Lima, Peru
The first stop on our South American vacation was Lima, Peru! Lima is on the Pacific coast.
Just outside of the Postal Museum, Ed stands in front of a gated door for telegraphs.
Also in Lima are the Huaca Pucllana ruins, dating to the first century AD. What is particularly interesting about these ruins is that they are surrounded by the city itself; see below that you can be walking through these 2,000 artifacts, and see the modern structures all around you.
The ruins only earned status as a historical park in 1991.
The park also had demonstration gardens, as well as areas for animals that would have been bred by the residents of Huaca Pucllana back in the day -- including these little guys.
Food and drink in Lima was fun! Our first meal in the city was at a massive municipal marketplace -- mostly vendors of fruits, vegetables, meats, and household goods. But, there were also several shopfront restaurants, as well. Though it looks kind of sketchy, our first meal was in the marketplace, and it was fabulous!
Also in the marketplace were actual groceries:
Available along any street were an assortment of Latin American and European pastries!
Locals drink a lot of Inca Cola
And, we were lucky enough to find the best gelato in Lima -- quite possibly the best gelato of our lives -- on our first night in town. We built our remaining activities around the gelato!
And finally, we found some artisan drinking establishments, including this gin bar where the bartender was sawing the ice cubes by hand:
And this place, where we had our first pisco sour.
Lima is renowned as a world-class dining destinations. In fact, some of the restaurants we wanted to visit had 6-month wait lists to get a table! We also got to experience Lima's pride in being the inventors of rotisserie chicken -- it is very easy to buy rotisserie chicken in Peru.
Of course, you can't visit any Latin American country without being influenced by its cathedrals or religious history. In Lima, this meant a combination of churches, cathedrals, and convents.
This particular convent included a tour of the below-ground reliquery. These catacombs were re-discovered in 1943 and contain thousands (~25,000) of remains of the Lima citizens who died before the 19th century.
The remains are usually accessed through strategic vantage points from the primary sanctuary, or from secondary chapels. Here, Ed is in a secondary chapel that features a strategically placed mirror; this lets you contemplate on the momento mori of the remains.
This is a photograph of the convent's gorgeous library.
And here Ed demonstrates how short people of Aztec descent are compared to non-Aztec-descended people.
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