Hola Mis Amigos! Today started the true fun and adventures after our long days of travel. It was well worth it. We started off heading to the Basilica and Convent of San Francisco. It was stunning. It was full of gold everywhere, and beautiful sculptures and paintings. Afterwards, we went on a tour of the Convent, where they told us the story of the building’s creation, and how it took around 100 years to build. We saw all of the historic paintings, sculptures, and statues built and kept inside. The tour guide told us that some of the statues were made of bones (some were made of the friars’ bones). We continued the tour to San Francisco’s brewery he built, which was fascinating to see. Our tour ended with us going up on the roof, where we saw the first beautiful view of the day. The entire plaza and town around us were visible, and we of course grabbed a few pictures.

Once we left here, we went into the plaza and checked out all of the street vendors. It was insane to me how far our dollars got us. We got churros (thank you Skip) and continued on to lunch. We found a local shop that had empanadas and decided to eat there. A huge empanada was a dollar and fifty cents. It was muy delicioso.

We headed back to the hotel to change into shorts and then tried to call our Ubers to The Virgin of El Panecillo, but they cancelled on us. A group of five of us decided to walk up the hill, which was a tiring but rewarding experience. The steps had counters, and we reached 845 at the top. We were at 9908 feet of elevation when we were on the statue. The views from the top were amazing, and the statue was beautiful. We then got a taxi to The Basílica del Voto Nacional. It was huge. We climbed the towers and climbed up a sketchy ladder to the top of the middle tower. We also went up the left tower, and it was worth the climb. The views were again fantastic (starting to sense a theme?), and the architecture was beautiful.

We left and headed towards our hotel, when we ran into another group, and ended up doing a chocolate tasting at a local factory and store called Kitu. The man was so genuine and was thanking US for coming in and sharing the experience with him. He said he had one other local factory in Quito, but doesn’t want to export, so it felt special having it in a place I could only try here. His stories and explanations were fascinating.

After the chocolate tour, we went back to the hotel for our group dinner and then headed down to a street a few blocks over that had a bunch of restaurants and boutiques. We went into a restaurant with live music; however, they were closing down soon. The staff stayed open an extra half hour for us to play music and dance with us, and it was an amazing experience and story.

Day one was more than a success.