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 a [View Full Entry]

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So, it's been weeks since I've updated my blog. Sorry guys, I've been pretty busy. So, the weekend of October the 19th two of the other program girls and I decided to take a little trip out of Lima. We packed up Friday afternoon and headed for the desert oasis of Huacachina, about 5 hours in bus south of Lima. We arrived around 10pm, had a quick supper of pizza (from the only place that was open), and headed to bed. Saturday we woke up early and by 10am we were out on the sand dunes. The dunes in the area [View Full Entry]

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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 [View Full Entry]

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Last weekend, all of the students from UVa (seven including myself) and some peruvian friends decided to spend the long weekend helping with earthquake relief in the areas hit hard. We volunteered through a program called "Un Techo Para Mi Pais" (check it out here: www.untechoparamipais.org). We spent Friday shopping for gloves and food. There is still no running water or power in most places, so we had to bring all of our food and water with us. We stayed for three nights at the Pisco airport in tents and sleeping bags. We met at a park in Lima on Friday [View Full Entry]

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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 [View Full Entry]

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On Friday morning, the four of us woke up at 5:30am to eat breakfast and catch the train to Aguas Callientes (translates to Hot Springs but is really just the town at the bottom of the mountain Machu Picchu). It was a pretty rocky 4.5 hour ride from Cuzco; we took the cheap train so the comfort level left much to be desired. We got to the town around noon, checked into our hotel, and grabbed a quick lunch. Since we had a free afternoon we decided to attempt a hike that was in the Lonely Planet guide book. The description [View Full Entry]

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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 [View Full Entry]

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So I am a little behind; sorry, it is my first attempt at blogging. August 20 though the 27 was my first real week in Lima. Spanish classes hadn't started yet, so it was a great time to relax (finally some down time - what I had been waiting for all summer) and familiarize myself with the city. Monday was rest-filled since we had been traveling all weekend and Tuesday Paco, a professor and author who is our father-like contact in Lima, took a few of us on a walk around the area we live in (San Isidro). He showed us [View Full Entry]

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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 [View Full Entry]

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Hola! My flight to Lima was long and pretty uneventful; I flew from Charlotte to Miami to Nicaragua to El Salvador and, finally, to Lima. There are 7 UVa students doing the program; we all met in Miami and arrived as a group in Lima. Once we got out of customs and immigration, we were met by the two professors directing the program and taken to our host houses. My host family lives in San Isidro, a really nice, ritzy area of Lima. My host parents are Lucia and Antonio; my host parents, another American student, Adam, Lucia's mother, and two [View Full Entry]

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