Lima: pottery, gold, and alcohol fountains

I don't even know where to start.
There's so many things.
Which are the important things?
If I just put up a bunch of pictures, are you going to be satisfied with that?
No, seriously.
Ok. This is where I'll start.
Lima is a very big city. Well, the main city area isn't actually that big, but there are about 11 million people living here. I thought I wouldn't like it. I never liked Manaus, and that's only 2 million people, and in general, bigger cities are more unpleasant. I mean, I'm not a huge fan on Helsinki, and that's only got 600 000 people. But I was wrong. I somehow like it here in a way I never liked it in Manaus. I don't know what it is. I think maybe a part of it is that I'm simply looking at the city completely differently: Manaus was a place I lived. Lima is a place where I spend a few days. The flaws of a place only become apparent when you see them every day, for a longer period of time. Or maybe it's because Lima seems to be a lot better suited for walking and biking than Manaus is. I'm not saying it's great. I'm just saying it's a lot better. Because Manaus is impossible to get around. Lima at least has descent-width side walks and bike paths exist in places, also in the center.
And as long as you stick to the main bus route, the buses are really good, if packed with people. There's one bus route in Lima, the metropolitan, that has maybe ten lines running the same route but stopping on a bit different stations. They run every few minutes, stop on all the stations and have their own lanes that no one else is allowed to drive on, so they don't get stuck in the traffic. It's basically like a subway, only without the tunnel and the tracks. And it works really great, if you have the time to wait for a bus you can actually fit on, because like I said, they're packed with people. I never got a seat on those buses. But somehow the buses being packed didn't bother me.
In the same way the chaotic traffic didn't bother me. Because even though there one that one un-chaotic and reliable and clear bus route, the rest of the traffic is chaotic. I think. Maybe. I don't really notice it. It was worse in Manaus, anyway. Or maybe I've simply gotten used to chaotic traffic in the last half a year.
So yeah, I was wrong. I quite like Lima. I wouldn't want to live here, but it's not nearly as bad as I expected, from a South-American city this size. And honestly, I think if I had to spend a longer period of time here I'd get bored with it.
Oh, one more thing about the traffic: there's way more honking here than in Manaus. All the time. Everyone. I don't get it. If you're stuck in traffic and no one's moving anywhere, the honking's not going to help, guys. What do you think, that the people ahead of you are just sitting there to annoy you? No. If they had the space to go somewhere, they would go. Telling then you are just as annoyed as they are isn't going to make anyone get anywhere any faster. So just stop already, ok? At least in Manaus the people just sat quietly and resigned in the traffic jams.

I also thought I would freeze here, because not only am I always cold, I've been in the tropical rainforest getting my body accustomed to a 30-degree temperature for a half a year. A more than ten degree drop aught to make me freeze. But no. I'm good. Just put on a jacket, if it's windy. One day the sun actually shone for a moment, and I had to take my long sleeves off. Most of the locals are wearing thicker clothes than I am.
(By the way, what in the world am I doing here in 17 degrees Celsius while there's like 26 degrees in Finland!? I'm the one who's supposed to be in the tropics. I'm like 12 degrees south from the equator. Finland is 65 degrees north. Stupid ocean current, bringing all the cold from the Antarctic to here.)
The weather isn't great in general here this time of the year. During my first four days, the sun shone for literally maybe an hour. It's cloudy. All the time. It's not raining. No, never raining. Just cloudy. Exactly the kind of weather that would be perfect, if it also was ten degrees warmer.
But somehow, I also don't mind that. Like I said in my last post from Brasil, I've missed being warm when it's cold. And this is the perfect almost-cold to not actually be cold.

Another thing I've noticed about Lima is that there are a lot of parks. Or squares. Which lead me to wonder about the difference between a park and a square, and I came to the conclusion that it must be defined by the proportion of ground covered by grass instead of stone. All stone is a square. All grass is a park. There's a line somewhere there. I'm not sure where it goes, though.
Anyway, here's some photos of some parks/squares for you:

 (I don't even remember where this one is from....)

This is Plaza San Martin. It's the one that initially got me to wonder whether this particular one is a park or a square, because it has quite a lot of grass for a square, but I also feel like there's a lot of stone for a park. GoogleMaps calls it a park, though.

This is Plaza de Armas, which is the main square of Lima. Also the name of the main square of Iquitos. I don't know. Maybe all the main squares here are called Plaza de Armas?

In one park I found this fake tree. I have no idea what it was there for. (It happened to be during the one our of sunshine I mentioned earlier.)

Ok, enough about parks.
What else did I do in Lima...?
I went to some museums. I woke up my first morning here and thought "so, I know nothing about what to do here". So I simply googled if there is a natural history museum here, because natural history museums are always great, and a city this size aught to have one.
It does. So I went there. It was a very small natural history museum, though. Way smaller than even the one in Helsinki. At least that one has two floors. But I did see some cool things.

 Like this huge fish.

And a t-rex with horns. (It's not a t-rex with horns. It's a Carnotaurus sastrei, apparently.)

And a hairy armadillo.

 And a cat whose face basically says "dude, what?"

And an enormous whale skull. These whales don't exist any more, though. I think. All the texts were in Spanish. Either way, the lower jaw is as long as I'm tall.

On other days, I went to a couple of museums that display the pottery and gold of the indigenous peoples of Peru. Here's some fotos from those:

I don't know about you, but I would not want to own a bottle like this. (Yes, it's a bottle.)

This blanket is apparently 2000-3000 years old. It was used to in a burial. Burying a body in a desert. Which is apparently how it's still at all intact. Because it's hard to decay in a desert

This thing has a body of a child inside it. Apparently this is how at least one of the peoples in this area buried their dead: in a fetal position within a lot of leyers of clothes. This a fake head.

This got the music from Dreamworks' The Road to El Dorado playing in my head for days.

 In case someone lost their nose.

During these museum visits I learned that it is very, very annoying to try to take photos of a something behind a glass.
I also learned that Pachamama means Mother Earth, which I suppose means that Pacha means earth. I'm assuming mama is the part that refers to mom. So that was interesting. (If you don't know what I'm talking about, you need to go watch Emperor's New Groove.)

On the topic of museums, after some of the people from Finland going to Moot with me got to Lima, we went on a monastery/church tour in the city center, which also included going to see some catacombs underneath the church. There were a lot of cool things in the monastery. The catacombs were also cool, though a little tight and low-ceilinged and underground for my liking. Though still definitely worth it. And I would love nothing more than to share some pictures with you from there, but taking photos was not allowed. Apparently too many people were using flash despite being told not to use flash and that was damaging the old paintings on the walls, so they banned taking fotos completely. Or something. So I have no fotos. Sorry!

On the same day that we went there, it turned out, was national pisco day, or somehing. Pisco is this local alcoholic drink that is made of grapes but can't really be called wine. Or maybe it can, but it's not what I think of when I think of wine. I did a walking tour around the center that ended up at this store that gave out free pisco tastings, and it turns out that it's actually pretty good. This coming from a person who in general doesn't like the taste of alcoholic drinks. (Yes, I don't like wines or beers. I don't understand why anyone would drink them. They cost a lot, taste terrible, and make normally great people a pain in the ass to hang around.) The fact that I like pisco (sour, is the type of pisco we tasted) basically just means that it has enough sugar to combat the bad taste of 18% alcohol. But it's definitely not the kind of drink to actually drink. It's the kind of drink to taste. I think it's sold in shots here in the restaurants.
Anyway. National pisco day. Meant that the city filled the fountain (in the foto) on the main square with pisco instead of water. And then they gave people free drinks of pisco from the fountain. So... yeah. Apparently that's a thing. We thought of getting a drink from there too, but the line was long and we were hungry so we just went to find a place to eat instead.

We also went and walked the seaside route. Basically, if you've seen one photo from Lima, it's some version of this one:

Probably one with a lot less fog and clouds and a lot more sun. But right now it's winter, so the sun never shines.
Anyway, there's this walkparkway there that stretches for kilometers along the cliff by the shore, and we walked a good stretch of it, just to see the ocean. We didn't go down to the ocean, though, because we couldn't quite figure out how to get down there, and partly because once we did figure it out, it didn't seem worth the trouble going all the way down and across the highway right on the shore and then all the way back. But I can still tell you exactly how the water was: very cold.
Despite that, there were surfers.

During the walk we stumbled upon a mall built basically underground in to the cliffside. It had a separate bathroom just for kids.

We ended out walk in Miraflores, which is a really touristy area in Lima, with all the restaurants and a huge area with only souvenir shops. We mostly just passed the center of Miraflores (we did stop for a short while to get some souvenirs), and headed to see these ruins of a 1500-year-old temple that were close by. This photo is taken from atop the biggest structure. All of it was built out of mudbricks, which makes it pretty incredible that the thing was still there 1500 years later. The fact that it does really shows how little it rains in Lima.

They also had some lamas and alpacas at the temple ruins.

So what's my final take on Lima?
It doesn't feel like an 11-million-person city. Except at 7 pm on a Saturday evening, apparently.
I liked it more than I thought I would.
Most of the time I'm not cold, even though I feel like I should be. Also, I love that I can use a thick blanket again.
I like Brazilian food a lot more than I like Peruvian food. I didn't eat much at all while I was in Iquitos, but now I've been eating out somewhere every day, because it's cheap enough to eat here that I haven't bothered cooking at the hostel. They eat a lot of (is an understatement) chicken here, which sounds great, except that they often use some combination of spices that I don't really like.
Fun fact: this is how they sell the raw chicken here:

And that's apparently what I'm ending with.
Oh well, you can't always win.

~matu