Photos and day´s narrative

Well, I just spent half an hour writing this, only to have it all deleted by the Spanish keyboard´s inability to understand what I thought were pretty basic shortcuts. But, hey, it´s not like the days when I rode a train for half an hour to check my mail weekly. I´m sitting in the common room of our $15-a-night hotel, where, if I´d brought it, I could be using my laptop on their WiFi connection. Much has changed in 15 years.

The photos: Our self-appointed guide to the Museo Metropolitano de Quito, who offered to show us around and then demanded money, a common trick. He got fifty cents and a talking-to. But he did show us his identity card, proof that he had voted in sSunday´s referendum. The Museo was fine, but nothing compared to the Museo San Francisco, housed in the abbey attached to the Iglesia San Francisco, the sparawling complex (biggest religious complex in Latin America) built four years after the Spanish defeated the Inca. (Started then, anyway.) (One photo is of its facade, and another is the group posed on its steps.) It is a world class museum, and our guide was also a volunteer, but of a much nicer sort: a uniformed art history graduate student who spoke very clearly and showed us any number of sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth-century works of art. Excellent tour.

We toured much of colonial Quito today on foot, doing a lot of picture-taking and some shopping, and the stduents were again pretty wiped out in the afternoon. A couple of them were so tired they didn´t hear me knocking on their door, and the other two were so comfortably ensconced in "The English Patient" that they were happy to stay in the hotel a while. (Please try to assign something more trip-specific next time, Mr. Hurley.)

We went into the neon tourist district tonight for supper with some Ecuadorian friends of mine (one of whom, Juan, is the first person we´ve met who voted "no" on Sunday), and on the way home we took the Trole (pronounced "troll-ay"), the subway-like above-ground electrified articulated buses that run norht-south in Quito. We all paid our fare and waited for the trole, which was pretty crowded when it arrived; we all waited patiently for people to get off at our stop, and then Sara got on, followed by the rest of us. Except that between the words "on" and "followed", the doors closed, and we were treated to the site of Sara´s face as she hear the doors close, then turned to look at us through the glass, slowly, her eyes getting bigger and bigger, finally mouthing "No way" as the trole started to pull away. We remarked afterward that she is definitely a born actress: every tiny element of her emotions was evident on her face. Of course, she did as common sense would dictate, and got off at the next stop, to see us pull up on the next trole and step aboard, although there was a somewhat agonizing 5-minute wait between troles. But we were all confident, as we waited, that she´d do the right thing. Still, I found myself peering out the window of the boarding area looking for the next trole pretty often in those 5 minutes.

We are off to Otavalo in the morning, where there is no trole, for better or for worse; revelie is at 8:30. (We got in at about 9:40, and they still had to pack.) Updates as needed!

Mr. Johnson