Day 12- Caral/Lima

Today we met at Youth Hostel to get into our bus and drive to Caral, the oldest civilization in America and one of the oldest in the world. I left my house at 7am and took a cab to the hostel, and we left around 7:30 or 7:40. We had a four hour ride to Caral, and I was able to sleep for almost an hour. When we got out of the van, we saw beautiful streams and trees on the ground surrounded by tall cliffs and desert. 

Paul Kosok discovered Caral in 1948, but not until 1994 was the site excavated and deemed ancient. Its inhabitants lived there from 2600B.C. to 2000B.C., and archaeologists are still exploring why its citizens left. In the whole village, they have only found 4 adult skeletons and 2 infants. It's possible that they had a special funeral custom, such as burying the bodies in another village or cremating them. They implemented an irrigation system to plant beans, squash, potatoes and more.

When the site was first discovered, all of the pyramidal structures, including houses and temples, were covered on the top by clay. This was removed during the excavation process, proving that the mounds were, in fact, houses. The public architecture has stairs, rooms, and courtyards and there is also an amphitheater. Some jewelry was discovered in one mound, as well as a knotted textile piece called a quipu. They believe that Caral's inhabitants followed an Incan record keeping system, involving knots tied in rope, though there is no evidence to support its purpose either way.

After hiking back down the mountains for just over a mile, we got back in the van and drove about 30 minutes to a nice restaurant along the way back to Lima. I ordered duck with fried rice and a salad; the duck was very hard to cut but was very tasty. They gave us a pear for dessert, and Monica surprised us by paying for the whole meal, which we all really appreciated.

We drove another four hours back... I couldn't sleep and had no ipod so I was bored but enjoyed the gorgeous beaches we passed. Once I got back to my house, my host father and sister were home, and the rest were out with their extended family. I took a shower and went downstairs to eat a light dinner (we had lunch at 2 or 3pm and they served us a lot of food, so I wasn't very hungry).

Renzo returned to the house. I told him he could come out with me the other night, but he was sleeping when I left, so he wanted to join me that night. I went online and read that people were planning to meet at Murphy's Pub at 11:30pm, so we got ready and left at 11. We grabbed a beer at a German bar right by Murphy's and walked over around 11:45 or so. However, once we got there, nobody from Northeastern was there. They had a live band and a cover charge of 10 soles, so I assumed people didn't want to pay for that and went to a discoteca. Renzo told me he was already planning on going to his friend Sergio's house for some pisco, so we took a cab there. I went on Facebook once we arrived and tried calling various people's numbers to see where everyone had gone; only Rosanna's worked, and she was sleeping and told me not to call her. Apparently, nobody had gone out that night since they were very tired.

We hung out with Sergio and Carlos, one of Renzo's best friends, for about an hour and took a cab to the club. Renzo asked me if I'd ever gone to a gay bar, and I told him I hadn't but had always wanted to. His friends are gay, so we went to Lola's Bar. They charged us 20 soles to get in, but that included a beer. The place was a lot of fun but very, very packed with barely enough room to dance. We stayed there until about 5am, at which point Renzo and I decided to go back home and eat. On the way back, though, we kept running into more of his friends and they wanted to go to a different club. There was more room to dance in the second place, and we stayed until 7am before walking home. I had a really fun night and got to bond with my host brother. Also, I spoke in Spanish pretty much the whole time (Carlos is studying English and wanted to practice with me, but we only spoke a sentence here and there) and met some new people.