Daily Archives: November 17, 2017

Santa Catalina Monastery

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This nunnery is located right in the historical center of Arequipa and takes up an entire city block.

Before I went in, I got a pretty good view of the snow capped volcano this morning.
The nunnery is quite interesting.  Nuns would go there for 4 years while they trained and then they needed to decide if they wanted to stay or if they wanted to leave.  The whole complex us beautifully painted with lots of courtyards and trees.
There is also a coffee shop inside as well as an art gallery.  You can view the old kitchens as well as bedrooms and living areas, it’s all been preserved.  Part of the complex was repaired due to earthquakes and you can see some of the damage as well. 
There is quite a creepy area with pictures of any nuns that died here.  The artist was given 24 hours to paint the nun after death, as he was not allowed to paint them when they were living.

Apparently, once per week they open it up after dark as well and then you can see it lit up with the street lights.

Juanita

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I made it to Arequipa on an overnight bus and I probably would not repeat the experience!  Arequipa is lovely.  It’s much quieter than Lima and surrounded by snow capped volcanoes.

One of the interesting thing that was found on one of these mountains is Juanita.  Juanita is an Inca girl that was sacrificed on the mountain and remained almost perfectly preserved since she was frozen.  They call her the frozen mummy.  You can go to a small museum and watch a video about her and then you can actually see Juanita.  They kept her frozen in a case at -20 degrees Celsius. Unfortunately they do not allow pictures, which is a shame.
The cathedrals in Arequipa are also quite spectacular.  A lot of the buildings in this area are made of rock from the volcanoes that surround the city.  There is also a nunnery that takes up an entire city block which people call a city within a city.

Peru wine

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The majority of wine in Peru is made in the Ica province, which is a desert.  On average this area receives less than 5mm of rain per year.  So where do they get the water from? They built a canal.  This way, the water from the mountains runs down into Ica.

There are some large wineries in Ica that use modern technology.  Tacama would be one of these.  Tacama is actually the oldest winery in America.  It was started by the Spanish as they did not want to continue importing communion wine from Europe (that’s their story and they are sticking with it).
However, there are also a lot of smaller vineyards that use manual labour for everything.
Once they harvest, the grapes go into the front of this and people still use their feet to crush them.  After that it goes into a press, which is turned by hand on a corkscrew.  Obviously these are small wineries, but I still think it’s pretty cool to see them continuing the old traditions.
Pisco is a distilled spirit made from grapes.  First they get the juice out if the grapes and then they heat it.  It boils and the steam rises.  The steam us forced through a copper tube and cooled.
This bath would be full of cold water.  When they first extract it they get 98% alcohol which I’m told us bad for you 🙂 They sell that to pharmacies as rubbing alcohol.  After that they get Pisco (35% – 45%), after that they get a much lower product that they use to feed livestock.
The casks here are used instead of barrels for the wine.
I took a wine “tour”.  It was actually a taxi driving me between wineries.  The actual wineries did the tour.  I found it quite interesting.  Obviously they let you sample the wine and Pisco.