Semaforos y Alpaca Mundo con Liz!

A lovely shot of Arequipa's main plaza. Right below the terrace we were on was one of very few intersections with a stoplight. (Driving or walking through the rest of the non-stoplight, non-stop sign intersections was tricky, you couldn't be bashful, you had to put the left foot in, and then the right foot in, and walk into the melee with faith that they'll stop, which they will.)

So, when this particular stoplight allowed for pedestrian crossing, it played a little ditty: a tinny Beethoven sampling followed by staccato beeping. It was amusung at first, but if you sat in any restaurant nearby, you'd go mad listening to it. Nice plaza otherwise.


Liz and I went to Alpaca World, which I thought was just going to be a store. It was that, PLUS an almost-museum of Alpaca! There was a sort-of farm with a few live alpaca milling about; piles of shorn wool, ready to be cleaned; a little stand showing how it is cleaned and sorted; and outside, some camera-ready scenes showing how you get the final products: hanks of finished, dyed yarn, hanging from nails in the wall and two lonely-seeming women weaving with the yarn. Honestly the women looked more forlorn than the animals at the fake farm in front.

If so much wool is black and brown (alpaca wool falls in a 24 (I think!) color spectrum from white to black) then how do we get all the pretty colors? That's what I want to know.