Lima–2014 January 16
First stop today, the Botanical Garden that is part of a school of medicine, with a very nice building that you see as you approach the area.
And here are some pictures of the plants.
I was planning to take a bus back to the main drag in order to get to the Parque de la Reserva, but am glad I walked instead. It was actually faster than taking a bus, as the traffic was incredibly snarled. Everyone was driving with their horns going full blast. Once back at Paseo de la Republica, I headed toward the park, which is near the stadium.
The park has one of those shows with the fountains, but that was at 3 p.m. and I did not want to stick around for three hours, so here are a few pictures of the park. I got someone to take a picture of me, and here I am with a tree growing out of my head!
I caught one of the buses back toward the hotel and got off near the Huaca Pucllana. (“huaca” means a sort of monument, usually something revered.) I passed a building with some interesting sculptures. The Huaca itself is in a semi-residential neighborhood.
I decided to go with the English-speaking tour guide, which was interesting, as his English was a bit shaky, so I might actually have understood as well with Spanish. In any event, he did a good job of showing us around the place. If you look at the bricks, you’ll see that the ones on the bottom look to be in bad shape; those are the originals. The ones that look perfect are restorations. The first picture shows an unrestored area of the huaca. Forty years ago, the area was just thought of as one huge hill where people did motocross racing. Then they started discovering artifacts and started excavation, which is still in progress. In the last picture, you see a handprint; the bricks were hand-made from mud and ground-up shells.
There’s also an area where they have animals such as guinea pigs, llamas, alpacas, and alpaca/llama crossbreeds that are, like mules, infertile.
They also have plants like quinoa, corn, and lúcuma (the green globular fruit). Lúcuma is best eaten as a frozen confection; I had a lúcuma ice cream bar today and it was very good. They also had coca leaves, but I did not take a picture for fear of running afoul of some insane drug law somewhere.
The guide also showed us a replica of a burial site. He was talking about how people made sacrifices to the gods to avoid earthquakes, and if you were to come to them and tell them about tectonic plates, they wouldn’t understand you and would probably kill you as a heretic. I commented to some other people in the group, “Sort of like what would happen in Texas today.”
Lunch
I stopped at an empanada shop and had a rice with chicken empanda with some local drink called Inka Kola. It looks like Mountain Dew; I have no idea what Mountain Dew tastes like, but this stuff was fizzy and sweet. For dessert I had an empenada with chocolate and banana.
Wall Art / Building decoration
The first picture is a courtyard that looked very appealing.
Signage
The first one is just weird; the text reads “The soda cracker you weren’t expecting.” The last one is a traffic light with the “time remaining” indicator at an angle. Made it hard to read until I figured out which way was up.
Feral Cats
The botanical garden also has a colony of feral cats; I arrived just at feeding time, and exchanged information with the person who was giving the cats their food. The last two pictures are Kennedy Park cats that I just couldn’t resist getting a picture of.