A light day in Cuzco

Today we are trying to take it easy while we get used to the altitude. We planned to visit the Museo Inka, the main Catedral, and view the Entrance of the Corpus Christi in the Plaza de Armas. All of these are either on the plaza or a block off. We started out with a leisurely breakfast at the hotel with coca tea, scrambled eggs, bread, and fruit. (We passed on the mixed fruit with strawberries because we've been warned about fruit you don't peel, but we had papaya which was very good.

Before sightseeing, we went to some hiking shops on a narrow lane right off the plaza that we'd seen the day before. I wanted to buy a long sleeve t-shirt. All my shirts are short sleeved and I needed something in between that and my fleece. We've been watching the weather on our iphones for the last month and I'm looking at weather.com right now and it says mid 60s low and mid 80s to 90s high. But it just hasn't felt that warm. Today I finally checked google's weather and it's saying high of 70 and lows in the 30s. That sounds more like what it feels like! Anyway, I needed another layer. But most of the stores were still closed (it was 10:30).

So then we went back to the plaza and decided to sit in the sun while we waited until 11am when the Entrance was supposed to happen.

We sat on the stairs of the main cathedral. When we first got there, there weren't a lot of people, but it began filling up and so we were pretty sure we were in the right place for the Traditional Entrance of the Festivities of the Cuzquenan Corpus Christi. The festival of Corpus Christi is tomorrow, but today the saints are supposed to parade into the plaza and go into the catedral, where they spend the night to await the procession tomorrow. This festival is the biggest one of the year in Cuzco.

 

Nita on stairs of catedral: don't I look saint-like?

But nothing happened. After a while we heard a band and we saw a procession go past a corner off the plaza, but it didn't come to the plaza and it was pretty short. We heard bands playing in the distance a couple of times. Then around noon, we saw a procession with two saints go by the side of the plaza, where we could see them, but they went past and besides, we thought there were supposed to be more saints than that. (It turns out there are 15).

But by then, we didn't think we could stand to wait for the rest. We went back to the hotel for lunch and sat on the balcony so if more came, we could see them. But still nothing happened. We decided we needed naps (so far we've just had drowsiness and a little head-achiness from the altitude). We laid down and we could hear bands coming onto plaza, but we really needed naps. (And we're getting good at sleeping with bands going!)

After about 45 minutes, we got up and went down to the plaza and at last the saints were proceeding into the Plaza de Armas, up the steps of the catedral, and inside. (Are you sensing a pattern here? Things do not seem to start promptly at their starting time and go way longer than we expect.)

The saints come from all the parishes in the area, some as far away as 15 kilometers. The groups take a year to prepare their saints and train to carry them on litters from their churches to the catedral. We think that the saints were parading around the streets and gathering to one starting place before proceeding into the plaza and that's why it took them so long to get here.

Here's a photo of Saint Sebastian. I don't know if you can tell how hard his bearers were working. They had replacements going alongside to take care of any who needed to rest. There may have been as many as 20 men holding the litter at one time. And they had to carry him up the catedral steps and up more steps into the church.

Saint Sebastian

This is the back of the gorgeous gown of one of the virgen saints. It sort of reminded me of fiesta in San Antonio.

 

 

Each saint had banners and parishioners going before them and behind them was their own band. So there was lots of loud music the whole time.

 

Virgen and Child

 

Going through the door of the catedral

 

Another saint

 

We decided we'd seen enough even though the saints were still coming. We went back to the hiking stores and this time I found a workable long sleeve tshirt. Sandra also found an alpaca sweater she liked.

Then we went to the Museo Inka. It's housed in an old colonial mansion. The mansion itself was pretty impressive.

 

 

Inside were lots of artifacts from various periods of pre-Columbian cultures and models of various places like Machu Picchu. They also had some skulls that showed that some of the nobility deformed their skulls, elongating them, to show status. There was also evidence in some skulls that trepanning was practiced. From some skulls, it was clear the person died shortly after the procedures, but in others, there was bone remodeling that showed the person had survived a while after. There was also a display of mummies.

In the courtyard, there were women weaving and also woven items for sale. They were very beautiful (and very expensive).

We went back to the hotel and had another cup of coca tea. I can't tell that it perks me up in any way, but it's a pleasant herbal tea. We washed some clothes and read until time for dinner (we'd decided today wasn't a good day to visit the catedral).

We had dinner at a place called Inka Grill. I had Aji de Gallina, which is chicken with a sauce of aji chilis (not too spicy). Sandra had Quinotto with Chicken ( a chicken with sauce over quinoa and veggies). Both were very good. We also split a pisco sour. We're worried about alcohol until we adjust to the altitude, but they had the sour with the passion fruit infused pisco that we liked so much before. This was equally good. We had lava cake for dessert.

As I write this at 8:30, the bands in the plaza are still going strong. We hope this festival doesn't go on all night!

 

 

 

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On to Cuzco!

Today we left Lima and flew to Cuzco. It's about an hour flight, but of course there's the 45 minutes to the airport, the waiting, and taking off 15 minutes late. But we made it above the clouds finally (it's been cloudy the whole time in Lima, I guess it's like Seattle in the winter only warmer). Cuzco is at 11,200 feet. We've been taking Diamox for a couple of days to help us acclimatize to the altitude. The pilot tipped the wings so we could get a good look at some of the mountains we were flying over.

Cuzco is in a bowl surrounded by mountains. The mountains look reddish brown. Our hotel is right on the main square: Plaza de Armas. While we were waiting for our room to be ready we had our first cup of coca tea. It has a mild, pleasant herbal taste. It's supposed to be good for altitude sickness as well.

This hotel is very different from our Lima hotel; it's very modern with hardwood floors and lots of metal and glass. Our room isn't facing the plaza, but we can easily see it over the roof tops.

 

Out the window of our room

 

The hotel also has a terrace above the fourth floor where you can see the plaza and the moutains in all directions.

 

On the terrace looking southwest away from the plaza

 

After we got checked into our room, we went to the hotel restaurant for lunch. We sat on the balcony so we could watch the Plaza. We had sandwiches and chiips fresh made from Peruvian potatoes: small and white and purple. Very delicious!

 

 

Sandra watching the plaza

 

Today on the plaza, they are having a Parade of Dances and Musical Groups. We could watch the groups as they entered the square while we ate. They are school groups in fancy costumes that march onto the square and then dance in front of the grandstand. It started with little bitty kids and then got older in age. The costumes range from very traditional Peruvian costumes to fantastical costumes.

 

Some of the little kids

A great costume

 

 

Many wore knit caps with fantastic hats on top

 

This group had great masks

 

You can watch a brief video of some of the dancing/marching. Each group had their own drummers and flutists. We've been listening to drum and flutes all afternoon!

 

 

We came back to our room and took a nap (in spite of the drums and flutes). So far I only feel a little spacy and very sleepy from the altitude. After our nap we walked through the plaza and then a few streets over to get a little more movement today; we didn't do too badly even uphill (looks like we'll be doing a lot uphill). We came back to the plaza and watched the dancers a while more.

For dinner we ate at a restaurant that faces the plaza. We had our first taste of the traditional Peruvian dish cuyo (guinea pig). It tasted fine if you can get past what it is. They also had a very tasty chili relleno, a small chili stuffed with ground meat, cheese, and vegetables.

We're finishing the night laying in bed hoping that the festivities will be over soon and we can get some sleep! Two days from today is the Festival of Corpus Christi, which actually begins with openers tomorrow and the main festival on Thursday. So we should not lack for entertainment.

 

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Historical Downtown Lima and the Beach

Today the plan is to do a walking tour of the historic section of downtown Lima and then walk to the beach in the afternoon. We had breakfast at the hotel, lazed about until about 10, and then took a cab to the Plaza de San Martin for the first stop on our walk. This plaza has lots of magnificent buildings around it, including this hotel, the Grand Hotel Bolivar, which was the first hotel in Lima. Notice it now has a KFC in it (to the left of the main entrance in photo). We're seeing a KFC about every other block in Lima. Since they all show up on my Pocket Earth app, they make great landmarks.

We walked from Plaza de San Martin down the Jiron de la Union, which has been closed off to make a pedestrian street. There were lots of neat old buildings with ornate balconies and other architectural detail, but few of them were marked with names and/or dates. Mostly the lower levels are now shoe shops or clothing stores. We did also pass our first McDonald's. We went in the Iglesia do la Merced which was built the first time in 1541 on the site where the first mass was held in Lima. All the buildings here have undergone many rebuildings, often due to earthquakes. This church has gorgeous chapels with ornate mahogany altars and other beautiful things. There was a mass going on while we were there. I was surprised to note that none of the women were covering their heads. I guess I'm behind the times.

Next we arrived at the Plaza de Armas, the main plaza of Lima. It has the Catedral de Lima (where Pizarro's remains are held although we didn't pay to go in and see them), the Palacio Arzobispal, and the Palacio del Gobierno (where the president lives). None of these buildings are very old as they have been built and re-built. The bronze fountain where I am standing was built in 1650, although even it replaced an earlier one.

 

Sandra in front of the Palacio Gobierno

 

We were there a little before 11:30 and they have a changing of the guard every day at noon, so we decided to stay and watch. We thought we would have to wait until noon, but the show started about 11:30. They blocked off the sidewalk in front of the palace and we had to stand just past the curb in the street (they also closed off the street). First, two trumpeters came out and stood on the palace steps and played a trumpet call. Then, the marching band came out. They marched around the square in front of the palacio (all behind bars for us spectators) and then onto a platform where they performed about 5 numbers for us, including some Latin dance music, which was hard not to dance to. The first thing they played though was "El Condor Pasa" which you can watch the opening bars to below.

 

Then the band marched over to one side and at last, when the cathedral was chiming noon, two groups of marchers came onto the square (see video below), met in the middle and did a few manuevers in front of what looked like the commanding officer.

 

 

 

After a while, all the soldiers marched back off the square, and finally, the band marched off, too. The actual guards never changed. They were standing in front of the gates guarding.

 

Guard guarding during change of the guards

 

After the guard had "changed," we went looking for a restaurant for lunch. We stopped at a place that had a menu with English descriptions outside, but when we went in, they were serving lunch, which wasn't the same thing. Still, we had a nice meal picking out things we recognized. They offered a beginning course, main course, and dessert for 13 soles each (about $4). We had causa de verduras (we're learningur "causa" is the name of the dish where they layer something between two layers of yellow potatoes).

Causa de verduras

 

We also had chicken al horno with legumes and rice and flan for dessert. They gave us some chicha morada, which is a drink made from boiling purple corn and herbs (not alcoholic although some chichas are). It was was good, but too sweet for me.

Next we went to the Parque de la Moralla. A moralla is a city wall. This is a parque where they've excavated some parts of the original city wall of Lima (built 1684-1687). You can also see old foundations where people built buildings outside the wall right next to it (I guess that cuts construction costs by a quarter). It's a pleasant park with some fountains and gardens and has some signage about the wall, although the English translations are a bit funny.

 

Sandra and Nita in front of La Muralla

After La Muralla, we walked past the Monasterio de San Francisco. It's a beautiful building, but we decided we didn't want to pay to go see the human bones arranged in geometric patterns in the catacombs. We walked past the Plaza Bolivar, which is in front of the congress building. But they had it closed off, so we couldn't go in. We also skipped the Museo de la Inquisition. I saw a small inquisition museum in Spain a few years ago and that was enough for me. I don't need those images in my head! We ended our walk by going past the Mercado Central and ending at the Barrio Chino. We walked a few blocks to a street that was busy, but not too busy and got a cab back to our hotel. This cab driver also did not know how to get to our hotel and had to stop and ask two different people about how to find it. But we eventually did make it back.

 

 

We rested a short while but decided if we were going to walk to the beach, we better do it before the afternoon got late. As we thought, the beach was just about 5 blocks from our hotel. Five blocks plus some really steep stairs down the bluffs to the water! The shoreline around here is flanked by bluffs so high, they use them to hang glide off.

This stairway is only 150 steps

Second part of the stairs down

After coming down the first part of the bluff and crossing the streets, there's that much more down, across a road, and then down a long flight down to the beach. The beach itself is rocky, so not good beach glass hunting here. Too bad. It would have been fun to add some Peruvian beach glass to our collection. There were lots of companies lined up on the beach ready to rent wet suits and boards and teach surfing. There were a lot of surfers in the water. The waves weren't very high, but some of them were able to stand up and come in. If you enlarge the photo of Sandra below, you can see surfers behind her.

 

Sandra on the beach

 

Then we had to climb back up the bluff and we finally realized what we had done all those stairs in Seattle for. I'd guess there were around 300-350 stairs, almost as many as the Thistle Stairs at home (but I forgot to count til the second half). We made it with not too much huffing and puffing and only a couple of short rests. We walked back to the hotel, stopping at a shop that sells pasteles and getting a little chocolate dessert to have after dinner.

On our way to our room, we each got another Pisco Sour: Sandra got another passion fruit enfused one and I got a mango enfused one. We drank them while we waited for the hotel restaurant to open. For dinner, Sandra had gnocchi made with Peruvian yellow potatoes and I had a chicken and pasta dish. After dinner we came back to our room and ate our dessert and got most of our packing done. We leave early tomorrow to catch our plane to Cuzco.

I did manage to get some new warning signs for my warning sign photo collection. Below are some of them.

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Exploring Lima

We are staying in Hotel Antigua Miraflores, which is in Miraflores, a suburb of Lima. The hotel is very quaint with heavy wooden furniture, Latin American tiled bathroom, and a window that looks out onto a little courtyard around which the hotel is built.

Out our window

 

We got up this morning a little after 7 and went down to the hotel restaurant for breakfast (included with the room). Breakfast was rolls, tea, juice, and eggs cooked to order. After breakfast, we spent some time planning what we wanted to do in Lima for the two days we are here. It seemed like a lot more time in Lima when we were plannning our trip, but they moved our flight to Cuzco from the afternoon to the morning, so we have a lot we want to see in a short time.

We started out by taking a taxi to the Museo de Larco. In this museum, they display and document many of the artifacts of the pre-Columbian cultures of Peru. (Larco was a wealthy activist who collected artifacts and identified some of the previously undocumented earlier, pre-Incan civilizations.) There were lots of great ceramics, textiles, and metal works (gold, silver, and copper) from that time period. The grounds of the museum themselves are gorgeous with lots of plants and lots of bougainvillea on the walls around the property. Every building here seems to have a guard at the door. The gates to the grounds are closed, but when we walked up, the guard opened the gate to let us in.

On the grounds of Museo Lorca

The artifacts are pretty amazing. Here's a collection of gold nose ornaments worn by Moche elites.

 

 

The last section we went to was the storage area where shelf after shelf of artifacts were stored. It's strange to see how many there were. In the museum, you get the feeling these are rare, one-of-a-kind artifacts. In the storage room, it seemed there were so many of some things there was hardly space for them.

 

After we finished with the museum (and the gift shop), we had lunch at the museum restaurant. It was very fancy and on an open porch off the museum courtyard that is filled with blooming plants, ferns, and succulents. Sandra had a dish that had Peruvian yellow potatoes layered on the top and bottom and layers in between of a shrimp filling and avocado. I had a corn and beef pie which was a meat filling (a bit spicy with raisins) and a corn pudding-type dough on top and bottom.

Sandra is wearing a wool flower we bought at the gift shop

The bathrooms at the museum are all marked with anatomically correct figurine replicas of some of the pre-Columbian ceramics. Here's one from the women's room at the restaurant.

 

After lunch we decided to walk to our next destination: El Parque de la Reserva. Our apps had said it should take us about an hour to walk. We are using an app called "Pocket Earth." It allows you to mark routes and such while connected to the internet, but while you are not connected, it still locates you on the map using gps. So unlike imaps or google maps, you can view the map and your location without wifi or cell, plus any routes or points you have saved.

We started out walking and enjoyed getting to view the city at this less frantic pace (the cabs drives have all been wild and death-defying). When we had walked almost an hour and thought we should be getting there soon, we got worried and asked a policeman who was standing on the corner to make sure we were going in the right direction. He didn't seem to understand what I was talking about, didn't recognize the name of the park or my Spanish describing the park. So he called another policeman who spoke English (he grew up in New Jersey). But he didn't know about the park either. So at least is wasn't my Spanish that was the problem! I was pretty sure "fuentes" meant fountains (the park has 13 fountains). He finally called someone on his walkie-talkie who knew where the park was. We were headed in the right direction, but still had a ways to go. He wanted to call us a cab, but we were still determined to walk it.

We finally made it to the park. We had to walk another 10 minutes around the perimeter to find the entrance. So in all it took us almost an hour and a half (including the time talking to the police). I guess it's slower walking when you have to stop for traffic and such.

The park is very beautiful with 13 different fountains: some formal, some you can walk through or stand in without getting wet, and others where in the summer kids can play in them. Even though it's winter here, it's pretty warm and humid (high today around 75). (I know that's not hot for you all in TX, but it's hot for us Seattle-ites.) So walking among the fountains was quite pleasant and cool. The fountain Sandra is standing in front of below shot water up in different dramatic ways.

 

 

We took a cab home--another death-defying ride with lots of honking for extra fun this time. Our hotel had called the cab we took to the museum and had also told the cab driver how much to charge (you have to negotiate the charge before you get in the cab), so we knew how much it should cost to go back. The cab driver offered to take us for 30 soles (about $10), but we offered what we paid before (S/ 17). Another cab pulled up behind right then, so the driver accepted our offer.

We were exhausted from our long walk when we got back. We rested a bit and then went down to the hotel bar to try our first Pisco Sour, the classic Peruvian cocktail. Ricardo, the bar tender, taught us how to make it: three parts Pisco, one part egg whites, one part lemon juice, and one part simple syrup. Then he blended it with 3 ice cubes, strained it and poured it in a chilled glass and put a drop of bitters on top. He said it was important to use a queda glass (I think that's the name he used). It's about the size of an old fashioned glass, only narrower at the bottom and wider at the top.

I really liked the drink. It was light and foamy and not too sweet. Sandra had the same only made with passion fruit infused Pisco. It was delicious as well.

After our Pisco sours, we went back to our room and rested until dinner at 6:30. We were so tired from our walk and relaxed from our drinks that we both took a short nap. We had dinner at the restaurant in the hotel. Sandra had an Asian/Peruvian fusion dish with rice and shrimp and I had steak and rice, both very good.

Then we played dice until early bedtime.

 

 

 

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On our way

We're on our way to Peru today! We both very excited. We took a taxi to the airport at 4am and had breakfast after we got all checked in.

On our way!

 

We had a 3-hour layover in Houston, which was nice. We could have a sit down lunch, time for each of us to take a walk about the airport (with the other watching bags), and even charge our ipads.

 

We sat almost an hour and a half on the plane in Houston while they redistributed the fuel between the wings. This second leg was a 6 and a half hour flight and we tried to watch the free movies and TV shows, but the plane was so loud I missed about every other word. So we gave up and went back to reading and ipads.

Somewhere over Central America

 

We got to Peru 45 minutes past our scheduled landing. It took an hour to get through immigration (mostly standing in line) and a 25-minute harrowing taxi ride to the hotel. We've arrived!

 

 

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One Day to Go! Graduating from Square Dancing

We leave tomorrow on our Peru adventure!

Last night we graduated from our square dance lessons at Puddletown Squares. We've been going once a week since January. It's a lot of fun! In July we're going to the Annual Convention of the Gay Square Dancers Association in Salt Lake City.

 

 

 

 

 

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One week away! The Neighborhood Stairmaster

We're climbing the Thistle Stairs to get in shape for our Peru trip. They're about a mile from our condo: 360 stairs straight up the bluff. We can do them 2X now and Sandra did them 3X once! Luckily I was at work that day.

 

Here's Sandra on the stairs. The stairs are mostly shady and very busy.

 

 

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