Lima

We spent 3 days in Lima at the beginning and a day and a half at the end. I guess this is more than a lot of tourists do. We found Lima to be busy and chaotic, especially the traffic! Our experience of Lima traffic can be summed up as follows. In the US, we have pedestrian crossing signs like this:

In Lima we saw signs that looked more like this: (although this one is from Guatemala. I didn't manage to snap a picture of the peruvian crossing sign.) This depiction is entirely accurate. If you cross the street, you will end up running from moving vehicles.

This vehicle claims to be protected by satellite tracking. Hm.

One of the first things we did in Lima was find a restaurant and order ceviche (the front plate).
Peru is famous for its ceviche, which is raw seafood marinated in lime and cilantro and pepper. It was delicious! The sopada (fish soup, in the back) wasn't bad either.

We went to the Museum of the Inquisition, but the museum that made the biggest impression was the Museo Larco. This museum has some 45,000 pieces of pre-Columbian pottery and artwork. Here is Richard with a Mochican statue.

The Mochicans explicitly expressed a lot of things through their ceramics, including activities like intercourse and childbirth. In fact, they have a whole separate room to exhibit these pieces. We thought we couldn't pass this up as a honeymoon activity.I won't post our pictures from this gallery, but if you are dying of curiosity, you can see them here.

The last day we were in Lima corresponded to the Catholic celebration of corpus christi, so we found the main square filled with purple-robed men attending an open-air mass in front of the cathedral. There were elaborate pictures formed on the road from flower petals. The petals got thrown at the priest and altar boys as they passed by.