Quito

Views from El Panecillo

Views from Basilica of the Nacional Vow

We spent ten days in Ecuador, seven of which were spent in the Galápagos Islands. This left just a very small bit of time to explore Quito, the capital of Ecuador. Therefore, we only spent two full days in Quito and small parts of two other days while in transit to and from Quito.

Reading Up Before We Left

Here are a few things we read before landing in Quito.
- Split Personality and City of Blood? The article Quito: Blood, Guts and Pizarro’s Bequest from the site Ecuadorial says that Quito has a split-personality. “Quito, like Ecuador itself, suffers from a split personality. To the south the old town, a Florence of the New World, all dreaming spires and towering belfries, gleams white in its valley beneath the high Andean sun. To the north, the new town, with its mirrored tower blocks, swanky hotels, overpasses and roundabouts, congested with grey, anonymous modernity. The contrast couldn't be greater, and at some 2,800 meters, clearer.”
- Safety? We made the “mistake” of reading the U.S. Department of State’s info on Quito. Seriously, you should read it, but, be forewarned, if you are the worrying type you may have the urge to throw your hands up in the air and just stay home. For example, we were worrying about “Secuestro Express” taxi assaults before the ink of the airline tickets was barely dry.
- Health Concerns? For travelers like us, unfamiliar with traveling in South America, there was some time spent puzzling over what health issues we should be concerned about. Would we get yellow fever, dengue fever, malaria or chagas? The descriptions of the diseases make a mugging seem preferable. Anyhow, the U.S. Department of State has some info on Quito health as well as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) that is worth reading.
- Florence of the New World? Quito was one of the first World Cultural Heritage Sites declared by UNESCO in 1978. It’s a capital city. It’s in a stunning location at 9,000 feet and surrounded by mountains. UNESCO states that it is the “least altered historic centre in Latin America” and that the monasteries and churches in the historic center “are pure examples of the ‘Baroque school of Quito’, which is a fusion of Spanish, Italian, Moorish, Flemish and indigenous art.”
Quito Old Town Street Scene and La Ronda

Impressions on the Ground

Here is what we experienced in Quito.
- Split Personality and City of Blood? At first glimpse, Quito seems like an undifferentiated mass spreading in all directions. The view from El Panecillo is sobering: a mass of concrete and structures pushing up against the mountains. In fact it’s hard to see where the old and new town borders are. San Francisco de Quito, usually just shortened to Quito, has a metro area size approximately the same as Seattle, 3+ million people, but feels larger.
No, the split personality wasn’t one of the physical layout of Quito, rather, it was more one of our experience on the street, in the old town. One hand we were going through our usual tourist motions - make a beeline to the main cathedral, pop into this site, etc. etc.- yet something seemed decidedly un-touristic. The people on the streets seem disinterested or at most uncertain of their roles as players in our tourist game. I guess this is a thankful situation because it carries a degree of authenticity or untouched-ness? Life seems to carry on whether we visit or not.
In the old town, everything is for sale and it might just be heading your way on the sidewalk! Peripatetic vendors. There are the sellers of lottery tickets and newspapers announcing their items. Indigenous women with babies on their backs selling six avocados, fresh pineapple slices from a tray, or cherries in a basket. Ice cream on the go? Sure, two women are chatting as they carry mounds of something vaguely resembling ice cream in Tupperware containers. The cones stuck in the top of the mounds give a clue. Micro-candy stalls sprout on the sidewalks. And, there are more baby Jesus outfits for sale than you would think one city could support. All this while the traffic moves in fits and spurts and fumes pour out. Then, suddenly school girls in impossibly white socks walk by and lighten up an otherwise gray street, oblivious to it all. This is the split personality we experienced and it was more of our problem than Quito’s. Our guide in the Galapagos, a resident of Quito, said that he and his friends say that Quito is bi-polar and we think he meant it on several levels but are still puzzling through the meaning.
- Safety? Thankfully, we did not run into any problems in regard to safety. We walked for miles around the old town during the first day. There were many police in plain sight. We walked back from a restaurant in the old town around 10pm and didn’t notice anything unusual. On the second day, we hired a taxi by the hour for the day - wisely suggested by our hotel staff and they also picked the taxi for us as one they worked with before. The taxi shuttled us between sites, dropping us off and picking us up at pre-defined times. For the whole day we paid $40 - well worth it. All transportation to and from the airport was arranged by our travel agent (Columbus Travel) ahead of time. It was especially nice to arrive at 12:30am in the morning in Quito and see Javier holding up a sign with our name.
- Health Concerns? In Quito and the Galápagos we didn’t have too much to worry about. All the scariest diseases were either not an issue or very low risks. We were surprised that we ran into almost no mosquitoes to speak of in Quito or the Galápagos. We could have just been lucky. Diseases from water are still always a risk and we did get “bit” by this. Thankfully it hit us toward the end of our 10 days in Ecuador so it didn’t stop us.
- Florence of the New World? We would say that Quito, especially the old town, has a ways to go to work itself into this nickname’s shoes. The structure of the old town has all the elements going for it, interesting structures, plazas for gathering, and a density of interesting sites to visit. However, it doesn’t quite all come together, yet. They seem to be working hard at it. Our hotel for example is an example of buildings being restored and attracting tourists.
The Roof of the Basilica’s Nave

What We Saw

Day 1: Basilica of the National Vow. We walked to this church from our hotel. The basilica is a bit run down and need of some basic repairs. It does have some impressive views from different balconies or perches you can reach by stairs or ladders (literally).
Day 1: The Church of the Society of Jesus or La Compañía de Jesús. After the Basilica, we walked back to the center of the old town to this gold-leafed-Baroque extravaganza. Inside an English speaking guide, Alex (studying tourism), gave us a short tour.
Day 1: Church and Convent of St. Francis, Museo Fray Pedro Bedón. First, we ate lunch at the popular Tianguiez at the foot of the convent. Inside the convent, the Museo Fray Pedro Bedón has a display of religious art that demonstrates the more gruesome depictions of Jesus that are favored by the Quito school. All the better to instill fear in and connect to the hearts and minds of the indigenous people to be converted. Again, we refer to the article mentioned above in the Ecuadorial for more background reading.
Day 1: Virgen de Quito on El Panecillo. We walked up to this city icon in the late afternoon. A series of staircases (some not finished) take you up from the old town. When you go by foot though, be warned there are posted notices about NOT walking there. The view from the top gives you another glimpse of the spread of the city and, if the weather cooperates, a glimpse of the mountains and volcanoes cradling the city.
Day 2: TelefériQo. We took a taxi from our hotel to the base of gondola (10,226 ft) and arranged for the taxi to pick us up after a couple of hours. At the top of the gondola (12,943 ft), we met misty weather so just walked around a bit and headed back down. There is little signage or explanation - that we could tell - that explains what you might see or experience up there. There are amenities at the top: café, restaurant, shops - but many were closed when we went up in the early to mid-morning. We would definitely like to go back to the top under nicer weather.
Day 2: Foundación Guayasamín. The Guayasamín museum contains the works and art collection of Oswaldo Guayasamín (1919 - 1999), a Quechua native and Ecuadorian artist. His work often features tortured faces and hands, like the series La Edad de la Ira (The Age or Rage). The museum combined with his La Capilla del Hombre (The Chapel of Man), located 5 blocks away, can take a few hours to visit and is well worth the time. Take a taxi to get to the museum - it’s not something you can easily walk to it.  For more about our time in the Guayasamín museum see this post.
Day 2: Casa del Alabado. This is a new museum in the old town focusing on pre-Columbian art. It’s a beautifully done museum. You will see a lot of beautiful artifacts with a brief description of what the object is and the period designated by a particular culture such as Valdivia (4,000 a.C. - 1,500 a.C) or Chorrera (950 a.C. - 350 a.C.). On the second floor there is a room that helps visitors decipher these designations. It is probably best to visit this room first. There is documentary film about the construction of the museum that features the stories of the people who helped restore the building that houses the museum.
La Casona de la Ronda

Where We Stayed and Ate

We stayed at La Casona de la Ronda - a recently refurbished structure - and beautifully done at that. We stayed at the hotel two nights before visiting the Galápagos and two nights afterward. We would highly recommend this hotel. Most tourists seem to stay in the Mariscal neighborhood, but from what we saw, we’d pick the old town any day. From La Casona de la Ronda we could walk within five minutes to all the key sites.
We ate one night at our hotel and it was very good. Two other nights we ate at Theatrum Restaurante & Wine Bar (old city center) and La Gloria Restaurant (edge of Mariscal) - both upscale restaurants with good food. The dessert at Theatrum was especially interesting. It was assortment of different preparations of fruits of Ecuador. See this post for details of the dessert.
We ate one lunch at the popular Tianguiez, at the foot of the San Francisco complex and overlooking the Plaza de San Francisco. It is popular with tourists and safe if you don’t want to negotiate the intimidating food vendors and shops that are all over the old town.
Tickets from Quito Tourist Sites


Two Restaurants in Quito


Basilica of the Nacional Vow – Climbing to the Top

Agave and Staircase

Plaza de San Francisco

Inside Convent of San Francisco

Iglesia de la Compania de Jesus
Caution Sign – Walking Up to El Panecillo
View of El Panecillo from La Ronda

La Virgen del Panecillo

McCoy Grecian Pottery and Holiday Greens

In this pots and plants series entry, we have a two McCoy Grecian pieces with holiday greens. We take out the McCoy Grecian pottery around Christmas time. Its swags of embossed greenery and gold crackled finish seem Christmas-y without being over the top. Here, they are pictured with some purchased holiday greens (holly, spruce, pine, etc.) and yet more Skimmia foremanii. (See Weller Claywood and Skimmia foremanii for more information about Skimmia.) From the McCoy Potttery Collectors’ Society site, it says that Grecian line was introduced in 1957: “Ivory, with Green decoration and 24k Gold networking.”

Panettone 2011

Panettone seems to have exploded on the American market in the last few years. One can scarcely step into the local grocery store without being greeted with a floor-to-ceiling stack of panettone. Our beef is that many panettone for sale both have goofy flavors and endorsements that seem wrong. (Bauducco features it is made with Hershey. That's enough to make us go running and screaming in the other direction.) Or, when you buy the panettone and take it home it is dry and disappointing. So we decided this year, snobs that we are, to make panettone ourselves. Fatto in casa… as they say. See all those years of Italian language lessons have paid off.

The origin of panettone is not exactly known and it isn’t just an Italian holiday treat as many other countries have either adopted this sweet bread or have a variation that is very similar. However in our minds, panettone and Italy are forever intertwined terms. We spent the days before Christmas one year in Positano and the site of people hustling and bustling about carrying their panettone was memorable to say the least.

The panettone recipe we followed was out of the December 2011 issue of La Cucina Italiana - a recipe from the Tartine Bakery (recipe here). The recipe played out over three days. Day 1: Refresh our starter (we already had a sourdough starter). Day 2: Make the poolish (pre-ferment). Day 3: Follow the rest of the recipe. We used the Fingered Citron or Buddha’s Hand (Citrus medica var. sarcodactylis) as the lemon zest called for in the recipe. See the post Annashaab Vase with Buddha’s Hand for a picture of this citron.

Panettone with Buddha’s Hand Citron

Panettone Waiting to go in the Oven

Panettone with a Slice Missing – Couldn’t Resist

Weller Claywood and Skimmia foremanii

In this pots and plants series entry, we have a two small Weller Claywood pots with Skimmia foremanii looking very festive with its red berries.

Weller Pottery (1872 - 1948) of Zanesville, Ohio was a prolific pottery company that created pieces ranging from high-end art ware to functional commercial ware. 1910 generally marks the beginning of Weller's middle period, and the pottery's chief designer at this time was Austrian native Rudolph Lorber, who created some of Weller's most recognized lines, among them Claywood. Introduced circa 1910, Claywood, along with the related Burntwood line, features naturalistic design motifs primarily of flora and fauna, with the scenes divided into panels on the Claywood line. The Weller Claywood pieces shown here are smaller pieces, less than four inches high. For examples of more Weller Claywood pottery see the images from the 2001 Wisconsin Pottery Association and Show & Sale feature Weller Pottery.

Featured with the Weller pieces is Skimmia foremanii. Skimmia is a genus of a few evergreen shrubs and small trees in the Rutaceae (citrus) family. S. foremanii has been in our yard for about ten or more years. It isn’t watered but by natural sources and is in a shady location. The leaves are smallish and slightly waxy. The bright holly-like berries appear in the late Fall. We find sprigs (with berries) of the Skimmia scattered around our yard. Some animal or bird snips the end off and drags the berries off but occasionally leaves them for us to find. In our notes we recorded that we purchased both a male and female so we get the berries, but currently, the two look like one plant. S. foremanii is a dwarf.

The genus name Skimmia comes from a Latinization of part of the Japanese name for Skimmia japonica. The species name foremanii is named after one Mr. Foreman of Dalkreith, Scotland sometime in the late 1800s. Mr. Foreman exhibited the S. foremanii (a hybrid between S. japonica and S. reevesiana) in 1881 in Edinburgh. More details can be found in Journal of the Arnold Arboretum, Volume III, April, 1922, Number 4. The journal entry is titled:
New Species, Varieties and Combinations from the Herbarium and the Collections of the Arnold Arboretum, by Alfred Rehder. The article is on page 211.


In the mantle photo,the painting in the center is Padre e figlio (1997) by Alessandro Gambetti, an Italian artist. To the left is a piece by AJ Power, a Seattle artist.

Richard Dawkins and The Magic of Reality

The Magic of Reality: How We Know What’s Really True is a book by Richard Dawkins with illustrations by Dave McKean. The book poses and answers twelve common questions about everyday life. First, possible answers to each question are given from myths and then, the real answer in the form of an engaging scientific explanation follows. The idea is that the scientific explanation is not only real but much more magical. You can experience the book as a book, as an audiobook or (magically?) as a digital book / application on an iPad - which is what we review here.

The Message

The message of the book is that science has it’s own magic and that magic is reality. Mythology - of all color and stripe - is not necessary to explain reality when you have science. The book’s message is targeted at an audience from early teens onward who are interested in science and understanding some fundamental questions like What are Things Made Of? (Chapter 4), What is the Sun? (Chapter 6), Are we Alone? (Chapter 9), or What is an Earthquake? (Chapter 10). The book tackles twelve basic questions about reality, answering them in an easy to understand language that uses analogies and illustrations, and audio and video in the iPad application.

Even though the purpose of the book is to dispel of myths in favor of science, the descriptions of myths turns out to be somewhat, shall we say, endearing. Yes, Dawkins dispatches with them as not necessary to explain the phenomena in question, but the presentation of them works both in word and illustration. The illustrations, some of them animated, are engaging and complimentary of the myths. Overall, experiencing the imagery and text woven together is quite effective. Maybe Dawkins and McKean should work on a book of myths. It could be interesting.

 
Image from Chapter 12 – Dave Hume

Unfortunately, the mention of Richard Dawkins is enough to raise the hackles of a good number of people and I’m sure he could care less. Richard Dawkins is, among other things, an atheist. To quote a recent study, Atheists As “Other”: Moral Boundaries and Cultural Membership in American Society (AMERICAN SOCIOLOGICAL REVIEW, 2006, VOL. 71 (April:211–234)), that a friend sent us: “[u]sing new national survey data, it [the study] shows atheists are less likely to be accepted, publicly and privately, than any others from a long list of ethnic, religious, and other minority groups.” So Dawkins’ outspokenness in his atheism automatically brings with it condemnation of any work from him, no matter how worthy. It’s a shame, because for readers who don’t invoke a higher power for describing events like rainbows or earthquakes, much of the book is informative and entertaining. Granted, for creationists or believers in miracles, the book will be hard to read. And speaking of miracles, they are covered (really, dispatched with) in the concluding chapter What is a Miracle? In this chapter, Dawkins discusses among other topics, the maxim from the Scottish thinker David Hume (1711 - 1776) regarding testimony and miracles is discussed. The maxim states “[t]hat no testimony is sufficient to establish a miracle, unless the testimony be of such a kind, that its falsehood would be more miraculous, than the fact, which it endeavors to establish.” It’s a handy maxim to keep in mind for many things.

Overall, the content of the the Magic of Reality is going to be of interest to a young science-inclined reader or even an adult reader who might be embarrassed about his grasp of basic questions covered in this book.

The Medium

Image from Chapter 6 – Egyptian Legend for the Sun and Moon Cycle

The medium is the message is the famous phrase by Marshall McLuhan and we didn’t want the medium is the distraction to be the case with this book. Assuming that there is some base level of learning to extract from an effort like The Magic of Reality, we don’t know if “experiencing” the application on the iPad was better than if we had read the book or listened to the audiobook. (What is the right consumption verb for a digital book/application? ) Learning in our experience is quite situational and dependent on which combination of senses you get the most lit up on. The Magic of Reality application hits on the visual, aural, and tactile senses (taste and smell we’ll have to wait on) and so as conventional thinking goes it engages more senses, so has a greater opportunity for impact. The challenge is that the iPad is a medium that we typically used for fractured, asynchronous tasks like a little browsing, a little communicating, a little gaming, a little reading. Fractured tasks work against the immersive experience that a good learning experience requires. However, these temptations can be overcome with some discipline. Turn off the push notifications and resist the urge to play the next word in Words with Friends.

The iPad application blurs the boundary of what a book is as it naturally leverages interactive features (touch), audio, and video of the iPad. Images on the iPad can be especially vibrant, and in this respect the digital book/application works well because of the fantastic illustrations by David McKean. Some of the illustrations are static and some are “dynamic” in that they flutter or grow, weaving in and around the text.

Most chapters have some interactive part as well that is either a demonstration or a game to help drive home the chapters main question. Some of the games work, some don’t and we thought a few were not necessary. For example, in Chapter 3 (evolution) you are presented with a game to get some floating iguanas to shore by imitating the wind and blowing into the microphone. It felt a little silly. In Chapter 7 (rainbows), the game initially crashed the application. (It was later fixed with an update.) Can you crash a real book? It’s like every time you turned to a certain page in a real book it flopped out of your hands and on to the floor and you had to reach down and pick it up. Overall, the less successful interactive parts don’t distract from the text and imagery which really is the heart of the book.

Example Image from Chapter 7 Showing Navigation

Annashaab Vase with Buddha’s Hand

In this installment of the pots and plants series we have an Annashaab vase with a Buddha’s Hand. The Annashaab vase was made in Lervarefabrikken Annashaab and was likely designed by Eiler Løndal (1887 - 1971) who came to Annashaab after the closing of Danico (another pottery maker) in 1929 - as described by Starkeld.com where we purchased the vase. The Annashaab Pottery existed between 1891-1958. This vase is stamped with an L in a A and Denmark and is incised 618.

The Buddha’s Hand is also called a Fingered Citron and has the scientific name Citrus medica var. sarcodactylis. The variety name derives comes from sarco, from the Greek sarx or sarkos meaning flesh, and dactylis, from the Greek daktylos for finger. Sarcodactylis refers to the unusual shape of this member of the citrus family: it looks like many plump fingers. The visual aspect of it caught our eye first in the local grocery store, but it is the subtle and intoxicating smell that sealed the deal. It turns out that scenting rooms is one of the ways people use this citron. And so the Buddha’s Hand sits in an Annashaab vase in an area we pass by frequently so we catch a whiff. So far we’ve only been enjoying the visual and olfactory aspects of the Buddha’s Hand and haven’t tried it in a culinary setting.

When you look at the imagery of Buddha, pay attention to the hand gestures or mudras. Each mudra has a meaning like gesture of warning, greeting, or reassurance. What is our Buddha Hand saying to us?

Annashaab Vase with Buddha’s Hand

Annashaab Vase Bottom Stamp and Incision