World of the Wise: The Differences Between Seattle And Ecuador

Quito, Ecuador and Seattle, Washington are both cities that are extremely large, have lots of museums, lots of people and lots of rules. And along with all of the similarities come lots of differences. Some of them I have already noticed just by walking down the street.

Quito's differences...

- Since Quito is a 3rd world country, you can see people everywhere that are on the streets asking for money (Today we were at a cafe and a man came up and started to play his guitar and sing, afterwards he came up to our table and would not leave until we gave him money and then he left.)

- In Quito there are not very many crows that are flying around and you do not see them at outdoor restaraunts or anywhere. (The cafe we were at was outdoors and we could not see any birds anywhere, if there were some birds there they are obviously not used to coming up to tables and stealing something.)

- In Quito there are no rules that say how far away from a building you can smoke and some places people can even smoke inside the building. (We were eating at a restaurant and 2 people started smoking at the table next to us, so it smelled horrible.)

- You should not drink water in Ecuador AT ALL. The water from anywhere is undrinkable and can make you seriously sick.(This includes no brushing your teeth and then washing your toothbrush off in the sink, no ice, no water at restaraunts. You have to get used to asking for bottled or filtered water without ice.)

- In Quito pedestrians do not have the right of way, or if they do, they do not follow that rule. And to go with that, if someone stops for you everyone else behind that car starts to honk their horns at you until you are on the other side of the crosswalk.

- Sunday in Ecuador is election day and nobody is allowed to buy or drink alcohol for 36 hours before the elections are held or 12 hours after. (My parents tried to order beer but they quickly said that they could not until Monday.)

- Quito is very near the equator so there is always the same amount of sunlight and darkness.
- Also the altitude here is incredibly high. (My brother got winded after running up the stairs)

One thing that is definitly similar between Quito and Seattle is their night landscape you can see almost every single light in the city from the top of a tall building (or in my case, from my hotel window.)

While we are in Quito, we are going to see a lot of museums with lots of history and culture. Today we went to the Mindalae Museum.

The Mindalae museum is a museum of Ecuadorian clothing and folk art. The word mindalae means merchant or tradesman and the tradesman would usually trade clothing and folk art.

The building itself has a cool thing where 4 times per year the sun shines directly through a window in the ceiling all the way to the base floor.

The people used to hang their corn from the ceiling to dry it out so they could make corn.

These are a bunch of shells that the merchants traded. Shells were one of the things jewelery was made out of so it was valuable.

A lot of their clothes and beads and paintings were very brightly colored or black there was almost never any dark reds or oranges.

Pottery was very important as well because all of their cups, bowls, statues, a lot of their supplies were pottery. On the left, you can see a lot of examples of what pottery was used for.

My favorite part of the museum was the textiles. I was impressed by the bright and contrasting colors and the stitching. On the way back from the Museum, we saw indigenous people wearing the same kind of clothes we saw in the Museum!

All of their fancy stitching was done on a big weaving loom like this. Since most of their clothes, blankets and fancy stitching was made like this, it took a lot of time to make one full piece of clothing.