Quito is neato! Flowers have landed in Equador!
Hey Pollinators and hello from the capital city, and the second highest official capital city in the world! ( can you tell we were listening on our walking tour of Quito?!)
Despite travelling for around 22 hours, we were feeling pretty good after bagging ourselves a cheeky upgrade to British Airways Club World seats for the 9.5 hour flight to Miami! What we learnt from this...always tell British Airways you’re on honeymoon and get treated like a VIP and get given lots of freebies for the duration of your flight!
Do note however that if you are flying through an American airport, your free bottle of champagne will be swiftly removed from your possession during the terrifying American security process...and please don’t feel the need to argue the point with them (Chris) as they carry hand guns and couldn’t give a monkeys that it was a kind gesture from our BA friends for our honeymoon!
We had the slight disappointment when entering Miami airport that Will Smith wasn’t blaring from the speakers welcoming us with his classic hit off of the 90s but it didn’t dampen our spirits! What did however was the friendly little text we then received from American Airlines informing us of a 2 hour delay on our next flight meaning we didn’t arrive at our hostel in Quito until around 1am so we were definitely ready for our beds.
The hostel we are in is called Masaya and is really cool! Nice rooms, fab little garden and lots going on!
So our actual tour doesn’t begin until Saturday evening which gives up a couple of days to explore Quito!
As the language spoken in Latin America is Spanish we thought it would help to take a Spanish lesson being put on by a lovely Equadorian man called Washington!
We spent a lovely hour with our new friend asking to learn some basic phrases that we need for our stay such as “No that is too expensive!” and “she is vegetarian, can she eat here?”. Washington was very accommodating but we probably need to Practise a little more, and when we say a little more we mean, we need to go back to school! So for now we will continue to use hand gestures and speak louder and slower in our very ignorant English way and to be fair, it seems to be working for now!
We took a walking tour of Quito on Friday PM with a lovely local lady who is studying tourism in the cit. We learnt a lot about the locals, the different communities and how they can be distinguished by their interesting attire! We learnt that 82% of the people in Quito are religious hence why there are 33 churches in the old town alone, several of which we visited to view the beautiful gold leaf decor and ancient art.
We visited the old hospital where we learnt that if you ended up on the ‘dying person’ wing, they use to cut the patients ankle to let them bleed out and speed up the process to free up beds! Nice! Luckily this was many many years ago and so I feel fairly confident if we are to need any minor medical assistance we will be cared for well! Having said that we will be keeping our ankles well covered.
And finally we walked up a huge hill (at slight altitude, any hill here feels huge!) to view their impressive gothic cathedral.
There was a local family celebration going on at the cathedral and if you think you ever dress your children up to look comical then you need to visit Quito! They take the embarrassing dress to another level here with the kids! Child cruelty at its best but it made for some cute pics!
The city is also full of gangs of stray dogs(Katy obviously named them all and offered them all a home back in England! She also spent the tour checking the dogs weren’t crossing the roads without looking but they all seem pretty street wide over here!)
On a side note, if you are blonde and visiting Quito, be prepared to be stared at as if you have 3 heads! There are no blonde people here! A little bit off putting at first but you soon get use to it!
So today we head to a new hotel where we will meet up with our group and guide who we will be travelling with for the next few weeks! Next stop, the Amazon! Not going to lie, both a little concerned about the snakes and spiders situation up in the old jungle during the next few days but what’s the worst that can happen?! ( please do not respond to this with any horror stories or worst case scenarios, it was merely a figure of speech.)
Adios Amigos for now,
Much love
A couple of Flowers xx
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