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Published: October 3rd 2008
hot air ballon!
Ricardo and I in the fabulous Remax hot air balloon!Well, I have arrived in Lima without any incidents! Ricardo and I even managed to go for a reasonably sketchy hot air balloon ride over Langley on the night of the 30th before I left. It was quite fantastic, and since we were an hour late it involved me scaling a fence and running across a runway to the balloon before they took off without us. Then we landed on a baseball diamond with children playing on it. Overall, it was fabulous.
Yesterday I departed Vancouver for Toronto at 8am and from there flew to Lima, arriving at midnight local time. I made a friend on the plane, a girl named Gwen from England. She´s volunteering near Cuzco which is where I´ll be in a month, so we´ll probably end up doing fun things together on days off. There was a taxi driver from my hostel (The Flying Dog Hostel I might add) waiting for me once I made it through Customs and brought me to Miraflores, apparently an upscale district of Lima where I´ll be staying for the next month.
Today I explored a little bit of Miraflores. There is a lot more English around than I thought
children enthralled with the balloon
Here are the children we almost landed on - the balloon people had them assist us in deflating the balloon by jumping on it, as in the parachute game. there would be, but I still feel like an alien with my very limited knowledge of Spanish. Mainly, I feel stupid not being able to understand very well and worse, answer people who try to talk to me. I´m finding that I keep thinking in French and wanting to respond to people in French (at least I know that knowledge hasn´t disappeared, it´s just been suppressed for a long time...and is fairly useless here). Hopefully shortly I´ll get the hang of Spanish. I was befriended by a man named Sergio in the park today. He speaks Spanish, French, English and Italian and we communicated in a mish mash of the first three. He took me to see some colonial houses where rich people live and also to the ocean! There are beautiful gardens and public artwork with a nice path that follows the Pacific Ocean and it reminds me greatly of English Bay. I think Í just found my running route for the month!
There´s also a lot more westernization here than I thought - Starbucks, McDonald´s, Burger King, Payless Shoes, Scotiabank (I first saw an ad in the airport and couldn´t believe it!). However, there was a floral
plane wing!
The wing of the plane on which I flew to Lima! This was taken somewhere over Mexico/Caribbean area I think. festival and outdoor market in Kennedy Park, right beside my hostel, and they had a number of vendors selling colourful Peruvian hats and clothing. I think I´ll get to experience more ¨classic¨ Peru once I get to my placement in Ancahuasi in a month. The roads here are crazy - tons of cars honking madly, buses careening through the streets then stopping randomly to pick up more people (think Volkswagen vans with 20-30 people stuffed in them) AND there´s even a fair amount of bicycle cart things. It kind of reminds me of what I´ve seen on tv of large Indian cities like Delhi.
Tomorrow I´ll be going to my volunteer headquarters, meet the rest of the people I´ll be working with and starting much needed Spanish lessons. It should be great!
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Rana
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so jealous!
even the plane wing picture looks fun!