Day 1

Our first day of exploring Lima was extremely successful. We originally planned to walk to the city centre from MiraFlores. Turns out we would have been walking for awhile. Luckily our roommate from Argentina convinced us to cab with her. And we didn´t even have to negotiate with the cab driver because she spoke Spanish!

We made it just in time to catch the changing of the guards at noon at the Plaza de Armas. The marching band played some familiar songs (namely the typical war song). The elaborate display was about an hour long, with the soldiers doing a choreographed march. There was a lot of side stepping and diagonal marching it seemed almost like a dance. But after all this, the guards didn´t even change! But it was fun to watch nonetheless. The square itself is beautiful, with a large fountain in the middle.

The highlight of the day was the San Francisco Convent located behind the Plaza de Armas. The English tour began at 2pm so we wandered around with our Australian roommate Kerry. The pedestrian shopping street is off the city square where people are trying to pull you into their shop to sell you a tattoo!! random. We also stopped for a local drink - Inka Kola. Its yellow and a bit like cream soda but not as fizzy.

We also walked along the boardwalk lining the monastery. They have restored parts of the wall that used to fortify the city as well as protect against the river overflows. From here we could see the shanty towns of Peru which are colourful houses set into the mountain, which also has a cross set on the top. (Probably what I saw the first night here). Apparently Montreal isn´t as original as I thought.

We finally made it into the monastery which is the COOLEST part of the day. It is famous for its catacombs that house over 75,000 bodies. The monastery itself is incredibly large, with many different rooms. The first being this gorgeous library, very similar to the one in Harry Potter (as pointed out by our guide). This monastery was built in the 16th century and the books in there were mostly from the 16th century! They even had a choral book that weighed 40kg! (I think it weighs the same as me...if not more!)
In the catacombs, the bones were arranged by whichever bone part it was, with the femurs together, pelvic bones together, skulls etc. It was so cool and so eerie at the same time. Unfortunately they don´t allow phots so there are none of this convent but believe me it was well worth it!

After this we decided to head back to the hostel, and our Argentinean friend had told us that we should only pay 10 soles for a ride back. We hailed a cab and negotiated our rate from 20 soles down to 10 ! We are slowly getting the hang of things!

Our hostel is in centre of Miraflores. And there are so many American fast food chains, Pizza Hut, McD´s, Dunkin Donuts, KFC, Burger King and Starbucks! Insane.

We had our first Peruvian dinner and afterwards Katie and I wandered around and ended up at the street with food and bars. We found a bar called Canadian Bar...it looked like a hooters type bar, so we opted to skip out. We sat down at Rustic for 1L of beer each. I think it was well deserved!