In the morning, I went to visit Santa Catalina monastery. The monastery is a huge complex - it even has its own streets. To facilitate orientation (or for another reason that I'm not aware of), one part is left white, another painted blue, and a third painted red. These arches are close to the entrance, reminding visitors to keep the noise down inside the monastery.
The stones used to build the monastery - and most of the rest of Arequipa - are called Sillar. They are volcanic stones from nearby Misti volcano that are light, durable, and easy to carve (for decorations).
The monastery was built over 400 years ago and inhabited only by nuns - no men allowed! Today, most of the monastery is done up as a museum and open to visitors. Only a very small part is still in use. The remaining nuns earn their living by making souvenirs and selling them in the museum store.
This part of the monastery is called orange tree cloister because of the orange trees growing in the courtyard. It was reserved for nuns who had already taken their vows. Novices had to stay in the white part, with notably smaller and less comfortable quarters.
This is one of the beautiful streets in the monastery:
Next to living quarters, kitchens and the infirmary, the monastery also had a room where eucharist wafers were produced. This is a tool that allowed to put text and images onto the wafers - somewhat resembling the machine we use to make waffles today ;-)
In the afternoon, I made a rather long walk to the museum of contemporary art. It is located a little outside of the center in a nice villa, surrounded by a tranquil garden. They had an exhibition of photographs from the 1920s and 1930s, mostly showing Arequipa and its surroundings. I found it fascinating just how many buildings still look exactly the same today.
But my favorite photo was a different one. It showed a scene from a shop, the shopkeeper and her daughter apparently in the middle of some kind of work. Only a small detail gave away that the scene was not spontaneously photographed, but carefully planed out - including the poses maintained by the shopkeeper and her daughter. That small detail were two animals, a dog and a chicken, moving through the picture. Due to the long exposure times necessary in these days, the animals appear shadowy and in several stages of their movement. This small imperfection made the photograph just about perfect in my eyes. It illustrated better than any description what kind of an effort photographers needed to make less that one hundred years ago.
The museum also exhibited this old camera - I'm not sure if it was the one used to take all the photographs in the museum, but the model may have been a similar one at least.
And to think that nowadays cameras can easily fit into a small pocket!
The stones used to build the monastery - and most of the rest of Arequipa - are called Sillar. They are volcanic stones from nearby Misti volcano that are light, durable, and easy to carve (for decorations).
The monastery was built over 400 years ago and inhabited only by nuns - no men allowed! Today, most of the monastery is done up as a museum and open to visitors. Only a very small part is still in use. The remaining nuns earn their living by making souvenirs and selling them in the museum store.
This part of the monastery is called orange tree cloister because of the orange trees growing in the courtyard. It was reserved for nuns who had already taken their vows. Novices had to stay in the white part, with notably smaller and less comfortable quarters.
This is one of the beautiful streets in the monastery:
Next to living quarters, kitchens and the infirmary, the monastery also had a room where eucharist wafers were produced. This is a tool that allowed to put text and images onto the wafers - somewhat resembling the machine we use to make waffles today ;-)
In the afternoon, I made a rather long walk to the museum of contemporary art. It is located a little outside of the center in a nice villa, surrounded by a tranquil garden. They had an exhibition of photographs from the 1920s and 1930s, mostly showing Arequipa and its surroundings. I found it fascinating just how many buildings still look exactly the same today.
But my favorite photo was a different one. It showed a scene from a shop, the shopkeeper and her daughter apparently in the middle of some kind of work. Only a small detail gave away that the scene was not spontaneously photographed, but carefully planed out - including the poses maintained by the shopkeeper and her daughter. That small detail were two animals, a dog and a chicken, moving through the picture. Due to the long exposure times necessary in these days, the animals appear shadowy and in several stages of their movement. This small imperfection made the photograph just about perfect in my eyes. It illustrated better than any description what kind of an effort photographers needed to make less that one hundred years ago.
The museum also exhibited this old camera - I'm not sure if it was the one used to take all the photographs in the museum, but the model may have been a similar one at least.
And to think that nowadays cameras can easily fit into a small pocket!
