48 hours in Quito

Quito wasn't on our list of places to visit but flight times necessitated it on our way to the Galapagos.
Having been told that Quito had come on massively over the last decade or so, this wasn't born out by our first impressions of the city. Our drive in from the airport gave us a good view of somebody getting beaten up (apparently a regular Friday night occurrence after too much rum) and when we ventured out for breakfast the following morning, our short walk to the "central hub" of the new town, was through some pretty run down areas - and the hub itself was pretty underwhelming.
Our food experiences on the first day were no better - a pretty dire breakfast of over cooked eggs and cheap coffee (despite having some of the best coffee in the the world here, apparently many equadorians prefer Nescafé instant!), an average sandwich for lunch and a dinner which should have been nice turned out to be very undercooked salmon (Sam likes pretty pink salmon - but this was cold and practically still swimming). Throughout the day we (mostly Sam) did manage to experience some local delicacies, including humeta (corn stuff) and empinadas (fried pancake with cheese filling).
Thankfully the food improved significantly on the next day - a great breakfast in a place called Swiss Corner (including poached eggs in mushroom soup - slightly weird but very tasty!), sandwich lunch in the Plaza Grande Cafe (including some tasty plantain, sweet potato and yucca crisps, and a funny fruit drink with maize), the best hot chocolate Alistar has ever had and a great local dinner in Attioche (we can't remember the names of all the dishes we had, but the corn kernels were superb). Brian & Jackie (Sam's parents) had arrived for this day so enjoyed the good without the bad...

The city did have some other highlights, including:
- a trip to Mitad del Mondo (middle of the earth) and Inti-nan - Quito is the only city in the world on the equator and is also where French scientists did a lot of work to prove the geometry of the earth. As well as getting to see the coriolis effect in action (see next post), we also learnt about some of the ancient traditions of indigenous tribes and got to see an amazing local dance

- pretty plazas - Plaza Grande (or de la Inpendenzia) was our favourite
- stunning churches - in one of them we got to see a bonus live music and dance show

- an imposing statue on top of a hill, with a great panoramic of the city and the surrounding mountains

We also managed a trip to the hotel gym - proving either how unfit we are, or the effect of altitude (Quito is just under 3000m).
All in all a good weekend: Quito wouldn't be top of places we'd recommend to visit just now - but given it's superb location in a basin surrounded by snow capped volcanos it certainly has potential.
We're now off to the Galapagos for a week, where we think internet connection will probably be non-existent, so you'll have to wait a while for the next chapter...(we failed to upload this in time, and you've probably realised by now that we've been out of contact for the last week!)