we press that button.

We go up and the elevator doors open into a dark lobby.  We step out, and the elevator doors close behind us.  It’s silent up here, and completely dark.  I call out a few “Hola’s” but no one responds.  We walk around a while, kind of creeped out, until we decide to go back to the main floor and ask about the restaurant.  We head to the elevator and press the “down” button, but it doesn’t light up, and the elevator doesn’t come up to get us.  This is starting to sound like a set-up for a horror film, but I see the “salida/exit” sign and we take the stairs one floor down, then take the elevator the rest of the way.  Turns out the restaurant is on the main floor and the sign was wrong, and we were in the penthouse suite (that’s what PH stood for).

We receive a complimentary drink for staying in the hotel.  I ask if I may have a raspberry martini, and the man says no, saying that the complimentary drink is a specific drink that every guest gets.  He brings us a layered drink.  I take a sip:  The top is pure liquor.  Once I get past that, the rest of the drink isn’t alcoholic at all, and the final dregs are syrupy sweet.  I think maybe I should have stirred it from the beginning.

We order an appetizer of empanadas.  I use every word in my vocabulary to tell the waiter, emphatically, that I cannot eat peppers.  I am allergic.  I am VERY allergic.  My throat will close up.  I will not be able to breathe.  I might have to go to the hospital.  “Peppers” includes green, red, yellow, jalopeno, chipotle.  Please make sure there are NO peppers in ANY part of my meal.  Our meat empanadas have green peppers in them.  I call over one of the snobby suited men who “work” for the hotel by standing around, and ask him if there are peppers.  “Nope,” he says, looking straight at the green peppers in my empanada.  When I try to clarify he pretends he doesn’t understand me.  

Determined to have something Ecuadorian, I order fried pork.  I quickly learn how difficult it is to cut tough, greasy fried pork with a fork and a dinner knife.  The waiter notices me wrestling with my meat and kindly provides me with a steak knife.  We order dessert, a tres leches cake piece.  It’s not bad, but the center is frozen.  Our whole time there, we are one of three small groups in the restaurant.  There is one waiter and four men in suits who just stand around talking to each other and looking important.  No wonder we had to pay $140 for this room; we’re paying for salaries and suits for people who don’t do anything.

The bills in restaurants includes tax and a “service fee.”  We never quite figure out if the service fee is the U.S. equivalent of an included tip, or if we’re expected to tip beyond it.  Even when we asked our Ecuadorian friend Leo about it later, he wasn’t sure.  In this case, we slip our waiter an extra dollar because I like him and his unpretentious attitude and kind smile.

 

Back at the room, I read my Nook, and Joe asks if I wanted to use the jacuzzi bathtub.  I say “yes” but don’t feel like getting up, so he draws a bath for me!  It’s such a nice thing to climb into a bath I don’t have to prepare.

We sleep well in our king-sized bed.