So we’re back and up to our old tricks again.  We left our boy with his grand­par­ents and flew down to Quito, Ecuador.  The cab ride from the air­port was accented by fire-blowing jug­glers at inter­sec­tions in place of our squeegee wield­ers.  Sup­pos­edly, thiev­ery is ram­pant in Quito, from pick­pock­ets to snatch and run­ners to bladed ban­dits.  All are hyper-aware of the threat, to the point that a waiter promptly clipped our day­pack to a chair while hand­ing us menus.

To our unex­pected and uncom­fort­able sur­prise, Eng­lish speak­ers are tough to come by, even in the tourism indus­try.  Even when the vast major­ity of tourists are Amer­i­can.  And, iron­i­cally, the offi­cial cur­rency of Ecuador is the US dol­lar.  We’re guess­ing that tourism folk don’t feel they need to learn Eng­lish since it’s the US’s sec­ond lan­guage.  That said, a few weeks of Span­ish classes a few years ago and we can barely speak a lick.

Quito is still dry through it’s rain-stormy after­noons as it’s on the Equa­tor and is the sec­ond high­est cap­i­tal in the world (after La Paz and not includ­ing Lhasa, which should be rec­og­nized as the cap­i­tal of Tibet).  We spent the day vis­it­ing the old town, a UNESCO World Her­itage site, with it’s colo­nial archi­tec­ture and sev­eral bil­lion churches.  Spain cer­tainly did a numero on Ecuador.  We walked the hilly cob­ble stone streets gasp­ing at the thin air, snapped a few shots, stopped in for some incred­i­bly sweet tamales and then a giant bird took a gigante numero dos all down Janiv and his backpack.

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