Peru Travels, Part I: Lima

Well well well, now onto the good stuff. I had one night here at my host family's house in Angol after camp, and then my friend Caroline and I took the night bus to Santiago to meet up with another volunteer, Jen, and catch our flight to Lima. We did have an afternoon to kill in Santiago, though, so we climbed to the top of Santa Lucia hill to see the snow-covered mountains behind the city. Just enjoy this panorama, if you will:

Then Peru! For some crazy reason, there were mobs of people waiting to see loved ones get off their planes at the airport, so when we walked out we felt like celebrities rushing past paparazzi. Nice national welcome. We got to our hostel late, crashed, and got up the next morning to walk along the cliff over the beach.  Within the first few hours there we saw more gringos and heard more English than we had in 5 months in Chile!  It was a little mini-culture shock for us.  Going back to the U.S. is going to blow my mind.

But anyway, the neighborhood we were staying in was called Miraflores, and it's the new ritzy part of Lima right on the coast, full of high-rise condos and fitness clubs and expensive restaurants and perfectly manicured parks.  It was pretty cloudy that morning, but we learned that's the norm for Lima so we were just lucky it wasn't raining.  That part of the city felt very American, probably due to all the gringo tourists as much as its actual appearance.

cloudy, but you get the idea: that's Lima as far as the eye can see

We came across The Park of Love on the coast overlooking the beach, with pretty mosaic benches that had romantic lines of poetry on each one. Looking closer we realized that couples had signed the little mosaic tiles (cue: awwww sweet!). 

"Tu de este lado y yo del otro como dos remos" / "You on this side and I on the other like two oars"

"Amar no es un delito porque hasta Dios ama" / "Loving is no crime because even God loves"

From there we made our way down to the beach itself, where there were a bunch of surfers doin' their thing (and a bunch of Peruvians trying to get us to buy surf lessons). Then our first restaurant meal in Peru! Can't even remember what I ordered here but I remember that we were starving... 

From there we walked through some parks, where we found this weird bull thing, and some artesanal markets. This was the first of many many many souvenir-shopping trips we indulged in. I hadn't bought any gifts at all in Chile, so I went a little crazy at all the markets in Peru! But here's this bull. It's called a torito de Pucará, and it represents wealth, happiness, and fertility. Throughout the rest of the trip we saw little ones everywhere, made of clay and painted different colors.

By that point we had pretty much seen all there was to see in our neck of the woods, but the next day we ventured into the historic city center.  We took a little local bus to get there, and it was not until that bus ride that we realized how immense that city is.  One of the girls pointed out when we were leaving Lima later that we had not crossed our own path at any point the entire 3 days we were there. Every time we got in a cab to go somewhere, it was in a new direction and through parts we had not seen. Yesterday I finally googled how big Lima actually is and learned that it's almost 8 million! Yup, that would explain it.

But regardless of how big it is now, the heart of historic Lima is the area around the Plaza Mayor, which is huge and beautiful and edged by the national cathedral, government palace, municipal buildings, and pedestrian zones.  It felt very European, and I realized stupidly that would be because Peru was a very important Spanish colony (read: SILVER) so their presence there was huge compared to Chile (where I have felt hardly any Spanish influence at all). If you ignore the palm trees, this could easily be nestled in some major European city, right? Also, there was a doctor's strike going on so the riot police were out in full force, even though when we finally saw the strike it was only about 50 people in front of a news camera. Whenever I see riot police, I get excited that something is going to happen no matter how unlikely that may be, so I was pretty pumped.

Plaza San Martin

Plaza Mayor

national cathedral

We had lunch up on a terraza overlooking the plaza, and I tried some ceviche (a seafood dish) that was DELICIOUS. This was one of my favorite meals of the trip!

We were quite pleased with ourselves after that meal. Then we took a tour of the Archbishop's Palace, which is now a museum with art/religious relics and then saw the cathedral attached (both of which are on the right side of the plaza from our view at lunch).  We learned a lot about Peruvian art schools and religious ties to Europe and whatnot, which brightened our understanding of Lima's history a bit.  Also, it was really pretty.

the staircases make the shape of the cross, which tells you that it was built for a religious man to live there

you can tell this Mary was made in Cuzco b/c she has the rosy cheeks typical of people of Incan descent and her hair is curly just like that of cusqueños (people from Cuzco) when they take it out of the braids they typically wear

In the cathedral next door, we saw Francisco Pizarro's coffin! He was, just as a little refresher for you, the Spaniard who settled the Spanish colony in Peru, conquered the Incas, and founded the city of Lima.  It was a little weird to see him exalted in the capital cathedral like this, based on the views we usually take regarding his methods for conquering the natives, but I guess we kind of do the same for Christopher Columbus, right? It was very interesting to see the balance between Spanish and Incan heritage in Peru, where the Incan culture is much more recent and present than other native cultures are in other countries.  Anyway, Pizarro's body is here in this box and his head was kept separate elsewhere (which, incidentally, I saw later).  This whole nook is covered floor-to-ceiling in beautiful mosaics with murals about his life and family, and their family shield. 

There were also some tombs underneath the cathedral, where we could see actual skeletons and remains through glass.  Here I am gettin' real excited about some skulls:

After that we walked to a monastery nearby (San Francisco) and the other two girls rested outside while I went on a tour of the monastery, church, and its catacombs. YES, I SAID CATACOMBS. I was unfortunately not allowed to take any pictures, or else I would have been bustin' that camera out all over the place.  There were a lot of really beautiful rooms in there, including an old library (complete with spiral staircases and skylights to read by) and a wooden cupola carved into geometric patterns. You know what, I'm just gonna find pictures of these on Google because they were too pretty not to share...

 But my favorite part by far was the bones and tombs in the catacombs.  We learned that over 25,000 people were buried there, their bodies stacked one on top of the other in rows of deep graves, each separated by just a layer of sand and lime.  They went in in the order that they died, without any way of keeping families together or noting who was buried where.  Apparently they finally stopped burying people there in 1808 because it started to stink up the city.  But they used femurs and skulls to line these tall drums that served as seismic wave absorbers whenever earthquakes or tremors hit. LOOK (also from Google):

Yeah that was pretty awesome.  There are still Franciscan monks living there, but only about 30 now, compared to the 300 it used to hold.  

That night we were ecstatic to discover that Papa John's had found its way to Lima, and that they offered free delivery, so we got Papa John's for dinner. I mean, it had been 5 months since we'd eaten Papa Johns, what else could we do? We were afraid it might taste different, but nope! Good old Papa Johns! We had to get up for our flight to Cuzco the next morning, so that was the end of our Lima adventures the first time around.  I had seen a lot of gorgeously-colored buildings and graffiti murals I loved, so I'll leave you with some of those...

that's a fresh mint, if you can't tell

On to Cuzco!