Lima at last

After being here over two months I have finally gotten the energy to go downtown and see something of colonial Lima. You can't see it clearly, but the houses on the mountain to the left are all brightly colored and look like a party town from a distance. Once you get closer you see that it's a shantytown for the poor - but what a good idea to paint the poor ghetto parts of town with vibrant happy colors!

Speaking of colonial Lima, I couldn't help taking a picture of the sign where we ate lunch - they offer not only an Israeli breakfast (which means that it includes a half a avocado), but also a Colonial breakfast. Coming from the middle east where the term "colonial" is equivalent to "era of suppression and violent occupation" it's hard to get used to the idea that the colonial period was actually a positive thing for some people around the world, it is almost revered as the golden age here in Peru.

In any case I picked up Alexa in the car after her nursery and we drove to the old part of town and saw some impressive churches, one of which houses the grave of Francisco Pizarro (the original colonizer himself), who with 180 men and 37 horses defeated the entire Inca empire of millions. And a big church with catacombs under it housing the bones of unlucky former monks who not only had to live a boring monastic life, but whose bodies can't even rest in (one) peace. They've arranged the bones by type, so there's a room full of femurs, a room full of skulls, vertebrae, etc.

We also saw Lima's Chinatown, complete with an arch and everything, and Alexa had her face painted like a cat, and then ran after the pigeons in one of the main squares for over an hour. I was really bored, but consoled myself by reading a guidebook about all the other neat things to see downtown that I'll have to save for another time.

This last picture is some of us with my Dad up at his cabin in Brighton (Vanessa, Alexa, Lauren, Lila, Eliot, and Keno Keith). It was a beautiful day and I miss that kind of sunshine here. Every day is just a giant misty mist, like a dense London fog. Today I went walking in the wet mist on the beach below the cliffs in front of our apartment and found a dead dog that had washed up on shore. He was a real mutt's mutt. There were a bunch of surfers in the water and I'm sure they must have bumped up against it while they were surfing. I swear I've never seen so many dogs in my life as in Lima. There are mutts that must be a mixture of over 50 breeds.