The next day we went to downtown lima. We stopped to visit Claudio (Calu), Alberto's best childhood friend, who is a Peruvian Ambassador. We visited the cultural center at the Exterior Ministry, where they had a pretty cool Indonesian exhibit. We then visited the amazing Torre Tagle Palace, which was a private house, now a historical building owned by the Exterior Ministry.






We then went to the Plaza de Armas (central town square) where we saw the change of guards at the Government Palace (the Peruvian White House). The Palace is in the main square "Plaza de Armas" where the Mayor's Office, Cathedral and Government Palace are located.

We then went to "Desamparados" which is the old train station, no longer in operation. Alberto's father used to run the "Central Railways" (Ferrocarril Central) years ago. They are now run tourist trains from this station once per month to Huancayo, a main Andean city. Desamparados is now used as a cultural center.






We then went to the San Francisco church where we visited the church and took a tour of the famous Catacombs, which is a narrow maze of passages in the basement of the church, full of human bones. Pretty creepy but very interested. The bones are neatly stacked to fit the more than 25,000 bodies buried there. People wanted to be buried under a church in the old days, but that ended when the Peruvian government passed a decree banning the burial of private citizens in churches.