Literally in the CENTER of the world

On Tuesday, we bacame ultimate tourists, exploring all the "hot spots" that Quito, and the surrounding area have to offer, including visiting the Equator, as shown above. At that location, "calculada con GPS," I ended up standing in both hemispheres at once, my right foot in the winter, and left foot in the summer.
In an effort to satisfy my mother´s pleas, I will attempt to post a dry list of everything we did that day, with pictures. I hope this is a one-of-a-kind type post, because I don´t think this will be very funny.

After the Equator, we took out tour bus up an extremely windy road to get to La Virgen de El Panecillo, which you can see in the blog´s main photo at the very top. Also, from half-way up, it´s absolutely huge, as seen in this photo:

 Then, as I said, you can walk through the Virgen to get half way up, at which point you have a 360 degree view of the entire city, which is by far the biggest, most expansive city I have EVER seen or been to. It´s nothing like American cities, where there's a clearly indicated downtown because of the 50+ story buildings. Quito has buildings anywhere from 8-12 floors high, but spread out for miles, and miles, and miles. Absolutely stunning. Here, I decided to test gravity, and of course I won:

Next stop: La Plaza Independencìa, which is bordered by an ancient church on one side, and the President's house on another. We were able to see just a bit of the President's house, but not too much. Here´s a picture from the church side showing the plaza with the fountain in the middle.

Then we decided to go to the most impressive structure I think I have EVER seen. It's called La Iglesia de Compañìa de Jesùs. The Outside of it, which does it no justice, is here:

Then we found ourselves inside the Church, inside which we were NOT allowed to take pictures, but my daring friend Justine was able to capture two, luckily. The first one, of the "entry way" is here:

This church took many decades to build, and as you can clearly see, is accented with gold, covering every inch of the walls. The next picture is a little blurry, but it´s all we have of the most impressive part, the wall behind where the Priest speaks from. There are many pictures on the internet to see it in more detail, but here's nothing:

Well, there's the post that you all have been waiting for, complete with pictures of all my tourist-y adventures. Sometime in the middle of this week I'll do a post about life in my house, but I still feel a little sketchy taking pictures of the inside of my house while my mom is there.
My next post will be all about my weekend adventure to Mindo, Ecuador. It was the most intense experience of my life, and all the details will be posted either Tuesday or Wednesday.

Best,
Blair