The middle of the world (or pretty close to it)

So Quito, the lovely city in which we find ourselves today, is just over the line in the southern hemisphere. The equator runs about 50 km north of the city, and one particular spot on that most famous of lines is particularly notable and visitable...it´s the Mitad del Mundo monument, where an 18th century French expedition calculated the circumference of the Earth and declared themselves right at the center of it. The site has been commemorated by a huge statue with a sideways globe on top, a bright yellow line, a solar clock, a fountain, approximately seventeen restaurants, and thirty-six souvenier shops, all surrounding an entire Mitad del Mundo plaza. Unfortunately, they were kind of off...the ACTUAL equator runs about 200 meters to the north of the bright yellow line. My initial response to this was sympathetic...after all, the French expedition was far from home, they had limited technology, they had been slugging for weeks through the dense jungles and over the steep mountains of South America, and they were pretty damn close...but then I realized that there are some really simple ways to figure out if you are standing on the equator or not. Let some water out of a basin, for example - if it spirals clockwise, you´re in the southern hemisphere. If it spirals counter-clockwise, you´re in the northern hemisphere. And if it doesn´t spiral at all, but goes straight down the drain? Yup! You must be on the equator.
The actual equator is marked as well, by a red line, and a much smaller and less-visited museum which includes some really interesting displays about indigenous Ecuadorian culture. My favorite part was the shrunken head.
In other news, Team Colombia is disbanding today...Rebekah is at this very moment on her way to airport to fly home to Philly, where she will start law school in a few short weeks. Priya is taking the night bus to Guayaquil and then heading even further south to Argentina, and I am staying here in Ecuador. We went out last night to celebrate/mourn...
I´m trying to put a picture here, but it won´t work! I´ll try to add it later.
And as for Quito, although it is a lovely city, it´s cold and rainy at the moment, so Will and I have decided to head out tomorrow to the Oriente...the jungles of the Amazon river basin.