This morning we woke up to a lovely surprise! Our hostel had prepared a breakfast for us which was included in the price of our room. We had coffee, juice, scrambled eggs and a croissant. It was nice to have our coffee and breakfast already there; we felt very fancy.
After breakfast, we decided to go on a double decker bus tour around town. I normally think those are a ridiculous tourist attraction but Quito is really large and the sights we wanted to see were very spread out. With the bus, we could take the three hour tour around town and get off and on whenever we wanted to at the different sights.
We began our tour in La Mariscal, which was the area of town we were staying in, at Plaza Foch. There were tons of bars, restaurants and cafes in this plaza and I was glad it was so close to our hostal.
Then the bus headed down towards the Centro Commercial Amador which had many different churches and museums. The churches each had an entrance fee so we didn't venture inside but they weren't as ornate as I had hoped they would be.
We walked down "La Ronda" which is one of the most emblematic streets in Quito. It is an area that has recently been renovated and contains restaurants, cafes and craft stores. It is located in the popular neighborhood known as Avenida 24 de Mayo which has permanent photography and sculpture exhibits on display.
We went up to the top of the mountain overlooking the town to visit "El Panecillo" which is a sculpture of the Virgin of Panecillo. It is apparently a replica and there was a lot of fallout when it was first placed on the hill since it was regarded as a holy area for religious ceremonies and the idea of a replica placed there was unappealable to the locals.
The Basilica del Voto Nacional was an amazing neo-gothic church that I really wanted to visit. Unfortunately if the bus dropped us off there wouldn't be another bus to pick us up for two hours, so we didn't get to go inside.
After we returned from our tour, we were happy tofind that the laundry Alyssa had dropped off in the morning had in fact been delivered tomour hotel. Unfortunately, they had swaped her rain jacket for a large, mens Nike jacket. We went to the laundromat to let them know their mistake, but it had closed at 5:00 so we would need to return in the morning to sort it out. We then headed to the grocery store to buy some salad and vegetables that we could eat with our leftover pizza. This is the first place we have found bagged salad, so we purchased an "American blend" salad that came with balsamic dressing and got some tomatoes and avocado to have with it. We made ourselves dinner at the hostel and afterwards we just hung out in our room reading. Another couple had come home from their day out and were apparently staying directly above us. Since we had been the only ones in the hostel the night before, we didn't realize how paper thin the walls and ceiling were. Every time the couple above us walked around it was like an earthquake above us and we could hear every word in their conversation like they were in the room with us. Once they started watching the Ecuadorian version of American Idol and singing in the shower, we decided we'd had enough. We went downstairs and asked the lady if it would be alright for us to switch rooms due to the noise (every other room in the 3 story place was open except the one directly above us). She brought us to a room down on the first floor which had its own bathroom, but the lady said it was fine and it would be the same price. We went up and got our stuff packed up and brought it downstairs. As we were about to go into the room, the lady stopped us and said there was only one problem. There was construction going on next door and she said that we would be woken up by the hammering at 7:00am if we stayed in that room. Since that wasn't much of a solution, we asked if we could stay in the room across from our current room. She said yes, that was no problem. We headed back upstairs and unpacked in the much smaller room (our first room had three beds and this one had one bed with a bathroom) hoping that noise would no longer be an issue.
We decided since it was our last night in Quito that we would walk to the nearby Zona Rosa to get a drink. We found a table outside at a restaurant in the main square and noticed that we were the only unaccompanied females in sight. There was a happy hour special of 3x2 but you had to get the same drinks, so we decided against that and I got a passionfruit margarita and Alyssa got a mojito. They hadn't quite mastered either of those drinks so we looked around to see what the locals were drinking. It looked like caparinas or micheladas were the drinks of choice, so we each ordered a caparina which meant that we got a third caparina free. Nothing eventful happened although we did get to watch some poor guy get a DUI in front of everyone in the square. After the 2 1/2 drinks, we headed home to get some sleep.
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