Our First Days in Arequipa

It is Wednesday and we've been here 5 days. We'll add some pictures later.

Our first news is that we found an apartment near our hotel.

Avenida Bolognesi, the street where we will live
Our house is at the end of the street. That gate you see is to a large public sports complex. The next picture is of the entrance to where we will live. There are several houses and one apartment building behind this big gate. The gate keeper didn't want me to take any pictures until I was living there. So I didn't.

Apartment Entrance
Our Apartment is on the 5th floor so we will have to walk up. The view is spectacular. We'll never have such a view again in our lives.

The apartment has two bedrooms, is furnished and costs very little in New Paltz dollars.

This city is incredibly beautiful. A real antique. All the pictures you have perhaps seen of Arequipa only show you the most well-known buildings but everywhere you turn there are little passages and alleyways that are just what Christopher Alexander talked about in "The Timeless Way of Building". Small, intimate spaces that exhibit that "quality without a name".

The university is moving to its new campus and we haven't seen it yet. Computer Science is in the old campus building - a refurbished brewery. The Comp Sci department is right next to the Rectoria (more or less, the 9th floor of Haggerty) and Andy is the only person not wearing a shirt and tie. We can only imagine what people would have thought if he had turned up here with his ponytail of last year.

We went shopping today for bed clothing. We bought a couple of wool blankets, pillows and a pair of slippers for Andy. We need to buy everything for the apartment, which we will do little by little.