Quito, Ecuador: Three Ways of Getting to Know a City

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We spent four days and three nights in Quito, Ecuador. Our first full day there, Wilson, a professor of architecture and planning, gave us a tour of the city from an urban planner’s perspective. First, he took us to the rim of a mountain valley where we had an overview of the city:


From there, Wilson pointed out different neighborhoods and their attributes. Next, we drove down to one of those neighborhoods and Wilson told us about his involvement in building the community. Finally, we joined Wilson, his wife and son for lunch at a local restaurant. They helped us pick out veggie-friendly traditional Ecuadorian foods.

We spent our second full day in Quito running errands. Josh had to get a vaccination, I had to buy a pen and we both had to get plane tickets from Bolivia to Brazil. Both the injection and the airline-ticket-purchasing required us to go to Quito’s equivalent of Mid-town Manhattan, i.e. lots of office buildings. Between errands, we lounged in a spacious park that we couldn’t help but compare to Central Park. To top the day off, we walked around a picturesque neighborhood, built into a hill-side, that Wilson recommended to us:


Finally, on our third full day in Quito, after a brief tour of the Old Town with Wilson, Josh and I wandered a bit on our own stopping to take pictures of the cathedrals and other buildings the guidebook told us were important, like the monastery of San Francisco:


Reflection
We left Quito, feeling like we knew the city pretty well. I think it’s because we experienced the city in three different ways.

1. We had a local show us the city. In Quito, the insider-urban-planner’s perspective was especially relevant to Josh, but I also enjoyed hearing about the different ways neighborhoods had changed and were changing and the projects Wilson and his students were working on. It was also the first time we visited a Latin American city where we had an overview that explained what types of people live in what types of areas. Often when we visit cities, we try to figure that out on our own, but we often end up seeing only the parts of the city charted by the guidebook’s maps.

2. We used the city as if we were living there. While I was experiencing it, I was disappointed with our day of errands in Quito. I kept wishing our errands would end soon, so that we could explore the touristy historical center of Quito. By the end of our stay in Quito, though, I appreciated the day of errands. We engaged with people doing their everyday activities, while we too, were doing our (relatively) everyday, non-tourist activities. I think we kept comparing Quito to NYC that day because we were experiencing Quito as we experience NYC.

3. We visited the traditional tourist sites, while reading our guidebook. The buildings were beautiful and the plazas grand and we enjoyed trying to capture those qualities in photos.

Question
What ways have you used to get to know a city?