Today I tried to sleep in and let my body rest but I couldn´t. For one, there is this super annoying little song that plays every time the light in the square turns red so that pedestrians know they can walk across the street safely. There is also the fact that I have a TV in my room that has American channels! Very few times on this trip have I had the pleasure to get a little news or reality television in my life here in South America. I watched Friday Night Lights and some military movie...thrilling I know.
Anyway, I ended up getting up around 7:30 a.m. and had breakfast and then walked to the Santa Catalina de Siena Monastery. I had heard from several people it was well worth the 30 Soles to enter and they were right!
Santa Catalina Monastery is an adobe brick walled community that is 400 years old. The monastery takes up an entire city block and is practically a city within a city (20,000 sq/m). It was started in the late 1500´s only about 40 years after the city of Arequipa was founded. The nuns who lived within Santa Catalina were usually from wealthy families as their family paid for them to be there. They had homes within the monastery and each home had at least 4 servants. It was tradition that the first child became a nun, the second got married, and the third went to the military. Over time this tradition changed and now the nuns live in a large community together for free in the new section of the monastery, opening the old section to the public as a museum.
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