Una Semana Peruana

South America
February 14th 2012

Published: February 15th 2012

(Scroll all the way down to the bottom to see more pictures)

Happy Valentine's Day everyone!

Tonight be and Cesar are going out to dinner. He has been sick and I have had really bad sunburn (as you can see from the picture!) so we have not seen each other much lately.

Anyways, so I learned a few interesting things this week..
- Lima, Peru and Washington, DC are on the same longitude line. Don’t believe me? Check it out! If you go directly south from DC you would eventually reach me. Pretty cool, in my opinion.
-The city is doing transportation reform over the next 3 months. This means all the privately owned buses will be forced to work for the government on fixed salaries. This is generally accepted as a good thing. It is easy to take a bus here, but it is absolute chaos. There is no bus schedule so you simply wait for the bus you need at a bus stop. Sometimes you wait 10 minutes, sometimes less than 1. You never know. Every once in a while there will be two buses with the same routes

Sunburn!

next to each other. In this case they race around like mad-men in competition to pick up passengers. Since they are privately owned, their salaries depend on how many passengers they get. There is incentive to drive fast, cut people off, and be reckless. With fixed salaries they won’t need to rush.
My only worry with this is that it will take some time to work out the kinks, for example the schedules. With the private system there were always lots of buses going everywhere… all the time.

-Valentine’s Day is celebrated in Peru. It’s a National Holiday here and everyone gets off work!!!

I went to the movies the other day. We went to go see “Con el Diablo Adentro” or “The Devil Inside”, for you English speakers. The movies are exactly the same here but come out a month or two later. Oh and they only cost $2 ($5 for 3D). Otherwise they are the same. The theatre is the same, there are still lines for food and Coca-Cola and the theatre screen is just as nice. I like going to the movies here.

The

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most eventful day this week has definitely been sailing to an island with “El Tio” (The uncle) of my neighbors. In total there was 11 of us. We didn’t know, but El Tio invited 10 people also! It was double the normal amount. Everything still went smoothly. Except the sunburn.

We had to swim from the boat to the island. To me it looked pretty close. “Nah I don’t need a life jacket.” Bad decision. I ended up clinging onto my friends nearly 4/5ths of the way. Half way there we saw the head of a sea lion in the distance.

Omar—“Aw look a little sea lion”
(10 minutes later)
Rodrigo—“there it is again… but it’s not small!”
The thing was gigantic. Its head was at least the size of the tire on a car. It’s two front teeth looked as big as water bottles. AND IT LOOKED STRAIGHT AT US AND SWAM IN OUR DIRECTION.

Naturally I was the only one to keep my cool as they screamed like girls..

We were on the boat for about 5 hours. It was a lot of fun and I

FOG!

Abnormal Weather in Lima. 3 whole days. Weird, huh?

hope to go again soon.

Some of the pictures below….
2 are from outside of Cesar’s apartment. Usually you can see the ocean but there is too much fog. This weather is very unusual for Lima. Everyone says the same thing as back in the United States.. “What the heck is going on?” This weird ominous fog lasted for 3 days.

I felt my first earthquake! It was cool… Alrighty another successful week in Peru (healthy, also!) so hopefully they just keep comin.

Much Love

Chris

Hoy recorde un momento con Molly. Hace como 5 meses en "el invierno" de Lima. Pues fuimos a Norky's en Centro por la primera vez, para probarla. Al principio se parece un buen sitio. Fuimos adentro para comer. Desde el primer momento teniamos mucho confusion. No sabiamos donde estubo el menu! Ni donde perdir. Asi eventualmente fuimos para comprar la comida. Entonces, era necesario esperar 10 minutos. Esto era extrano porque parece como Fast Food. Las demas no esperaron ni un momento, pero todavia todo bien. Cuando, al fin, tuvimos nuestro pollo y fuimos para sentarnos. (Oh tambien, no Coca-Cola!) Una millar de moscas.

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Todavia quedamos... hasta el primer toca de la comida. Que ascueroso! Salimos corriendo. Sobre todo, comida mala, pero una memoria muy buena con mi mejor amiga, Molly 😊

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