An afternoon in Lima

Thanks to a ten-hour layover between flights and to my dad's connections in Peru, I got to spend a lovely afternoon in Lima on my way home. Despite having heard and read several less-than-flattering accounts of the nation's capital (two that stick out are my dad's colleague's classifying it as "just another big, ugly city", and Patrick Symmes' nicknaming it "Scorch"), I quite enjoyed my short stay there. Maybe I did not stick around long enough for the place to bother me, or maybe I just really like big, ugly cities. There is something about the energy pulsing through urban centers, ugly or not, that has a way of getting under my skin even when I am exposed to it for just a few hours.

After lunch at a lovely restaurant in Pueblo Libre, I got to visit the Museo Nacional de Arqueología, which was really neat because I had just studied the ancient Peruvian cultures in my class in Cusco, and here I got to see a great collection of artifacts that before I had only read about. From top to bottom: the pretty courtyard; an estela whose origin and significance I forget, but I liked the frog at the top, or I guess at the left, since it came out sideways and I don't feel like trying to fix it; ah, the dioramas of Latin American museums; one of the amazing textiles from the Paracas culture, in a not-so-amazing photo full of glare from the display case; and finally, another legacy of the Paracas: trepanations (or trephinations - we English speakers apparently could not decide how it should be spelled). This is essentially a surgical operation which consists of administering to the patient a serious anesthetic (usually including coca) and proceeding to bore a hole in his or her skull, with a tool made of some hard substance such as obsidian. A great number of skulls with such holes have been found in the Paracas region, leading us to believe that it was quite a common medical procedure. The idea is, it was thought to release pressure and therefore cure serious headaches, like maybe migraines or cluster headaches or some sort of trauma resulting from injury. Also extant was (and, to a certain degree, still is) the belief that insanity or other mental illness was a result of the brain's being too hot, and so, a hole in the skull would ventilate it and help lower the temperature. Who knows? Oh, if you click on the photo to enlarge it, you can see the how-to diagrams on the poster in the back of the display case.