Peru, Day 2 - A Brief History of Death and Sex

I was so excited thinking about writing this post, since I thought we'd be paragliding off the cliffs of Miraflores today. But, alas, it was not to be. The winds had to be at least 12 mph from the south in order to paraglide, but they were too weak.

Instead, we visited the Larco Museum. The museum was founded by Rafael Larco Hoyle, apparently when he was 25 years old (if I recall correctly). There are 3 main rooms open to the public, displaying pre-Columbian art with a heavy emphasis on the Moche civilization. The permanent exhibition room showed off shelves and shelves of decorative pottery, funerary textiles, a mummy bundle (with the mummy of a 4 or 5 year old child still intact inside), and lots of jewelry. There was a repeating theme of the pre-Columbian obsession with death (or the afterlife) and human sacrifice. So, for instance, we saw this gem:

If you look carefully you can see the victims of sacrifice toppling down. The guy on the top is bent over, spilling blood.

The second room was basically a storage room filled to the brim with uncatalogued pottery.

The third, and pretty famous room, was basically an ode to sex and genitalia. Ceramic (Moche?) sculptures of oversized phalluses and vulvas and various positions of intercourse, including between men and animals and women and dead men. See, e.g., here.

There wasn't a lot of explanation to this gallery, so I was left wondering if this was something religious or whether this was the Moche version of porn and us modern fools had decided to romanticize it by calling it historical art. 

After visiting the museum, we went to the cafe to try chicha, a sweet, cold drink made out of purple corn.

We then headed to Miraflores, figuring that we could wander around this beach-side district of Lima even though the paragliding attempt at failed. We opted to start with some more sexual tension at the Parque del Amor:

Then we walked along the cliffs we would've paraglided off of if the winds had been strong enough.

Apparently it is always foggy like this around this time of year in Lima.

We wandered around to engage in my number-one favorite pastime, shopping! But Patrick discovered a grocery store and we had a blast trying to figure out what the fruits were. How many of these fruits do you recognize?

Tomorrow we will take a culinary tour of Lima. Stay tuned!