Last post from Lima

     This is going to have to count for yesterday and today.  Also, I haven't been posting any pictures because it is really complicated and stupid but I will put some on tomorrow.
     Yesterday morning we took a taxi to downtown Lima.  We arrived in the Plaza de Armas and it was filled with people, with the Government Palace on one side, a cathedral on another, the Archiepiscopal Palace on a third, and the Town Hall.  When we got there the changing of the guard at the Government Palace had just begun, and there was a band playing to the guards marching and performing.  This happens every day at noon.
     We then went to the Franciscan Cathedral.  It was first built around 1560, but the last renovation was in the mid 17th century.  A large part of the cathedral was in disrepair, with light coming through large gaps in the ceiling.  This part was sealed off, however, so we didn't get to see it.  The moorish ceilings depicted only geometrical shapes and no plants or animals, and in several places were held up merely by the pressure of the other pieces of wood and not by glue or nails.
     The library had at least 10,000 volumes, but though some of them must be hundreds of years old they weren't being taken care of and were falling apart.  There were huge  books used for choral singing, and they would be placed on large turntables that would be spun so that a choir could sit on all sides and read the music.  These were written latin on sheepskin, because at the time they were made paper was to expensive to be practical.  
     The tour took us down to the catacoumbs, which was Lima's only graveyard for a time (I am going to describe all of what we saw, but this maybe be a little morbid).  Graves were dug five meters deep and bodies were stacked in them--about 25,000.  There were some rooms that had iron gates, but through them there were piles of bones.
    Somebody had gone through the graves and sorted out the bones that didn't decompose easily (such was femurs and the bones of the hand) and sorted them into bins.  There were three or four wells that were structural for the catacoumbs.  These wells were a couple hundred feet deep and filled with an almost geometric layout of bones.
     It is really interesting here that the conquistadors are honored so much even though they came for gold and killed so many people.  But there are many statues to Don Quixote and Francisco Pizarro around town.
     There are many ruins around Lima, parks and streets and buildings are built around them.  
     Looking across Lima there was a huge hill that was covered in shantytowns.  These for the most part sprang up because of the terrorist war in the countryside, so there was a huge influx of people to the rural areas.  The Sendero Luminosa, the Shining Path, was an orginization founded by a professor of philosophy from Ayacucho named Alberto Guzman.  They wanted to turn Peru into a Maoist society starting in the 1980s, and continuing for about a decade.  Guzman was caught some time in the mid 1990s, and the movement fell apart very quickly after that.
      After visiting the cathedral we went to Lima's Barriochino, which was supposed to have very good food because of the number of chinese people in the area--but it didn't.
     Today we are catching a bus to Cusco at two, and we will arrive around eleven tomorrow.   We will spend tomorrow night Ollantaytambo, about an hour and half by bus away from Cusco.  It is about 1500 feet lower than Cusco, and we will go to acclimate.  There are also some very beautiful ruins.