Perusing Peru

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The flight from Denver was a full day of travel that went smoothly and allowed for lots of movie watching. At the Lima airport we were greeted pleasantly by our pre-booked taxi driver who was waiting for us with our names on a sign, we felt like high rollers! She got us safely (although her van took a beating) to our home stay location in Miraflores, a region of Lima about an hour of adventurous driving through thick traffic from the airport. There we were greeted by our host, a super sweet woman who has a fantastic house where we stayed the entire week during our spanish school.

Our spanish school was a well-run agency about a half hour walk from our new house. From Monday to Friday we spent a half day at the school, which was a learning experience in more ways than one. After the initial welcome, the only communication was to be in spanish -- in retrospect a good thing but at times very frustrating! In the afternoons we would recover and tool around the neighbourhood: Miraflores is a pretty spot right on the Pacific coast with some fantastic views. We rented bikes one afternoon, tried to do some surfing, practiced our spanish, found some great food (Lima is famous for its food), tried many of the local cervesas, watched the paragliders zoom around the ocean-side cliffs, took a cooking class, and logged lots of miles on our feet (averaging 15 - 20 000 steps per day if you are into that).

As we write this later on in our travels we've found the spanish school was well worth the effort. Although we are far from fluent it has made traveling considerably easier. We do get laughed at regularly though, for example, the words esposa and esposo sound pretty close but one means husband and one means wife. That little mistake resulted in some smirks.

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Photos

250 steps down to the ocean.
250 harder steps back up!

Check out the sign - no horn honking.
Thank goodness, otherwise we would be honked at every second, rather than every other second. Apparently the law is helping considerably though.

Cycling to Barranco
Thank you to the thoughtful kind boys who noticed we were a little lost and led the way to this beautiful spot.

Creepy street art.
But most of it is stunning.

Attack of the killer ant!
This must be a new species - 15 feet long. What do they feed this thing?

Comments

[Jon Bouma]

awesome
Love the blog....you guys are awesome...am really glad you are having a blast already. We are keeping our part of the bargain up and spanking the opposition in vball. I look forward to reading more adventures! Oh yeah..finished my marathon...took a ridiculous 5 hrs (but it was 27deg C in Columbus that day...so damn hot and had knee injury) but a finish is a finish. No confusing this Clydesdale with a Kenyan! Cheers to you both, Jon