Day 4: Relaxing day in Arequipa

We had zero agenda again in Arequipa, and that was just fine with the group.   We set off mid morning heading in the general direction of Mondo Alpaca, or Alpaca World!   The Plaza was busy early, with some military parade just ending and a girl and Boy Scout looking group doing some kind of celebrations.   Tons of locals were in varying states of relaxation and the atmosphere was very chill.   We still haven’t seen a cloud in the sky, so the temperatures in the shadows are generally nice, and the sunny areas get pretty hot pretty quickly. 

Alpaca world was pretty small, but we saw a little demo of weaving (with no touts or sales people hanging around.... weird) and the animals themselves in a relatively small pen.   The kids (Alex + 4) fed them some grass and we tried to strike up a conversation with a group of young men that seemed to be in exile from Venezuela and had made their way on foot to here.

We walked for another hour or two, going through some quiet neighbourhoods and eventually through a large paid entry public park that was a bid of a dilapidated amusement park with no rides.  

 

Lunch, it was agreed, would be Turkish cuisine so we headed back towards the Plaza area and landed on El Turk.  The food was great and the ambiance in the back courtyard was perfect for two games of euchre.  

The kids headed back to the hotel after lunch, while the four of us took a meandering walk through the city, passing through the market as Kim and Alex hadn’t been there yet.   The streets were fairly active and it was nice just kind of wondering for quite a while.

We found the kids singing and playing cards on the rooftop deck, and soon Kim and Beth were adding to the fun...

We struck out at Il Fornallini for dinner as it was closed so we ended up a place called Dimas for relatively mediocre, by Arequipa’s standards, fare.  We did manage to fill ourselves up with crepes after dinner - Abby had spotted a place called Crepissimo a few days ago and had locked it away in her crepe memory bank.   

It was a nice way to end the day... a littler earlier than most.  We have a very early start tomorrow!