Looking across The Plaza Mayor, or Plaza de Armas, at city hall. this is the original centre of the city.
the buildings on two sides of the square are all this colour of yellow.
Lima, the first time.
My hotel was only a block or two from Plaza de Armas, the historic main square of the city. Some work was being done on the central fountain and police would not allow anyone into the square itself. Across one street is the Government Palace of Peru, the residence of the president. At noon there is an elaborate changing of the guard ceremony which draws a lot of tourists and school groups.
These kids are studying English, and their assignment was to find anglophones on the street and interview them. Unlike popular destinations for Canadians like Cuba and Costa Rica, English is not widely spoken in South America.
For some reason I had the idea that most tourists would be foreigners, but it fact those I met were usually seeing their own country. That's the cathedral behind them. |
The Rímac River runs behind the palace. That’s the Pan-American Highway alongside of it. When Lima was a walled city, the wall ended on the riverbank on the left. Lima is a desert! It averages 6.4 millimetres of rain annually, but it gets water flowing out of the nearby mountains and lots of fog from the Pacific. There are about ten million people in Lima, almost a third of the country’s total population. This former post office is now a gastronomic museum. I could have taken lots of pictures of colonial and 19th century architecture, but the battery in my phone was just about dead at this point. By the way, this is across the street from Dunkin Donuts. The area around the Plaza was filled with the smell of chicken roasting. I was thinking hard about having lunch when I got sidetracked.... |