Our Journey to a Museum of Precolombian Art

After another hard two and a half hours at the hospital today, Justin and I headed off to Mariscal Sucre to make a down payment on our Galapagos trip and purchase our plane tickets. Our travel agent is a really sweet lady who´s very patient with our struggles to obtain funds. The credit card company they work with charges ten percent for any charges, so it´s much cheaper to pay with cash. This presents a bit of a problem as we can only withdraw so much money each day with Justin´s bank card. (Oh, yeah, so I managed to leave my bank card in Alabama - highly useful - so my parents had to deposit money from my account into his account so we can both get money out using his bank card. Got all that?) At any rate, we´re highly pumped about our eight day cruise around some pretty amazing islands - swimming with penguins (oh yeah, I said penguins), playing with monkeys, snorkeling, exploring lava tunnels, eating cruise ship food (always an adventure :). Bring it on! Unfortunatley, we won´t be able to blog during that time, but we´ll be taking tons of pictures to blog about when we get back to Quito.
Bit of a tangent, back to the topic of the blog. After our deposit, we headed off to try out a vegetarian restaurant Justin read about in the guide book. It was quite scrumptious, even though Justin did say it made him feel a bit yuppie. We were both craving veggies, and veggies we had :) I was already tired, but Justin was ready to make the most of our free afternoon and insisted we go check out a museum. I reluctantly let him drag me along, and I´m glad I did.

Oswaldo Guayasamín is a famous Equatoriano painter who painted and collected prolifically until his death at the age of 79 in 1999. Before he died he donated thousands of pieces of Precolombian art to the city of Quito, and that art, along with his own paintings, is displayed in his home on the hillsides of Quito.

The location was both beautiful and painful. Beautiful because it gave us some pretty incredible views of Quito. Mount Pichincha appeared enormous now that we could finally see it from its base all the way up. It was painful because we had to hike up some pretty impressively steep hills to get there (this is why I´m always starving).

As you can see from the photos, his home was also beautiful. Well manicured lawns and beautiful artwork. We also had two ladies who were more than willing to give us a tour of the art work and precolombian collections. Sorry we couldn´t take photos - just imagine really cool art work and precolombian figures :)After the museum we headed even further up the hill (whew) to La Capilla del Hombre, which was Guayasamín´s last work before he died. (It was actually finished posthumously by contributors from Ecuador, Chile, and Bolivia amongst others). As you can see from the above picture and from the one below, it was also a beautiful place, complete with a swimming pool that I seriously considered jumping into and a really cool car.

With another successful trip under our belts, we turned our noses towards home and (thankfully) headed downhill :)