Several of us toured a convent in Arequipa the other day. It takes up an entire city block and is basically it´s own city within it´s citadel-type walls. We wondered around for at least two hours to see the tourist part of it. Nuns currently live in a renovated area, which isn´t on the tour, of course.
It was built in the 1500s-ish and the nuns that lived there came with a dowrie that decided how nice their room would be and how large their kitchen. Everything was brick and it felt cold in most rooms, but it was neat to walk down the streets within the convent and see original objects, like beds and trunks and, in one room, a giant chair with a whole in the bottom...for all your bathroom necessities.
My favorite was the laundry system, which was outside with water running down a long narrow slide-like rock, with holes on the side that had pipes leading to ginormous brick basins that had holes in the bottom. If you blocked the water coming down the slide by a certain hole, the water would get high enough to go down that hole, into the pipe and fill the basin if the basin. I played with it.
Once upon a time, the nuns in this convent were a bunch of partiers complete with slaves of their own, but along came a Dominican nun who banished all such goings-on.
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