Lima

Day 262 – Lima, Peru

To summarize yesterday quickly, I missed the walking tour on a misunderstanding, spent the afternoon in a park with a book and a fresh drink, and took the free Spanish lesson at the end of the day.

Lima – Park of the Exposition

The teacher is a Venezuelan who left his country for a better standard of living, and in an hour and a half gave us the basics to get around in Spanish: asking for directions, describing body parts and how to express pain, food, colours, clothes, numbers, weather… That was nice.

Today I was checking out, so I started with a big backpack sorting. I took everything out, took a hard look at what I was lugging around and not using (sorry Mum, but the clothespins are mostly useless), and gave quite a few things into the recycling box -and made a fellow French man happy with my leftover laundry detergent that I have been lugging around for a month even though I don’t need it in South America.

That means that I missed again the free walking tour of Lima, but I least everything fit in my backpack. More or less. Anyway.

The airlines offered me to bid on an upgrade: basically, I give the price I want, and if they have seats left after the better offers have gone, I get one. I got it, so I got a cheap upgrade to a comfy seat. Since my flight is in the middle of the night -from 2am to 4am, I am quite happy!

But there was something I wanted to do in Lima: visit the Saint Francis monastery. Its particularity are the catacombs beneath the basilica, where the dead of the Franciscan community were buried at first because there wasn’t a cemetery.

Lima – Monasterio de San Francisco

Nowadays they still bury the monks there, but not the people of the extended community.

I got the English tour, quite shorter than the Spanish tour. No pictures were allowed, alas!

There is a beautiful library with ancient books, an Arab-inspired cupola -with a geometric star pattern, very Moorish-, coffer ceilings, 17th century tiles, terracotta floors, a green and leafy cloister, a beautiful refectory, very nice choir stalls in the basilica, and so on.

And of course we had a tour in the catacombs, where the bones are very carefully laid out, rows of femurs, rosettes of bones and skulls, layers of ribs, herringbones of shoulder blades and pelvis, and so on.

A bit quick on the whole, fewer explanations that I could have wanted -the extra mile was wanting.

I came back to the hostel via the Plaza de Armas, that had been closed a few moments before, police in riot gear letting just now pedestrians go again, so I saw it empty for a few moments before the flood of people got back there. (A gallery off the Plaza de Armas featured above.)

A quick word on my hostel: when the original family build the building, they got a French architect, a Mr G. Eiffel…!

The weather is a lot warmer here on the coast also: in Cuzco I was layering up, a scarf always around my neck, and here I’m back in shorts and T-shirt. It’s good to feel warm again.

Tomorrow in Quito I’m back above 2,800m, so we will see how warm it will be!