Lima

Bill and I are sitting in the Lima airport waiting to fly to Cusco. We had a pretty good visit to Lima, but we’re ready to see something else.  Lima is an interesting place. It’s nicer than San Jose CR, but definitely not a place where we’d want to live! It’s a big city with about 10 million people.  It’s about a third of the population of Peru. It’s not a particularly attractive city but it did feel safe and there were interesting shops and restaurants in our neighborhood. I had good Indian food the night before Bill came and last night, we got chicken sandwiches from a food cart in a nearby park. We did a city tour of Lima with our guide yesterday afternoon. We toured the main historic square with government buildings and old churches and we toured the catacombs under one of the churches. That was really interesting. Until 1821, all bodies were buried under churches. Bodies would be laid out in open stone rectangles and covered with lime. Once they decomposed, the bones were buried in mass graves. There were tens of thousands of people buried under the church. It would have been gruesome work for whoever had to go put lime on the bodies and burry the bones. There were open air vents in the church so the smell must have been pretty bad too. 

After our official tour, Bill and I went to the Larco Museum. It holds Peru’s largest collection of pre-Colombian artifacts. That was fascinating! It has extremely high quality pottery, jewelry, textiles and weapons. Some of it is Inca, but most of it predates the Incas. Bill and I were both really impressed by the quality of the work. The museum has some of the collection on display but they also let you see their storage area which has thousands of pieces neatly arranged in glass covered shelves. 

Otherwise, the trip has been a little slow so far. Bill and I were completely wiped out for the first couple of days. We have been a little disappointed with the Monograms tour company so far. There is a lot to do in Lima, but the company scheduled very little for us. They gave us a list of interesting places we could visit, but didn’t take us to any of them. That leaves us to organize transportation on our own. Hopefully, things will get better once we are out of Lima!

I’m glad I did the language trip to CR before this one. English is not quite as common here as in CR. My Spanish isn’t great, but it has been helpful. 

Bill’s Perspective

Lima has been interesting, the traffic is some sort of organized chaos, they cut lanes, squeeze into the lanes until someone lets them in. They sometimes give a beep beep to be let in or to tell someone they can cut in or pedestrians to go in front of them. Intersections without lights or signs have a well placed speed bumps that slows traffic in a given direction, I believe this is how they decide who has the right of way. For ten million people the mass transit system is lacking. They need some trains, subway or elevated. The architecture is bland for the most part. They have a lot of concrete that appears to be sectioned off into cubes/ tube and you can customize them. Depending on where you put your exterior wall, you can have a balcony or you can push your wall to to edge and just have a flat front. The tops of fences, walls and buildings have electric wires, iron spikes or broken glass on the top edge, they must have a lot of second story cat burglars. They say they crime isn’t that bad though.
A lot of the buildings have re-rod sticking out of the tops and sides of the buildings in the support areas, it appears they can just tie in later and grow their buildings. 
The city is divided into I believe 43 municipalities, each hires their own extra security to supplement the local police. They don’t carry guns though, our driver this morning said that they do have some sort of less than lethal option. I didn’t see anything on the ones in the area of our hotel. 
Our driver this morning also informed me that the citizens here are able to apply for, take some tests and acquire firearms. I had asked after seeing some advertisements for tactical wear, Glock and Smith & Wesson. 
I am disappointed in all the American fast food places that are here. A very sad sign of the local culture going to the way side. 
It has been hazy here, they tell us that it is just how Lima is, 80-90% humidity, it doesn’t rain just drizzles some. 
It’s been interesting walking around the are and seeing all the people and businesses. I really enjoy seeing the little kiosks with snacks and food carts on the sidewalks. We are going to try one of the empanada carts if we get a chance. We did get chicken sandwiches from a street vendor. They were very meticulous about the prep!! 
My flights here were without problems, it was a long day and night. I did get some sleep after getting here so we got to have most the day for exploring. 
The hotel was nice, I got a good room, had a couch and was good for relaxing after walking around. 
Our tour yesterday left something to be desired, there is a lot more we could have done. We were able to see a local museum with a very extensive collection of pottery! You could see there were some extremely talented artisans! Very detailed! The gold, silver and copper stuff was not as I expected, some was detailed and nice, most was very thin though. Reminded me of tin foil. 
I’ve really enjoyed getting to share this experience with Emily and look forward to the rest of our adventure!!

P.S. We liked Cusco better than Lima, and we saw a lot of interesting things today. We’ll have an update about that and picture when we’re less tired