Travel gene? Okay. Museum gene? Naw. Really?

The weekend after our jungle trip, we took it pretty easy. The weather that Saturday was fantastic, so we bummed around town in the morning, enjoyed a little street music at a gringo coffee shop and had lunch out.

After lunch, I wanted to walk down to the local Inca ruins - which were a good walk away. Elliott was tired and not in the mood for walking, but Finn wanted to see what the ruins were all about, so Shannon took Elliott home and Finn and I went to the ruins.

The ruins were pretty nondescript. The tour books say that the Spanish dismantled most of the Incan settlement to and used the stones to build Cuenca. Sounds a little like a travesty, but then, the Incas dismantled the previous Cañari settlement (the native inhabitants to the area) to build their town. In any case, all that remained were the stone foundations of some of the buildings and evidence of the way the mountain had been terraced for farming & walking.

Finn the photographer

Finn, however, loved the entire experience. He wanted to soak up every part of this place. We had to walk up and down every path to make certain we didn't miss a single part of the place.

In order to add a little excitement to the tour, they have added a "farm" at the base of the mountain to show what the Incas may have farmed in their day. We roamed around the various crops, from corn to various fruits to quinoa.

Finn with the quinoa crop

We finished up the outside part of the tour looking at a variety of tropical birds - primarily parrots and toucans. I'm not certain what they had to do with this place, but it made it a little more interesting!

Above the Incan ruins there was a cultural museum. I was pretty tired from all the walking myself, but Finn insisted we go in. Now, it should be said that I do love a good museum. In the right museum, I can spend hours. Of course, there are a lot of boring and uninteresting museums (at least in my opinion), but give me the Louvre, the National Gallery or the Great War Museum in Moscow, and I can roam for hours and days.

I am not alone in this - my mom also loves to explore museums. She and I have enjoyed several museums together - from the Art Museum in St. Louis to Hampton Court in England. My siblings, however, do not share my zest for museums. My mom loves to tell the story of the time she took the three of us to the Met in New York - after an hour, my sister and brother found her and claimed, "We've seen it. We're done," while I was still had yet to make it out of the Impressionist room. Anyway, at least the love of museums is something I have always shared with my mom, and I treasure that.

After spending the day with Finn at the ruins and the museum - and recalling my day with him at the Peace Museum in Giron, we certainly have another member of the family with the "gene". The museum was not very exciting. It covered the various regions of Ecuador and the cultures of each region - cultures such as the indigenous Quechua and Shuar, or the Afro-ecuadorian culture, or simply the mountain or coastal culture. There were displays of those cultures (frequently, the displays represent life as it is today) along with artifacts - some of which were truly artifact, and some which could be found on the street today. Finn explored each area of the museum with interest, and we spent nearly two hours there.

Though I myself would not have spent that amount of time there, I cannot wait to enjoy many more museums with Finn - and my mom - in the future.