We’ve been in Arequipa for a week. I was sick for a couple days. The weather here is beautiful now. We must’ve arrived for the last day of the rainy season. We arrived at our hostel in the evening to a large welcoming committee. Julianne and Junior had organized some Uno in the kitchen. Jill and I were rather exhausted from a 10 hour bus ride that should’ve been 8. We chatted for a while though and it was fun to see familiar faces and be in a group.
Friday we walked around our neighborhood and bought tickets to the Saturday beer festival. Arequipa has cobblestone streets in the old quarter. It’s known as the White City because of the white stone used to build the houses. Watching the city from the north are a bunch of sleepy snow capped volcanoes. The volcanoes don’t do much but be harbingers of earthquakes. Arequipa, like Antigua, is built low and solid to withstand nature.
Saturday we visited the beer fest. We saw some of the folks from Lima and got a free beer from one fellow. The craft beer in Peru is good but a little strong. There isn’t much with less than 5% alcohol.
Sunday found us walking around town again and trying to come up with plans. Monday we decided to go on a bus tour. It was ill fated from the beginning. The tour guide stopped translating to English after a few minutes. I could understand some though. We stopped at nice places and saw some camelids. For our restaurant lunch I ordered the menu of the day from the bus. When we arrived at the restaurant I was to pick from 2 dishes. One had the word picante and I picked it. My soup contained sliced intestines or blood vessels I don’t know which. There was also animal skin and some corn. The main dish was another form of the soup over rice. I stopped eating halfway through it. It tasted OK but didn’t look appetizing and that got the better of it. After we ate we went to a couple other places and then went for a horse ride on some scrawny horses for 15 minutes. The meal made me sick for about 24 hours.
On Wednesday we went and poked around a fancy church for a while. Then we went to the small museum of the Andes. This museum houses the frozen Inca sacrifices that have been discovered throughout the Andes. Our tour started with a national geographic documentary about Juanita’s discovery on amapatey volcano. Juanita is the most famous of the frozen children. Our guide then took us by some artifacts found with the bodies and the process that the sacrifices probably took. Lastly, in a glass freezer at -14 F, we saw Sarita. Sarita was found on a mountain in Southern Peru. The inca believed the mountains were gods and sometimes they took a kid up there to sacrifice. Since the museum is so focused it makes the tour quite enjoyable.
Later we visited the Mono Blanco climbing gym. That means white monkey. It was a lot of fun just to mess around on the 8 foot walls; we didn’t need to go any higher.
Today we have lots of plans again. At noon we are going on a walking tour. We are going to the walled convent later that is huge like a town in the middle of the city. Then we are off to a fundraiser party for the charity that we are in the loop of. It’s called Volunteers Peru and they run a couple boarding schools for orphaned girls.
Martin, don’t eat scary food! Yuck!
Mom