I can´t seem to get photos onto my blog from the internet cafes I´m in, but will post some good ones later in the week.
Outside of the general joy of finding the questionnaires filled out and meeting some wonderful healthcare workers, amusing highlights have been: using a health center bathroom that had two toilets side by side that still has me puzzling; helping a nurse- who was too busy to fill out the questionnaires -take keys out of her pocket because her silver nail polish was drying; being accosted by the patient ¨ambassador¨ at a health center and having him pull us into an office for an official-seeming chat for a good 20 minutes before realizing he just wanted to hang out and the person we needed to see hadn't been notified we were there; meeting a self-proclaimed Hare Krishna pathologist who told me he filled in the questionnaires out of pure love, not passion (which means you expect something back), or ignorance. After an hour and a half of stories that involved allegorical oranges and tuberculosis, I felt like something had been accomplished, but I wasn´t sure what. Maybe it was the language. Maybe not.
Monday and Tuesday promise to be at least as entertaining as we hit the road to Camana and Islay on the coast with maps that look very pretty but lack detail. Dave flew home on Thursday, but is coming back to Arequipa tonight and we set off early AM tomorrow in a rental car.
I really didn´t appreciate how absolutely picteresque Arequipa is until my map search in the city center on Saturday. With a slightly slower pace this weekend, I covered a lot of the city on foot and combi passing some beautiful churches with elaborate carvings in the sillar. The mountains in the distance change color with the time of day. The river is muddy and full with rains from the Sierra.
Natalie and Mike, the students who are hear full time, have a great apartment and have brought me to some great places to eat here. Supposedly, people don´t have as much of an appetite at altitude - 2200 meters - but I´ve managed to be hungry enough to try alpaca steak and rocoto rellena - a spicy pepper stuffed with meat and raisins.
When it started raining in the afternoon yesterday, I visited a musuem that houses artifacts from the Inca empire from the surrounding 7000 meter volcanic peaks. The centerpiece of the museum is a frozen natural mummy - a 500 year old Inca sacrifice - that was discovered in the mid-nineties. Apparently, the sacrifice of the young female child was made following some eruptions which melted the glacier on the peak. Afterwards, the glacier built up and there were no eruptions until 500 years later when the discovery was made. I guess what is unique about these mummies is that they were never in fact intended to be mummies and underwent no special preservation, no removal of internal organs. They just happened to be iced over soon after their deaths and became natural mummies.
The mummy I saw, Sarita, has never been... thawed... I guess. She is maintained in a glass case at -20 C and her hair and skin are eerily intact, even if she looks a little, well, freezer burned? She is tiny and has a little satchel hanging down her back that contains coca leaves - which she must have chewed to keep her going on her journey to becoming an Incan deity.
These mummies, it is inferred from the first Spanish chronicles in Peru, were beautiful, well-behaved children selected from infancy usually from noble families. They were specially nourished and educated and then would be brought from their hometown to be recieved by the Incan king in Cusco in a huge ceremony. From there, they set out on foot with priests to trek for several weeks to the surrounding peaks to ceremonially join the gods. Before being sacrificed, they would drink chicha - corn beer- probably laced with some narcotic. They would be freezing, feeling the effects of high altitude and high content alcohol, and presumably, starting to realize what exactly joining the gods meant. Gotta wonder.
While it was thought that Sarita, like similarly discovered mummies, may have died from cold exposure, 3D CAT scans reveal cause of death to be a skull fracture, probably from a single blow to the head. 14 of these Incan sacrifice /natural mummies have been discovered in Peru since Juanita of National Geographic fame was discovered by an American archeologist from Hopkins - Johann Reinhardt.
Pyramid of the Moon at Teotihuacan.
Scaling the pyramid
Pyramid of the Sun.
The street of the dead and the pyramid of the sun.
The cathedral in Mexico City. Mexico city was once venice-like series of islands in a lake, until the Spanish drained the city. Now all of the buildings are sinking and shifting at various angles.
Pyramid of the Moon at Teotihuacan.
Scaling the pyramid
Pyramid of the Sun.
The street of the dead and the pyramid of the sun.
The cathedral in Mexico City. Mexico city was once venice-like series of islands in a lake, until the Spanish drained the city. Now all of the buildings are sinking and shifting at various angles.
