More Explosions

Okay last time it was fireworks, this time… I don’t know.

Six o’clock this morning I awake to a huge bang noise.  In my sleepy haze I can’t decide what it is, but I think it is not a gunshot, unless it is, I don’t know what a gunshot sounds like except in movies.  I decide it might be a car collision, but there wasn’t the tinkle of glass and there definitely wasn’t a screech of breaks, so I thought it might have been a car going into a wall or a dumpster or something.

I actually had a few sleepy moments where I wondered if the house was about to fall down, but I decided I was safe.  So I went out of my room, I have a balcony, and looked around.  No smoke on the horizon and the city was not leveled, so far so good.

But across the street at Plaza Vea I see this:

Which is a little confused but is actually a bunch of police officers and people with video cameras.

I still have no idea what’s going on (initially I thought they might be filming a movie, or maybe there was a car crash), so I walk up to the corner and look down the street and can’t see anything.  Then suddenly I guess the police take down their tape or barricade and all the reporter guys start running down the street to the side door of Plaza Vea.

So that’s all I knew, unfortunately I did not have a radio or a television.  So I went back to sleep (it was 6am after all).

When I got up a few hours later, Maria, our housekeeper, was telling me that she heard about it on the news, that it was actually a bomb.  News to me!  That was a bit scary, but I couldn’t figure out who was responsible.  I thought she said something about stealing, but my Spanish needs work.  So I ask Ana Maria to translate, and she says that it was actually terrorists.  Now in the past, Lima has had a bunch of terrorists who liked bombing, they’ve even made a movie about it.  But nothing like that has happened in twenty years or so.

Finally, I found an article online that goes into more detail.  The general overview is that some armed robbers broke in last night and planted a bomb to distract the police while they robbed the place. The loud bang I heard this morning was probably them diffusing the bomb.