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Arequipa
I think Arequipa is my favorite city so far on my Peruvian adventure. It’s a low-key city with gorgeous colonial architecture, amazing restaurants, lots of sights to see and all without the annoying hassle of people trying to sell you stuff every time you take a step. Glorious. We really only had a couple nights in Arequipa but, since we didn’t have any classes or workshops to attend, we made the most of them. We really just took the opportunity to relax and eat foods that we would never get from our homestay families. We stayed in a cute colonial building converted into a hostel and spent our time checking out all of the restaurants available to us—my personal favorite being one called “Fez.” The most delicious lemonade and hummus I’ve ever had.
Other than simply wandering the city and looking at the colonial architecture, we visited one site in particular: the Monasterio de Santa Catalina, a humongous convent. From the outside the convent looked like a huge boring grey fortress, but the inside was actually really beautiful and colorful. It almost seemed like a small city within Arequipa with its small winding pathways between all of the buildings. Not only the layout and size made it seem like its own city, but they convent was basically self-sufficient. Other than obtaining some food items, the nuns took care of everything they needed to do inside the convent walls, from worship to washing.
It was really interesting to see how the nuns there lived. On the one hand it was really depressing that often times they didn’t have a choice in whether or not they wanted to enter the monastery, but on the other hand they could have their own rooms and up to two servants to do all of their work for them, of course depending on how much money they could afford to give to the monastery. Not exactly what I imagined the life of a nun to be… Not all nuns could afford this luxury, though, so the range of nun’s quarters was amazing. The smallest cells had just room enough for the bed and possibly a chair while the largest rooms were almost four times that size with personal items, other furniture and attached servants’ quarters.
The convent was our lost stop in Arequipa. We had just enough time to grab lunch—and for Emily and I that meant also finding ice cream afterward—before we were supposed to get back on the bus for another long, boring roadtrip. We left the city and, as is usual for me, I fell asleep. Next stop, Colca Canyon!
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