El centro

Most of the activities that seemed interesting from the guidebook were in centro Lima. El museo del arte, el museo de la inquisición, eating chiffa in chinatown (chiffa, I am told, is chinese food with a peruano influence), and then, after dark, the circuito mágico del agua.

El museo del arte, it turns out, is under renovation, so the second floor is inaccessible. The first floor features an artist who did a lot of street work during the most recent military dictatorship in Argentina, some pre-Incan artefacts from a dig somewhere near Lima, and artwork inspired by children's educational material. The time you spent reading that sentence is about how much time I should have devoted to the museo.

El museo de la inquisición is about the Peruano experience with the Spanish Inquisition. Weren't expecting that were you? It never occurred to me that the Spanish Inquisition was anything other than a European event. It's by guided tour only, and, if you understand español, you learn about how the court system was organized, the techniques used to get you to confess, the punishments for the guilty, and how, when independence was achieved, the system was abolished.

The most interesting aspect of the tour is definitely the techniques to acquire a confession. It starts with water boarding, moves on to the rack, and, if you still haven't confessed (they claim that most women confess during the water boarding, and most men while being stretched out on the rack), they tie your hands together behind your back, and then tie your hands to a pulley above you with a length of rope. Then they lift. Do your best to imagine that experience. Stand up, hold your hands, palms together, behind your back and start to lift them, arms straight, towards the sky. You'll stop at some point or another. But they didn't. They keep pulling until you leave the ground. What would you confess to in order to come back down?

Just recounting my visit makes it sound so very interesting, but the guide delivers all of this monotonously, skips over rooms completely, and yells at visitors who take pictures while she is talking. The yelling is the only part where her voice displays any emotion.

To eat, I head over to Lima's Chinatown, which looks astonishingly like Montréal's Chinatown. except that the second language you see on signs and menus is español. But, the buildings, the archways, the signs, the restaurant names, all the same. Similarly, chiffa tastes close enough to Canadian Chinese food that, had I received this plate at a non-traditional restaurant in Montréal, it would have been totally normal.

As the sun begins to set, I head south out of centro Lima, into, what it turns out is a very poorly lit neighbourhood. And my map, which clearly shows where the circuito is located, doesn't use street names, and it quickly becomes clear that this part of the map is not representative of reality. The map shows that I need to walk two blocks from the centro to get where I'm going, but now I'm far enough south that I can no longer see the lights of the centro and still no circuito.

It's dark. My map is useless. I don't know this neighbourhood at all. There are few people in this area, and those that are it's too dark to see their faces as they walk by me. And I know that if I turn to the left and walk a couple of blocks I'll be on Arequipa, I can take a bus back to Miraflores, and forget this whole magical circuit completely.

I stood and watched the fuenta magíca as it went through its many permutations. Growing to eighty metres. Widening to the point where it would splash people standing on the pavement around it. Lighting itself to give the water the appearance of fire. I circled it and watched it from every possible angle. I took more pictures of it than I did of all of Lima.

It is the first of a sequence of fountains, but I watched it for nearly as long as I watched the rest of them combined.