Volcanoes

So I recently found out that Arequipa is surrounded not by mountains, but volcanoes! Within the Andes Mountains there are quite a few volcanic zones (thanks wikipedia) and I'm living in one of them. Meet Misti, Arequipa's favorite volcano. Misti is inactive, and people climb it quite often. This is a photo I took on a bus tour of Arequipa.

Here's what Misti looks like from space. I took this photo on a space shuttle tour of the Milky Way:

Peru sometimes has earthquakes too. Arequipa experiences around 200 small tremors a day which can't be felt normally. (Unless you happen to be a trained earthquakeologist like me.) From a Wikipedia article on Arequipa: "Unfortunately the city was built on a very earthquake prone area, and was completely destroyed by earthquakes and volcanic eruptions during the 1600s."

Honestly, I'm just glad I didn't decide to time travel before my visit. Because that would have been rough.

In other news, I went to a bunch of really cool art galleries today. There's a guy living at New Hope who's currently getting an Art degree in college, so he took me to some cool places. My favorite was a gallery full of paintings by a Peruvian artists who has visited the US a few times, which you could see in some of his works. There was one of the San Francisco bridge, which is fitting because there's a San Francisco area in Arequipa. I wish I could find more links online to his paintings because they're gorgeous. All the ones in the exhibit were of this style.

Tomorrow, the girls are going horseback riding! I'm pretty excited about it. And fortunately, I recently bought a pair of gray boots that I'm pretty sure will go perfectly with a horse.