Tag: Lima

You never know what you’ll find in an archeology museum

Sheila museo
Sheila introducing us to the Museo Larco

Lima, Peru, Sunday, September 23, 2018 — “There are about 45,000 artifacts in the Museo Larco,” said Sheila, our Alexander + Roberts guide to Lima, Peru, “and you will see about 38,000 of them.”

The full name of the Museo Larco is the Museo Arqueológico Rafael Larco Herrera. In 1926, at the age of 25, Rafael Larco Hoyle founded the museum. Today it is an overwhelming display of pre-Columbian artifacts. Actually, they are mostly pre-Incan because the Spaniards destroyed most of the Inca work in their search for riches. Golden art works were melted down and either shipped to Spain or stuck in the conquistadors’ pockets. Not gold? Those were discarded.

There were a few gold pieces, mostly mixed with copper for stability.

The museum offers row after row of clay faces, “the cultures’ form of writing,” Sheila said.

Examples of ancient textiles included a rug that was 3,000 years old.

Rug
The 3,000-year-old textile was used as a body wrap for the dead
Faces 4
A face from “Salon exotica”

Sheila did not accompany us into the “Salon exotica.” Not sure what she would have said in there. But she led us to the door and said, “That’s a part of life as well.”

It’s an interesting job she has. She works as a freelance guide to work all year. She studied tourism for a degree and then studied English for three years in a language school.

She will drop our group off at the airport tomorrow (5 a.m. wake-up call!) and then pick up a new group in the afternoon to tour Lima. Upcoming trips include a week in Cusco and then a cruise in the Amazon region. When she goes outside the Lima area she turns the guiding over to a local person (as they do for her in Lima) and serves more as a facilitator, coordinating transportation, hotels, boarding passes and all the other things one of our tour identified as “sure nice to be babysat for awhile.”

Sheila also provided a birthday celebration that night at the dinner at the museum to our oldest member who turned 83. Excellent meal of an appetizer of potatoes (3,000 varieties in Peru), chicken salad, olives and a quail egg on top. Entrée was rice with seafood (shrimp and scallops) with pasta in tomato sauce and creamed dessert of a fruit similar to avocado (lucuma?) that tasted like butterscotch.

Loved having Sheila as our guide with her amazing knowledge of the city and the museum, often stopping to point out some of the masks that had been restored. And my favorite quote from her concerned the obnoxious habit of Lima drivers to rely heavily on their horns: “Honking horns is like our national anthem.”

On to Cusco.

Big dreams

How a required religion took hold in Peru

 

In Lima square
Standing in the main square in Lima, Peru

Lima, Peru, Sunday, September 23, 2018 — Francisco Pizarro probably never worried about whether he had a right to conquest Peru or how the Catholic religion would fit into what he did there. But before he garroted Atahualpa, the Inca leader, in 1533, the debate had been waged for 20 years in Spain.

According to John Hemming’s book, “The Conquest of the Incas,” Pope Alexander had divided the lands new to the Europeans by giving Spain most of South America and Portugal got Africa and Brazil. Some interpreted that as where the Europeans could spread their faith. Others argued that invasion for wealth was just fine. So proselytizing and profits entered these lands together along with something called the Requirement, the result of the decades-old debate.

This document was to be read to those about to die unless they agreed to acknowledge the Catholic church and the Pope, accept the king of Spain as their ruler and allow the Christian faith to be preached there. If not, the Spaniards could “‘do all the harm and damage that we can,’ including the enslavement of wives and children, and robbery of possessions.” And, get this, “And we protest that the deaths and losses which shall result from this are your fault.”

 

Courtyard
Courtyard in the Museo del Convento Santo Domingo

Which brings us to the Museo del Convento Santo Domingo off the main square in Lima, Peru. Our Alexander + Roberts guide, Sheila, told us that 500 monks once lived there. Now, there are 12.

“These numbers are dropping all over the world,” she said.

Probably true given some of the problems facing the church today, but this forced-down religion took hold here with 80 percent of the population identifying themselves as Catholic.

KT covering
Kathy covering up like ladies did in the 16th Century

Sheila says that the Catholic church succeeds in Peru by mixing itself with nature (later evidence of that in a later blog post). Yakelin, who will be our A + R guide in Cusco and Machu Picchu, high in the Andean region, says that about 50 percent of the people there practice both some Inca religion along with their Catholicism. Given that the Inca empire mostly occupied the highland area, it’s probably not surprising that the native religion remains in some part.

The Convent of Santo Domingo has a library I want, mosaics for my walls and a courtyard to match. If not, I will do all the harm and damage that I can. Losses which shall result from this are your fault.

Library
The library at the Museo del Convento Santo Domingo
Mosaics
Mosaics at the convent.
Moorish
Lots of Moorish influence from Spain in this building
Floor
Entry floor

 

How to lose a mayoral election in Lima, Peru

Lima, Peru, Monday, Sept. 24, 2018 — No use trying to walk by a newspaper stand without buying a paper, even if it is in a language I barely understand and it will take me a week to ready a daily. So in the Lima, Peru, airport, I bought a copy of Peru 21, hoping it would help with my Spanish.

And I can’t go past a story about politics, even if it’s about the Oct. 7 mayoral race in Lima. The debate was the night before I picked up the paper, and the coverage was excellent. Ten candidates for the office, but one of them, Renzo Reggiardo, from the Peni Patria Segura party refused to join in, saying he would not “sentar en el mismo lugar con personas que me han agraviado.” (sit in the same place with persons that have aggrieved me). Think of his honor, he said, and refused “to play.”

The paper quoted the other candidates’ statements on their vision for Lima in 2022, security and transportation. Politicians here sounded a lot like those in the USSA, promising life with “segura, para vivir sin miedo,” order, work on transportation projects (“El transito es caotico”) without much detail on how to accomplish security to live without fear, transportation or a vision in 2022 or any other time.

Did Reggiardo’s protest work? Especially since a poll by the paper said 83 percent would not pay attention to the debate, another similarity to the USSA. You remember the midterm elections are coming soon, right? Pay attention.

The election was Tuesday, and Reggiardo got beat by Jorge Munoz from the Accion Popular, with Peru 21’s sister paper, Trome, saying Reggiardo’s biggest mistake was “quizá el error más evidente de todos fue no presentarse en el primer debate electoral” (perhaps the error most obvious of all was not being present at the first electoral debate).

Definitely unhinged tactics.

Peru 21

Back in the USSA, you dunno how lucky you are, boy

Love statue
This statue in the Parque del Amor is known as “The Kiss.” Our tour guide said you can’t see the woman’s face because the artist, Victor Delfin, had four wives.

Back in the USSA, you dunno how lucky you are, boy, a friend told me, to miss the news of the past two weeks when the Greedy Old Peckers took over the last branch of USSA government to give them the economic security to hang on to their riches in a nation headed for moral bankruptcy. Sort of like what they said about the path that guy in Europe took to keep the trains running on time -– even though they didn’t always go where the riders wanted them to go.

But let’s get back to where we’ve been visiting the past two weeks. That’s where the Really Greedy Old Peckers showed what a combination of religion, horses, armor and avarice could do to people who stood between them and the gold. Let’s start with Lima, Peru. Back in 1535, Francisco Pizarro founded the city where he would be murdered by folks even more greedy than he was.

Sheila
Our tour guide, Sheila, addresses the group during a walking tour of Miraflores, a neighborhood in Lima.

Today, it’s a city that houses 10 million of the 30 million in Peru, mostly in apartments. Our excellent Alexander & Roberts guide, Sheila, explained that Pizarro came from Andalusia in Spain and styled his city after what was built there – walled houses with courtyards. After independence in 1821 and a flush of railroad money, the buildings took on the look of French architecture. Today, many of the older, bigger homes have been taken over to be used for businesses and embassies.

Lima is divided into 43 neighborhoods, six with ocean views. Each neighborhood has its own mayor, and there is one for the entire city. With 25 political parties in Peru, getting signs up for all 43 mayoral candidates plus the Big Enchilada took over most of the billboard and empty wall space in the city for the elections on October 7. There is a $30 fine for those who don’t vote, applicable to anyone between the ages of 18 and 70. After that Golden Age, citizens can “volunteer” to vote.

The rate of illiteracy in Peru, says Sheila, is 8 to 13 percent of the population; the government clings to the 8 percent figure. There are 143 universities in Peru, and Sheila graduated from one of them with a degree in tourism. All guides are required to have a degree, which was very apparent in the breadth and depth of knowledge our guides had in Peru and Ecuador in everything from how people lived to archeology, architecture and politics.

The security in the city was not terribly noticeable, but it was there, as Sheila pointed out. The increased security was the Peruvian answer to the Sendero Luminoso, the Shining Path, a Maoist terrorist group that made this a dangerous place to visit – or live – in the 1980s and ’90s.

“The Sendero Luminoso took advantage of the poor people,” she said, “forcing them to join or be killed.”

She seemed quite proud that the country did not compromise with the terrorists or accept any of their reforms (as Colombia did with FARC, she pointed out). Peru captured the groups’ leaders, threw them in jail on life sentences and installed heavy security. She pointed to the lighted cross erected to mark the visit of Pope John Paul II in 1985 and 1988 (81 percent Catholic, says the CIA Factbook, the best thing that organization ever did. And more on religion in a later post). The cross shines out over the city from a hill in the harbor, which Pizarro chose to ship gold he stole from the Incas. The cross was built from electrical transformer parts blown up by the Sendero Luminoso. So this cross has become a sign of peace rather than the banner under which the Spaniards slaughtered and conquered the Incas.

Sheila told us the main industry of the country is still mining and then agriculture. The minimum wage is $300 a month, with $500 a month being the average. Food is still affordable (and quite good), but transportation costs are expensive – and roads are hugely congested with people taking two to three hours each way to get from homes to work (sounds like Seattle). On the way to the airport, we hit the road around 6 in the morning to escape from buses, trucks and thousands of cars. Not entirely successful, but we did make it on time for our flight to Cusco.

The kiss
The Kiss