Peruvian Navidad

Looking for my Lima church's Christmas play, some friends and I stumbled into an Episcopalian service. It was a beautiful church, and these windows depicting the early life of Christ were done by a local artist.

The play charmingly included lots of child actors, and the story described the U.N. searching hard for world peace when there was only news of war...eventually finding it only in Jesus Christ. I really liked the Peruvian Baby Jesus.

(The girl in red, black, and white, is a classic take on the criolla culture, originating with Africans who were taken here by force, and now have made a huge impact on Peruvian culture, especially along the coast.)

Jan, Ruth, and I went down the Lima coastline for lunch one day. If the drop off and highway weren't dramatic enough, the restaurant with this view is called "El Salto de Fraile", literally "The Jump of the Friar" and has a coinciding folktale of a love-sick (of course) monk who jumps to his death. The tiring job of recreating the jump falls to this strapping young man: