Saturday May 12, 2007

We got up and ate at the hotel, then Daddy went out to take pictures of people in Cuzco, and Mother, Crystal and I went to the market to some souvenirs and gifts. We walked down to the market and only three vendors were open, so we walked around town a little bit. We about a dozen shops with hundreds of cakes decorated beautifully for Mother’s Day the next day. We also saw a parade with about 50 people marching along the middle of the street, with four people in front carrying a cross commemorating the 100-year anniversary of some society in the city. Behind the marchers was a military band, with all the marching musicians in camouflage fatigues. It was really cool. They just marched down the middle of the street and the cars all had to drive around them.

We then wandered back to the market (on the way I bought a delicious piece of bread at a panadería, a bakery) and we bought some things like woven belts for my sisters (and Crystal) and a woven alpaca-fiber wall hanging for our home. After shopping, we walked back to the hotel and met Daddy and Sally and went to the airport.

The flight to Lima was fairly uneventful, except for the guy sitting next to me was right behind Crystal, and he kept tapping and hitting her chair and just being fidgety in general. I think he was a smoker and was craving his next cigarette. That is another reason for someone to not smoke, not that I need any convincing. In the past year, I have become allergic to cigarette smoke; it makes my eyes water and my nose run.

When we got to Lima, we got off the plane and our guide, Adrian, came to get us, although he did arrive a little late. We drove out of the airport, along the beach, to an older section of town called Barranca.

Barranca is a colonial-style place with lots of buildings built after the 1890s war between Peru and Chile (which they fought over bat guano, which is a great fertilizer), during which the Chileans attacked Lima and burned a lot of buildings. We wandered through a weekly cooking festival and had some delicious desserts.

We got back on the bus (another Merced Sprinter) and drove through the San Isidro sector, an old, pretty portion of the city. There, we saw some gorgeous homes and loads of olive trees. Adrian said the olives were crushed into oil and used for lighting lamps throughout the old city. At this point, Crystal leaned over to me and said Daddy, who loves olive oil on food, was probably thinking, “They burned it! What!?!”

We then drove downtown and saw the central plaza and cathedral. Downtown Lima used to be pretty crime-ridden, but it has been cleaned up a lot in the last few years and we quite liked it. We saw how parts of the cathedral were older than other parts because an earthquake destroyed some its façade. The city has many buildings with incredibly beautiful architecture, including a plaza built to look like the buildings in Paris, France, and the Presidential Palace, which had lots of guys parked outside with guns and tanks, etc.

After the plaze, we toured a Franciscan monastery, which was one of the few buildings to survive the earthquake. It was gorgeous inside, but my favorite part was the catacombs underneath the building. The catacombs are in a section of the monastery that uses the underground structures to protect the building from earthquakes, with arched ceilings and special columns built to spread the out the shock of the quake. In the catacombs were lots of bones and skulls.

I was impressed with what happened when I walked into the catacombs … I felt the Holy Ghost. This makes me think about why I love cemeteries, because I have a testimony of the resurrection, which makes death not as much of a sad thing. I know that one day all those people will be able to live again, thanks to Christ’s atonement, and I am reminded of that fact every time I go into a cemetery.

After the catacombs, we saw more of the monastery, including a huge library full of books from the 1500s on. The library reminded me of something on the Harry Potter movies, with circular staircases, huge book stands and that great musty book smell.

When we left the monastery, we went to a museum with a huge private collection of Incan and pre-Incan artifacts, most of them collected by a rich family that paid people for the spoils of grave robbery. I was amazed at the sheer number (about 40,000) of pieces of pottery, which were sculpted into all sorts of people and animal shapes. The majority of the pieces were found in burial sites throughout Peru. We also saw lots of gold and silver ceremonial ornaments, like crowns, head-dresses and giant ear gauges. The gauges were so big, the men had to have them stuck through their ears and connected to their head-dresses, or else they would rip out their lobes.

After the museum, our family got dropped off at the Indian Market (where we were a week earlier) and the guide and driver took Sally back to the airport. We found the rest of our souvenirs (I bought an alpaca tie!) and ate dinner at Pepe’s, a fast-food place that was pretty good. Then, we walked to a grocery store and bought some candy to take home to people at work, and we also got some aji pepper sauce for Daddy, because he became quite enamored with it during the trip. Then, at 9:30 p.m. Adrian and the driver returned to pick us up and we went back to the airport. After a goodly wait, I told Mother “Happy Mother’s Day!” at midnight, and we got on our plane to Mexico City at 12:15 a.m. I, thankfully, slept the whole flight.