pigeons and skulls in central lima
by mikka
Our second day in Lima, we hopped in a taxi to the Plaza Mayor in central Lima, which is surrounded by bright yellow buildings and looks much more like the archetypal image of Lima I had in my head, compared to Miraflores' chilled out streets and modern architecture. We were lazy getting out of the hostel this morning, and so didn't have a huge amount of time, but it was nice to wander around anyway.
We wandered rather aimlessly into the Lima Cathedral, which houses the tomb of Francisco Pizarro with considerably more pomp and honor than Iain or I felt he deserves; the subterranean crypt also contains a collection of unsettlingly tiny coffins and a pile of skulls, for which we could find no labels or explanation. I didn't take a photo of the skulls themselves, though here's Iain looking at them:
We didn't even make it inside the second cathedral (San Francisco) that we visited, because we got distracted by watching people feed the pigeons outside:
This kid had pigeon food on his head in (unfulfilled) hopes of getting a pigeon to sit there, I think. Kids in front of the cathedral were either loving the pigeons or else where profoundly terrified by them (sometimes both in rapid succession); this older lady was having an awesome time, though:
We also made it the (free!) Museum of the Inquisition, in which I was too creeped out to take any photos of the torture chamber wax figures or the narrow, underground dugeon-looking ruins that snake below the museum. Lima is cold and grey, and we're still a bit tired from our late night arrival (and also by being woken up by various and sundry noises through the paper-thin hotel walls at five this morning); tomorrow we wake up crazy early again to make our way to Cuzco, where we have a few more days of being tourists before the volunteering starts.
