Arequipa - Cuzco

Arequipa - Cuzco

Our night bus to Arequipa ended up taking about 18 hours total, but it was very comfortable, and I slept for 10 hours!  Once in Arequipa, our first mission was to find a laundromat. The taxi dropped us right in front of one, and we struggled into the tiny place with our giant packs. We then proceeded to pull almost all our clothes out of the packs, much to the amusement of the ladies who worked there. I had one clean shirt in my bag, so I had Jonathan stand in the doorway, while I changed into that and added my dirty shirt to the heap. The women thought this was too much. Crazy Americans!  They washed, dried, ironed and folded our clothes for $8. Not bad. 

We found a great coffee shop with wireless and the sweetest owner who let us hang out there a long time, store our bags when we left, and gave us directions to every place we might possibly want to visit. 

Jonathan's sister, Caitlin, spent a semester in Arequipa in college, and we got to go meet her host brother, Bruno, and see the house where she stayed. It was great fun to chat with him, but it was brief because he was headed to the beach that night. 

We are here in the "off" season, since this is the rainy time of year for this area. We found a great hostel with comfy beds and a TV and our own private bathroom that was actually stocked with toilet paper! (I have gotten used to carrying a roll with me in my bag at all times.) The TV we could have cared less about, but they were playing American movies with Spanish subtitles on Cinemax, and it was a fun way to work on our Spanish. 

The next day we started out by visiting another huge market. I love how they have such great veggies, fruit, meat, and flowers for sale, but they also have random things like women's underwear, sunglasses, household cleaning items, and always a woman with thousands of colored shoelaces for sale. We got some groceries for our travels and then headed off to visit the famous monastery. 

Monasterio de Santa Catalina is a very famous monastery here in Arequipa that occupies an entire city block. There are still nuns who live there, but the public is not allowed to see them. The monastery was started in the late 1500s by a wealthy widow. At first she only accepted Mestizo girls - "mixed blood" women that were usually part Spanish and part Indian. This changed later and the nuns were from mostly wealthy Spanish families, since the parents had to pay a considerable dowry to have their daughter stay there. 

The monastery is huge and very beautiful. The architecture and the artwork everywhere is amazing. The monastery was damaged multiple times over the years by earthquakes, and the second floor that used to exist was not rebuilt after the last earthquake. 

It was pretty amazing to see the cells where the nuns lived. They all had a wooden platform where they slept, either just with blankets or with a very thin little mattress. Then they usually had a small table, chair, and candle, and a kitchen out back. The kitchen consisted of an adobe oven heated with a wood fire, and some surfaces to heat pots over the fire. The walls in all the kitchens were charred black from the years of cooking with fire, and they all had a wonderful smell. 

After spending about 3 hours at the monastery, we walked to Mundo Alpaca (Alpaca World.) This is a neat tourist attraction with a small museum explaining the history of using hair from alpacas (and llamas and vicuñas) for weaving and making all sorts of beautiful products.  They had all the machines needed to go from the shorn hair into yarn and eventually into some product, like a sweater. They also had men there dressed in native dress who were weaving in the traditional way. They were making such beautiful fabric with incredibly intricate designs. (And then they had that fabric for sale in their store for about $300!)  Then they had some llamas and alpacas out back that you could go see and pet!  Two of them were very friendly and immediately discovered that I was a sucker who would scratch all their itches!  They have the most beautiful eyes with such long eyelashes. And they have funny soft, squishy lips and chins and long teeth that poke out. So cute!

We decided that we had to go all out for lunch and try some cuy - guinea pig. It's very popular here and in Ecuador, and we had not tried it yet. So we got directions to a good place and walked there after Jonathan pulled me away from my llama friends. We split one fried cuy plate, and they bring it out whole, with the head and feet and everything. It was pretty good, tasted kind of like a mild pork, but very rich. They're such little creatures, though, and trying to pick the meat out from between their little ribs made me laugh because I felt like a giant. 

That night we took the night bus to Cuzco, and then we are headed on to Ollantaytambo, a small town with Incan ruins of its own, where we'll spend a couple days before heading on to Macchu Picchu!