tarainperu

Yes, I have been listening to the Rolling Stones, hence the title. So, after our sandboarding adventure, one of the girls, Kelli, and I headed up the North Coast for a week (we had a week off from classes). We first went to the city of Trujillo, which is a pretty and quaint city. Around Trujillo are the centuries old ruins of Chan Chan (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chan_Chan) and the Temples of the Sun and the Moon (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Huaca_de_la_Luna and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Huaca_del_Sol). Both we were awesome to see; Chan Chan is SO huge and vast, it's hard to take it all in. After two days in Trujillo, we hopped on an overnight bus to Mancora, Peru's best known beach paradise. Now, you may be wondering why I have included websites and no pictures. It is because while I was asleep on ... read more

Saturday we went to the Peru v Paraguay game and it was AMAZING. The crowd was ridiculous and the game was fun to watch. The final score was 0 - 0 (a big disappointment) and Paraguay almost made a goal about 10 times. The peruvian team was pretty lucky. We had to take a taxi, a bus, and then walk 15 blocks to get into the stadium. We were all decked out in $5 jerseys we had bought along the street on the way in. The crowd was fantastic, singing and screaming non-stop, and lots of flares were set off and air-filled "Arriba Peru" bags (see photo) were being thrown around. The end of the game wasn't so exciting; everyone was pretty disappointed. Overall though, it was soooo much fun and we are definitely going to ... read more

My life is starting to really settle down now; I have my daily routines, I can navigate around my house in the dark, and I am starting to recognize overplayed songs on the radio. I have moved onto the second level of my Spanish courses and am able to have basic conversations pretty easily. Besides the daily routine (which normally includes some sort of stomach pain; my stomach isn't a big fan of the Peruvian bacteria), I have gone to see a friend in a play (Bodas de Sangre), maybe half of which I understood, taken a trip to the Lima Zoo (nothing to brag about, but it was a fun afternoon), started volunteering at the largest orphanage in Lima (with the cutest kids ever), danced the night away at discotecas, headed into the mountains for ... read more

The beginning of our trip was a whirlwind; we found out we were going less than 12 hours before our flight our of Lima. There were four of us leaving on Tuesday (Klaas, Kelli, Claire, and me) and another UVa student joining us on Wednesday. Our flight was earrrrly in the morning; we left our houses at 3am for a 5:30am flight. The flight was uneventful (AeroCondor was the company- they were great!) and we were greeted by a travel agent in Cuzco and taken to our hotel. At the hotel we had coco tea (made from coco leaves) to prevent soroche, aka altitude sickness. We all went straight to bed and woke up to go find some lunch and explore the city. Our hotel was 4 blocks from the Plaza de Armas (city center), a ... read more

The places I went on my four day weekend are not those normally visited by tourists; in fact, TravelBlog doesn't even have them listed as cities in Peru. The first day of our trip, we left Lima at 8am and headed up towards the Andes. We heard there was a roadblockage caused by a post-earthquake (terremoto) landslide, so we stopped in a little town along the way, Chosica, to walk around (see picture). About twenty minutes up the road we were stopped by traffic... for 12+ hours. We would move in 15 minute spurts; 15 minutes of driving, 1 hour and 15 minutes of waiting. Everyone in all of the cars just came out and hung out on the roads, talking and meeting other travelers. The views of the Andes were AWESOME, but the extreme heat ... read more