Better in Daylight

The sun came out today! And though I went on a guided tour of much of the same parts of Lima as yesterday, I was surprised by how my whole opinion of the city changed with a little sunshine.


Same building a day earlier, but a world of difference, no? There are several world leaders in town for the APEC conference (including Bush, Putin, and Hu, I hear), and that could explain the change in the weather. These guys have pull.

Anyways, something was wrong with the plumbing at Doña Eloisa´s this morning, so I had a cold shower (MAN I hate those) which I needed after yesterday´s sexy ceramica (hot-CHA!). Then I went downstairs to this:


I haven´t been back since, so the poor dears are probably underwater by now, but I got enough plumbing problems back home to worry about, so I´ll just fritter around town until it´s time to sleep.

So, like I said, guided tour of the city today, including some catacombs (ooooh...). It´s so much nicer to hear about the actual history, art, and architecture of a church than to hear about its mythology, at least for me, so I enjoyed that. I won´t bore you with everything I learned about Franciscan monks, human sacrifice, and recent political history, but know that I ate it all up.

Speaking of which, the ceviche here is, as reported, really really good. I´m no food critic, but if there´s one thing Limeños can do well, it´s seafood. Public transportation, on the other hand, is a crazy carnival of chaos. No written description will do it justice, I´ll need all kinds of hand gestures and vocal inflections. Ask me about it when I get back.

After lunch, I went on a tour of Pachamachac, which, yes, is extremely fun to say. Pachamachac! It´s Lima´s most significant archaeological site, located in a desert just south of the city. Unfortunately, again, my pictures won´t convey how cool it was to sift through bones, clothes and hair left behind by corpses some 3500 years ago, but here´s a picture of me at the top of the Temple of the Sun for y´all.


Yikes. Too much sun and not enough shampoo. I´ve been told people want to see more of that, and less of this:


but I just can´t believe it.

One more:

This is San Salvador. What we would call slums or shantytowns, what Brazilians would call favélas, the Peruvians call pueblos jovenes, or "young cities." Isn´t that just delightfully paternalistic?

Well, I´m off to the Barranco district to find me a peña. I´m not really sure what it is, but I think it involves live Afro-Peruvian music, criollo (creole) cuisine, and stomping of the feet. Tomorrow (very early) morning, I leave Lima for Nazca, not to return until I fly back to LA in mid-December.