Touring the City of Lima

This morning, we met as a delegation and had a tour of our sister school - Colegio Santa Ursula.  It is a lovely school with approximately 900 students from ages 3-17.  Our four student tour guides were all proficient in English and gave us an excellent tour of the school.  We were quite impressed with the beautiful courtyard and the amount of space with fresh air - how lovely!

UA delegation to Peru with our excellent Santa Ursula student tour guides

After our tour, we boarded a bus with Beatriz Maruy from SU and a wonderful tour guide, Maria Isabel.  We drove through the city of Lima, seeing the neighborhoods of Miraflores, San Isidro, and Lima Centro.  The city is incredibly busy and very metropolitan.

Enjoying the "clima de Lima" - grey mist every morning

We stopped at Parque del Amor as our first stop; a beautiful park situated in Miraflores on the side of the cliff overlooking the Pacific Ocean and Costa Verde.  The park is filled with sculptures and a sloped wall with love quotes runs at the edge.  The air in Lima is grey and foggy - a low mist descends in winter and the city remains quite grey from June to September.

Kayla, Maddie & Shayla represent the Class of 2017

From there, we drove into Lima Centro where we stopped at Plaza Mayor - formerly known as Plaza de Armas.  The Presidential Palace - Palacio de Gobierno - was started in the mid 16th century and we had the pleasure of experiencing the regal changing of the guard.  It was a spectacular site!  The girls also got a taste of what it feels like to be a foreigner in a new land - lots of curious gazes from the Peruvian people, interested in our uniforms and American style.

We walked through the Plaza area, visiting Santo Domingo church which includes Santa Rosa de Lima's tomb and statues of St. Rose and St. Martin de Porres.  It is one of the oldest religious structures in Lim, built on a site granted to the Dominicans by Pizarro in 1535.

We finished our tour at the church of San Francisco; a large 17th-century church near the Plaza Mayor.  It is a beautiful church with an incredibly ornate courtyard and library with beautiful puzzles of inlaid wood and mosaics.  Beneath the church sit recently discovered Catacombs - we had the opportunity to tour the crypts and learn about the discoveries made in the mid 20th century.  How incredible!  The catacombs contain skulls and bones of more than 70,000 people.

We had a delicious lunch of Peruvian chicken and french fries at Pardos - yum!  The pollo arrosto is so delicious and a Peruvian specialty.  The Peruvians are very proud of their food culture and they should be!

Our lunch table

Peruvian chicken - Yum!

After lunch, we returned to school where the girls met their host sisters for the last period of the day before heading home with them for the weekend.  The girls will get to know their hostesses and families very well over the course of the next two days and it will be exciting for us to reunite as a group on Monday morning!

Delegation with our excellent tour guide, Maria Isabel