Today we decided to catch the Metropolitano to downtown Lima. The metro in Lima is not a train but buses in their own dedicated lane. After we purchased our travel card and credit (a good thing here is that one card can be used for more than one person) we gave the first bus a skip as it was too crowded. The second bus was only slightly better so we forced ourselves on, even though the proximity of people made us uncomfortable, we did have the advantage of feeling very tall, in general the people here are shorter than at home, especially the women.
We disembarked near the Plaza de Armas and wandered around, even stopping in on a wedding in the main cathedral. From there we ended up at the Monastery of San Francisco. There was a massive snaking queue leading into the church, with many people carrying flowers, K asked one of the women what it was going on, apparently it was some saint's day (we didn't quite get which saint it was) and they were taking flowers to put on the altar. We would have loved to have seen what all those flowers must look like inside the church but the length of queue made it seem we would need to dedicate all afternoon to get to it so we decided to give it a miss.
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| The entrance is not that big door in the middle, it's on the right side of the building! |
We did buy tickets to visit the catacombs though and were shown into a waiting room and told to wait five minutes for the tour to start. Five minutes later we were told to wait another five, then the Spanish speaking tour started and we were told to wait another ten minutes. That was enough for K (who is not known for her patience, even when she is on holiday) so we left and went for lunch. We returned about half an hour later and immediately joined the English tour with the same people who had been waiting with us earlier .... the original "five minutes" was more like 45! The tour was interesting as they described all the tunnels that supposedly criss-cross under the city, most of them still undiscovered. We went under the church and visited the catacombs and came across more skeletons than you would ever expect to see, mainly femurs and skulls as they had all been categorised at some point and placed neatly in piles.
There is a large number of Chifas (Chinese restaurants) in Lima so we decided to head to Chinatown, with its large Chinese gateway and hopefully find a supermarket with something tasty to cook. Chinatown was crazy, the streets were closed to traffic and jam packed with people. All the shops, including the pharmacies were full of people, we were trying to work out whether there was something special on or if this was just a normal Saturday in Chinatown. We didn't have any luck in the supermarkets so with our hands in our pockets wrapped around our phones (to thwart any potential pickpocketing) we slowly walked out of Chinatown only to run into a huge protest, kilometres long that had stopped traffic on a major arterial as the protesters made their way up the road with their anti-abortion and anti-gay placards. We watched for quite a while as the size and length of the march was incredible until we decided to make a dash for it, weaving in and out of the protesters.
The bus back to Miraflores was quite uneventful and if felt a little like home when we arrived back in more modern Miraflores.
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