Lima

After a long travel day yesterday, May 5, we all arrived at the tidy La Paz Apart Hotel around 0100. Even at that hour the "melody of Lima" surrounded us --- constant sharp car horns blasting away. Exhaustion brought sleep rapidly despite the serenade.
Today we toured Lima. In particular, we went to San Francisco de Lima, a monastery built in the 1600s. Because Andalusians were coming to Peru from recently Moorish Spain at the time, the monastery features wonderful tilework, a courtyard with gardens and fountains and arches. As has always been the way among Catholic institutions, wealthy influential Lima families contributed artwork and financial support to the poverty-vowing Franciscan friars in return for the privilege of having members buried under the monastery's floors. Centuries later in the 1950s the monastery was in need of funds and decided to open up those graves, scramble the bones and create ossuary "catacombs" for the touring public. The monks broke down walls and made low narrow tunnels among the dark opened burial sites so ticketed visitors (even a bunch of Westminster Griffins) could indulge in gazing with guilty curiosity at the fate of all mortal flesh, peering down upon eerily lit dust and bones. We wondered what became of all the piles of finger and toe bones, ribs, vertebrae, pelvic and arm bones. The artistic fathers arranged almost only femurs and staring skulls for display. Anyway, those generous families of the early colonial period have ended up paying twice --- once during their lives as patrons secure in the hope of sacred burial, and now again as the objects of tourists' grim fascination.