The San Francisco Monastery

I always meet the nicest people at the beach. I woke up today with the worst back ache I've ever had, which put a damper on my plans to go surfing, but I like hanging out at the beach, so I went down there anywhere to read my book for a bit. I ran into some friends and they introduced me to a girl and her boyfriend from New Jersey traveling with her parents. They were going to the catacombs at the Monestario San Francisco later that day and invited me to go along.

The monastery was gorgeous! The colonial architecture in Central Lima was so grand and beautiful. I was so sad that we couldn't take pictures of the inside. The first room we went to was the library. It was only lit with natural light, had two spiral staircases, deep cedar shelving, and thousands of books from the 1600s. It was amazing... Everyone gasped upon entering. That's the room that stands out the most in my mind, aside from the catacombs underneath the church. The ceilings were low and the tunnels were musky. The bones had been organized, which was very really weird. There were one room that we passed that looked like they haven't been organized with an array of misc. bones and skulls. Along the hall ways were rectangular boxes with organized long bones neatly laid out along with some that were full of skulls. The tour guide explained that they would empty out the catacombs into deep cylindrical chamber to make room for more bodies. The skulls and bones in there had been arranged in a circular pattern with alternating skulls and long bones. It did look kind of eerie, but I really don't like how much the human remains have been tampered with. After leaving the catacombs, we went to another room that had cedar carvings of saints on the walls. The ones with martyrs had an M. under their names and were carved showing how they died. ALSO there was another Peruvian last supper painting different from the one I saw yesterday. It took up an entire wall and was absolutely gorgeous! This one had a round table, included different people than are traditionally pictured, and of course, had cuy has the main dish.

After leaving, we went through a street that was set up like a souvenir market and had a bite to eat and then went to get churros for desert. Curros are long fried pieces of bread with custard in the center and rolled in sugar. Delicious. Apparently, I miss the memo that we were eating the churros for the picture. We thought we saw sails to a ship... they weren't, but still lead us to a neat park looking at tons of colored houses on a hill. It was also neat to see the old architecture intertwined with modern.

Overall, it was really fun to hang out with people who were touring Lima for the day!