November 27, 2016
Today, we slept in late (til 7 am!), showered in our delicious hot water, and went downstairs to get our breakfast. Scrambled eggs are either very popular in Ecuador, or it’s what all the white folk eat. We choose to believe it’s the former.
We had a couple hours to kill before we picked up our clothes from the lavanderia, so we set out for one of the few museums open on Sunday. It was a former Catholic church, turned into a museum. Quite nice. On the way there, we walked past stalls of vendors selling their wares, as well as a little fresh flower market. Overall, a quite bustling Sunday scene.
We picked up our clothes before noon and managed to buy an alpaca sweater, which is actually a lot harder than it sounds because each one is one of a kind with no real sizes on them. That and of course as tourists, each vendor is trying their best to capture your attention and keep you from buying from the next guy. Add to that that as Americans, we essentially tower over the Ecuadorians with our long gringo monkey arms, and you are guaranteed a challenging sweater buying experience.
Lunch was at a delicious Ecuadorian restaurant right underneath the “new” Cathedral, which is pictured below, as seen from our hotel room balcony.
It was a beautiful, hot, and sunny day, so we wandered around trying to find a coffee shop with wifi to relax and plan our next steps. We managed to decide the rest of our trip, but not before it started raining. We were trapped at the coffee shop for a little while before we ventured out into the rain to get back to our hotel for some proper attire.
The rain settled down and we set off for a walk near the river before dinner. We had planned to have dinner at a restaurant listed in our book as open on Sundays, but in familiar French fashion, it was no mas once we got there. We walked around a block or two before we found a nice-looking restaurant open for dinner. (Keep in mind that it’s Sunday… so not everything is open). We sat down and ordered and Nathan headed to the restroom. During this time, I looked around at all of the other faces in the room. Crap, we had picked out a gringo restaurant! Not a single non-white or local in the room. Oh well, the food was good, and we couldn’t walk around forever to find cena. We finished dinner, grabbed an ice cream cone, and went back to our room.
Tomorrow, a new museum and a new town.