Nuns with…maids?
After a rough night with little sleep (tooth, stomach full of camel, church bells ringing at 6am) we went to visit the local convent. It is pretty old and full of tourists. There are still 24 Dominican nuns living there, although they used to be 174 or something. It is a little town, with lots of small and big houses where rich nuns used to live. After the vatican decided they had to be poor, they had to let go of their many many private maids and learn to do stuff themselves. Even though there were some holidays on which only the nuns were allowed to cook…must have been horrible…the maids probably allowed them little practice.
They had things for making Jesus-waffles (hosts), laundry equipment, large rooms and interesting toilets. And a spectacular view, of course, of the three mountains (Picchu Picchu, Misti, Chinchani). The streets of the convent are named after Spanish cities (Sevilla, Toledo, Granada, etc.).
A small nun’s room Complete with a fake nun (at least I think she was fake?)
One of the many streets inside the convent
After that, we went to a mill that is still actually working (it is about 186 years old). The view was nice, but even better was the vicuña that, with the aid of an alpaca, was chasing around every dog within sight. I wonder what it wanted to do with the dog? I also got some videos of that, but I can’t properly encode them at the moment. I might upload them later, though.
This cute little thing does not look aggressive at all!
After that, we went to an outlook with a breathtaking view of the mountains. There was a little church there as well, and a 30’s car bringing the Peruvian bride to her wedding with a German guy.
The car that took the bride to her inevitable fate
We went for some thermal springs, to take a sulfur bath, but the tubs were small and full of people…so we decided not to, and go for a walk instead. On the way we met some of the cutest lambs I have ever seen…although they made some strange noises. There was this beautiful, almost ghost-city like village with this strange church…completely plain but for the tower. We got onto the roof…nice!
After getting back to Arequipa, we bought some fruit for about 1 Euro…8 granadillas, 5 small bananas, a pepino, a chirimoya…we calculated the Meinl price to be at around 50 Euro.
We went to look for a restaurant, and found a nice one. We had cebiche de camarones and corvina, Kentucky fried cuy, camarones saltados, corvina saltada and (mhh!) pato con salsa de maracuya. So that is: raw sea bass with shrimp, fried guinea pig, shrimp with fries, vegetables and sauce, sea bass with fries, vegetables and sauce, duck with maracuya sauce.
I can now pride myself to be able to make a perfect cut into a granadilla with my razor-sharp broken tooth!