8/10/2009 17:12
I last wrote on the blog on Saturday, Sunday I spent the day with Lara, my colleague from DTU who is here to do volunteer work down in the poor Villa El Salvador area in southern Lima. It was fun to hear her reaction to Miraflores. It seems she does not really think that I am living in Peru, but rather in a suburb of some city in Florida, which has accidentally been misplaced in South America. We spent most of the afternoon looking at trekking options and ended up booking the 4 day walk on the Inca trail starting on the 30th of November. After that we may also do a jungle trip together before Lara flies home on the 16th of December.
Monday to Wednesday I have had studied Spanish, now in a group class together with a Canadian girl named Nicole and it is getting a bit more demanding with at least an hour of homework every day. In the afternoons I have not done anything except catching up on my studies and shopped for a bit more clothes since I found I needed another sweater and a pair of long pants because the whether was colder than I expected.
Today is a holiday so I have once again had time to explore a bit of Lima. I went to the local ancient site in Miraflores called Huaca Pucllana, together with Magnus. Huaca Pucllana is a mount build by a pre-Inca culture in 200-700 AD it was originally a large step pyramid but it was used as a burial mount in 700-1430 and its original shape is therefore lost under the later structures. It was the administrative and religious centre of the local Lima culture and served as a centre of the local priest-ruler and a place of religious ceremonies and rare human sacrifices. On average a young woman was sacrificed there every second decade. The place is mostly a big block of clay bricks, but it is interesting to see how they used small bricks with airspaces in order to make the building shock absorbing so that it could resist earthquakes and it is the first South American archaeological site I visit.
On the way back we went through the Indian crafts market, which is a block full of shops selling all the traditional craft products and souvenirs from Peru. I was mostly a lot of woollen products, silver artefacts, carved catholic icons, some fur products and tourist T-shirts and usual souvenirs. I will see what I find while travelling around the country but I might buy some of the woollen products at some point.
Finally we finished off the afternoon with a pisco drink down at the centre overlooking the sea that I have earlier posted pictures of and then I came home to rest. We also found that this weekend has a pisco festival, which we will go to. (Pisco is the local Peruvian brandy)