We had an easy morning this morning packing up our things before we needed to check out. After storing our things at the hotel, we headed out for our last trip to the local market. We had encebollado one more time (fish soup), and we also tried a sweet blood sausage (morcilla), and some snails with peanut soup. 

 

After lunch, we took the public bus up north of the city to visit the equator. First stop was Intiñan Museum, at the real middle of the world. We did a guided tour here with some information about some of the indigenous people of the area, then the real attraction: Equator experiments!

First, we tried walking on the equator with our eyes closed and head up. It was surprisingly harder than walking off the line! Next was an attempt to hold our arms straight out while someone else pushed them down. It was, again, harder to keep your arms up standing on the equator than off the equator. The 3rd task was balancing an egg on the head of a nail- Alejandro was the only one in our tour group that got this one. He even has a certificate to prove it. The last was a demonstration with water draining down a sink, which differed on the equator, in the northern hemisphere, and in the southern hemisphere.

 

Next we headed to the Mitad del Mundo park, which has a huge monument that was built on what was thought to be the equator, but later they figured out with GPS that they were actually a little off. We went to a few of the museums inside the park, then headed back to Quito.

 

We went out to eat in the area of La Ronda, trying the 2 things that the area is most famous for- empanadas de viento (wind empanadas) and canelazo (a cinnamon/naranjilla drink with puro Ecuadoran alcohol). We also had some more churrasco. After dinner, we headed back to the hostel to pick up our things, then took an Uber to the bus terminal for our bus to Lago Agrio and the start of our trip to the Amazon!