7.16pm, Monday May 18, hostel bar ....just quickly

I am shortly to go off to dinner at a vegetarian restaurant with J, an American doctoral scientist from Michigan. We spent the day together in the beautiful city centre of Lima, all conquistador architecture - government buildings and cathedrals. Yellow boxy buildings with several stories of enclosed black balconies; an enormous white governor´s mansion reminiscent of both Buckingham Palace and London´s Parliament building.

J and I listened to the military band play American tunes in front of the mansion and went to an awe-inspiring Franciscan monastery. Surrounding a small, beautiful dry-looking courtyard with palms, oleanders and other green flowering things, the monastery has a general grand spaciousness that was changed over the centuries, from wall friezes which only bits of can be seen after layers of wall were scraped away to whitewash. These balconies are covered by ageing wooden ceiling tiling. The monastery´s major stairway is topped by an impressive Moorish wooden star-patterned dome and in the cathedral the figures of saints are intricately carved on every friar´s seat, which all face a stand for an enormous songbook. The monastery also houses a library that still has 300-year-old parchment books (that only special researchers may touch), a skylight and a classic spiral wooden staircase to a balcony level.

Underneath the monastery are catacombs, burial home to 250,000 people. Archeologists have organised the bones they found according to type, and in a few deep pits decorously arranged them in kaleidescopic patterns of skulls and bones. There are many higgeldy-piggeldy narrow passageways and random rooms, making the catacombs look more like a secret escape route or covert prison than anything else.