Arequipa

Yesterday, I made an intense full day visit of Arequipa, the Unesco World Heritage site. The city is also called "the white city" because it is mainly built out of a regional white stone (called "sillar"). I won't go into details, but the two most spectacular things I saw was the Santa Catalina monastery, which is a huge complex, consisting of little streets and tiny houses in which the nuns lined. They were usually the second born girls of very rich Spanish fañilies and actually webt there with up to three servants or even slaves (I recall, it is a monastery!!!) The nuns were "married to god" but it seems that they had a quite an exuberant life with lots of music, dancing, nice dresses etc... some of the nuns had bigger places to live in with a real "salon", a garden , a kitchen and a terrace.. this lasted for a few hundred years until a pope sent a very strict nun to manage the monastery and then it was shut from public until 1970 !! From one extreme to the next... Some nice pictures on http://www.santacatalina.org.pe/index_i_01.htm

The other one was the museum with the juanita, a frozen child-mummy who died over 500 years ago, which was found in 1995 on the top of one of the nearby volcanoes, the Ampato. She is the best preserved mummy of the world and is often also called the "ice maiden"! She was a noble 12 to 14 year old inca girl which was chosen to be sacrificed already as a baby and received specific education to be prepared for this. It was an inca customs to do this kind of child-sacrifices in order to pacify the mountains, which they believed were gods (in order to avoid volcano eruptions etc..) the mummy is extremely well preserved, as she was in the ice for several hundred years and only another volvano eruption of a neighbour volcano made the ice melt and she was quickly found. She is now exposed in the museum in a frozen glass container. The museum also contains all the objects and clothes she had with her in her grave.. quite impressive how well even the clothes were preserved.. the colours were still almost as new.. and there was plenty of porcelain and golden and silver statues with her.. If you want to know more about it, or see some pictures, go to the site of the museum: http://www.ucsm.edu.pe/santury/

for the rest I also visisted several very beautiful churches, had nice breaks, the nices one on the first floor of one of the galeries overlooking the beautiful Plaza Mayor drinking Inka-Cola (my favourite (non alcoholic) beverage here: it is a yellow lemonade with an indesribable taste)

By the way: the night before I had four Pisco Sours, as they were really really good...!!!