Beautiful Lima

Lima Peru is a very beautiful city steeped in history. Unfortunately over the past 200 or so years, there have been some major earthquakes that have destroyed a lot of the old architecture. For example, the main cathedral in Plaza De Armas below has been rebuilt 7 times over the last 200 years and the main columns are now cement:

We visited the Monastery of San Francisco (below) that have catacombs dating back to the 1700s. Believe it or not, they have over 25,000 skeleton remains- very freaky- under this church. They are housed in the monastery to the left which is very large. We took a tour and there are bins and bins and bins of bones and skulls. I never thought any religion would keep stuff like that; very poignant.

Both of these two churches are in the old part of Lima along with the President Palace that we visited next. In 1940, the President at the time started having a 'changing of the guards' every day at noon (sounds awfully familiar to England, don't you think?).

We went into Lima on their public transportation system that is bus versus rail. The bus lanes run parallel to the equivalent of our Gardiner Expressway.

It's quite interesting how this works along with some of the worst traffic congestion I've seen in a long time. There are people along the expressway selling papers, food, etc as it is almost a parking lot.