A Beautiful Weekend

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This weekend was beautiful! We spent Saturday touring all of the smaller towns within and around Huancayo. Our first stop was the textile village of Hualhuas. Here a textile worker showed us how the llama and alpaca and sheep wool was all made into the yarn that they make everything from. He also showed us several plants that grow in the valley that he uses for dyes. The products were beautiful. The big wall hangings and blankets were very soft and very expensive because they are woven either from alpaca or llama fur and they took ten 10-11hour days to complete. The hats were beautiful as were the purses and place mats. We next went to the village of San Jerónimo de Tunán which is the silver working town. The men do the bigger work for the jewelry and the women with their smaller hands fill each piece with these beautiful spirals of silver wire. The end product is absolutely breathtaking. Any jewelry person would be in heaven in any of the shops there because even the most expensive ornate piece of pure silver jewelry is less than 70 dollars. Our next stop was Laguna de Paca (Paca Lake) in the town of Jauja. Here we took pictures of the lake and went on a small boat ride to hear the story of the lake. It is very similar to the story of the flood in the Bible without Noah and the Arc and just with the drowning of all of the bad people- in this case men. After several pictures we travelled to the district of Ingenio which is the principal area where all of the trout are raised. We ate an amazing meal of fresh trout fried with garlic and trout ceviche next to the mountain fed stream/ river (fed by the glacier at Huaytapallana) outside at an umbrella covered table. Ceviche (also spelled as cebiche or seviche) , for those of you who have not had the pleasure of trying it, is according to Wikipedia, (also spelled as cebiche or seviche) is a form of citrus-marinated seafood dish, popular in mainly Latin American countries. Both finfish and shellfish are used; finfish is typically used raw while shellfish is typically cooked. For more history and info here is the wiki link:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ceviche.
We left Ingenio very full and happy. On our ride home we saw the conception statue which is a huge statue of the virgin Mary that guards and protects the city of Conception, which is right outside of Huancayo. The day was to die for: sunny and warm. It was probably around 65 which for a winter day is really nice especially when compared to a winter day in Minnesota or Wisconsin. Many fields were green with their vegetables including several huge fields of Artichokes and Quinoa. when we arrived back to our home base we were all ready for a nap.
On Saturday night we went out to a discotecha and danced and drank some pisco sours. Pisco is a grape brandy that originated most likely in Peru (people from Chile might dispute that). One thing about people in Peru is that they like to go out very late. We did not go out until 10:30, which was considered early, and we arrived home early too, at 2:30 am. It was very fun, but due to the late hour that we got in we slept in a little on Sunday morning. Sunday afternoon I went to a local park called Identity park. It is a park that was created by several artists in Huancayo to tell the history of Huancayo through mosaic artwork. Everything in the park except for the beautiful vegetation is covered in stone mosaic designs that tell about the lives of the ancestors. I am not sure how long it took to build, but I can only imagine that is was somewhere in the hundreds of thousands of man hours. Reading in the park was the perfect way to spend another spectacular winter Huancayo day and a relaxing end to my wonderful weekend.

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