Aaron and I had the incredible opportunity to visit Peru with Stephen, Claudia, and a total of 26 people from our ward! How this came about was that this guy from our ward, Ryan, asked Claudia to let him know when she was going to visit Peru next so that they could maybe do a tour with them. Claudia told him at a girl's volleyball game that they were going in September. Ryan pretty much invited half the ward before Claudia told him to reign it in. Luckily she invited us as well!
We left the kids at Casa Johnson (more on that later) and flew to Peru! Aaron and I had a day by ourselves in Lima before meeting up with the tour group in Cuzco. This ended up being one of my favorite days- we were filled with "I can't believe we are in Peru" adrenaline and it felt like the best date ever with so much to explore.
We stayed in the very fancy hotel by the new airport, mostly because we arrived late at night and didn't want to have to figure out transportation in a foreign country in the middle of the night. Our hotel room still smelled like new furniture. The breakfast buffet was delicious!
This mysterious fruit was unlabeled in a display. I used my Seek app to ID it. It's a granadilla, a type of passion fruit.
The slimy seeds inside were so sweet!
We took an Uber to the Basilica de Lima. This is essentially the city's main cathedral in the historic city center. It dramatically exceeded my expectations. The building was gorgeous inside and out. There was a sweeping main room with pews, with 12 or so chapels lining the area.
Most of the chapels were like this- intricately carved and heavily adorned. This one is the chapel of John the Baptist. The panels show his life story. They are hundreds of years old and so beautiful.
The first chapel stuck out because it wasn't dedicated to a saint- it is a mosaic covered chapel and tomb for Francisco Pizarro, the Spanish conquistador who led the conquest of the Incas and founded Lima. He laid the first stone for the foundation of this cathedral way back in the 1500's. His skeleton is on display in the chapel, which seemed really odd.
Our best scared/uncomfortable faces by the skeleton. Apparently there was a mummy on display that they thought was Pizarro from 1891-1977, when they found a box in a crypt that was labeled: "Here is the skull of the Marquis Don Francisco Pizarro who discovered and won Peru and placed it under the crown of Castile." Much forensic science occurred to figure out whose bones were whose, resulting in the newly discovered skeleton being deemed authentic and earning the display case. Nobody knows whose mummy was on display for almost 100 years.
You can walk down a steep staircase under some of the chapels to access the catacombs. There really were jumbles of skeletons under the floor of the cathedral, which is very odd to my modern sensibilities but was a common practice for many hundreds of years.
There was also a museum of religious art in a wing of the cathedral. This one reminded me of Breezy. I had to look it up- the baby heads she's standing on are cherubs carrying Mary up to heaven. I like the random objects floating in the air behind her.
I liked these guy's funny hats.
There was a little, easy to miss sign pointing to a library upstairs. I literally gasped when I walked into the room full of such old, beautiful books! There was a whole shelf of volumes written by a guy named Moroni. None were on gold plates. They had some of the huge illuminated manuscripts on display as well.
We walked outside to hear the booming brass band playing for the changing of the guard at the government palace next door. After watching their smart marching for a while, we walked a few blocks to the Plaza de San Martin. My dad lived near here during his mission in the 1970s and walked past this statue multiple times every day. It's still standing strong!
I had booked us a food tour in Lima. It exceeded my expectations in every way! I thought it would be in Spanish, but ended up being in English which was nice so that I could ask the guide a bajillion questions about Peruvian history (although I was a bit sad to have less of a Spanish immersion experience). The tour was for groups of up to 10 people, but it was only us and two nice European guys- Oscar the Philosophy grad from the UK and Jens from Germany. Our guide was full of great information and took us around to places I never would have found to try 12 different Peruvian snacks and foods. In this picture, we are in a ceviche restaurant that was accessed through a narrow alleyway and up a staircase. We also bought fruit at a stand in a giant market and hit up china town for some Chifa. We walked around and snacked for 4.5 hours. I'll spare you the millions of pictures we took of the food, but know that they exist.
Lima is a very crowded city. A third of the population of Peru lives there, making it the most populated Spanish-speaking city in the world (in terms of city proper population, some cities with huge metropolitan areas could beat it if you count the sprawl). There are street vendors with megaphones playing recordings on loop advertising their wares on most street corners. This is particularly annoying when there are two megaphones parked next to each other so that you can't hear a thing.
After the tour, we got an Uber back to the airport and flew to Cuzco!
No comments:
Post a Comment