Lima (bean), Peru

Lima is a giant city of 8 million people. It has everything from shanty towns to really nice business/tourist districts that look almost like La Jolla. My pen pal Garrett, who has lived in Lima on and off for 5 months, was nice enough to scout out a really cool hostal for Rachel and I in a great area of town called Barranco. It's very artsy and safe, plus its right on the cliffs by the beach. Our hostal was in an old mansion and even though we had to stay in a dorm with 6 other people, it turned out to be one of the best hostals we´ve stayed at. It was really social and we met some really fun people there. For some reason it was mostly Americans and Australians.

We were picked up from the airport by a friendly guy with a car named Herby (don't ask me the name of the driver, we only asked for the car's name). But there was a slight problem... Herby looked like he had been through a war. Maybe even two. And he was still somehow chugging along. For some unknown reason, there were slash marks all over the interior of the car (did someone have a knife fight in there? Silly Peruvian boys) and a lot of the metal was exposed. We were a bit worried Herby would die on the way to our hostal, but somehow he made it to our destination... though we did stop and start about 20 times during the drive and our 35 minute ride was accompanied with the nice smell of fresh gasoline. I casually asked our taxi driver how old Herby was, and he said he was born in 1993. That's as old as my Volvo and it does NOT look like that. Hmm. Something fishy was going on. Anyway, back at the hostal later that evening, two girls from Canada arrived at around midnight. They told us about how their taxi driver's car had broken down on a cliff (on a curve), and they had to wait and hour while the driver and another male passenger pushed the car around so that the gas tank would be facing downhill so the car could start again. We asked if their car had a name. You guessed it... it was good old Herby.

The next day we spent in the historic old town, which was a surprisingly long drive from Barranco (I kept forgetting how huge Lima is). We checked out the catacombs in the Monestario San Francisco, which is still to this day a church of the Dominican order. The catacombs were the first public catacombs, intended for public burials and viewings. The benefactor, of course had a giant tomb all to himself, and everyone else had to pay as well to get the ¨good¨burial spots. Though they were buried 12 to a plot, stacked one on top of another, so I don't really know why they were so excited to be buried there in the first place. The rest of the monestary itself was really gorgeous... from the rooms with giant religious paintings in the Ruebens and Cusqeño styles to the beautiful tiled walls around the central garden (in the moorish style, from the Spanish influence), to the central garden itself. It was also really neat to see the different rooms used for washing and dressing, meetings, as well as the choir room. Their dressing room had drawers for everyone, carved very elaborately, and above each dresser was a saint or a martyr (with the way they were killed depicted graphically... stabbed, burned alive, hung, etc). One dresser was actually a secret door to the catacombs below. The library was the best of all... it had fun winding staircases going up to the second level, beautiful carvings on the walls and ceiling, and old books from the 16th century onwards. Unfortunately we couldn't take pictures of anything

Lunchtime was next. We had a buffet lunch, served to us by French nuns! Supposedly for dinner they gather around and serenade guests with a rendition of Ave Maria, but we opted for the cheaper lunch menu, which was delicious. We even got to try chicha morada, a traditional Peruvian drink made from purple corn among a lot of other fruity ingredients. It was really good... and really purple.

We spent the rest of the day wandering a bit more around old town. A few boys catcalled us (they either hiss, whistle, or yell sweet nothings like ¨queen!¨ or ¨princess!¨) as we walked around, and we decided our new response was to make a really terrible, ugly face instead of just walking by and pretending we didn't notice. Or we laugh hysterically like hyenas. This either causes most guys to burst out laughing along with us, or they just shut up. It's fun.

Later we walked along the cliffs from Parque del Amor (Park of Love) in Miraflores and almost made it back to Barranco before we hit the end of the cliffs and had to take a taxi the rest of the way home. Parque del Amor has a giant statue of a couple making out in the middle of it and some neat tiled benches (kind of like in Gaudi park in Spain). Delfin, the famous Peruvian painter and sculptor, designed the park and its statue of love. I'm actually going to live at his house when I return to Lima (and maybe even meet him!) because my friend Garrett was nice enough to buy me two nights at Second Home (where Delfin lives) on the cliffs of Barranco (www.secondhomeperu.com).

That evening we sat around talking and drinking with all of our hostal mates. One girl named Jahan, from New York, told the most hilarious stories. She had us cracking up all evening. I particularly enjoyed her description of Cusco... ¨This was the first place I really felt like ´Wow, I´m in Peru, man!´ I mean, it was like New York City with all the great nightlife, but then I'd walk out of a club and there'd be a fucking llama standing outside the door!¨. (Now that we've been to Cusco, I can vouch for that odd sight, too!) The woman who worked at the hostal was also really young and fun and she organized a night out at a nearby club for all of us. A Peruvian guy started talking to me there, and even though it was a bit hard to understand his rapid Spanish in the loud club, I still managed to talk to him in half-Spanish for most of the evening, which was good practice.

One of our dorm mates was a guy who´s traveling the world for a year with the Watson scholarship... it's basically $25,000 of free money, and the only stipulation is that you don't come home until a year is up. He was using the money to study music in different South American countries and had some great stories to tell about his experiences so far. He even got to live with a Guatamalan pop star for a while... and had to look the other way when the singer would bring in his 25 different girlfriends. Our new friend was pretty hilarious, though I have to note that he had some, err... disgusting bathroom and eating habits, haha.

We wandered around the beach near Barranco later in the day. An chubby older man bicycling around a box of ice cream kept following us along the beach, thinking that if he waved to us just one more time we might cave in and decide we wanted ice cream. Then he changed tactics and started asking us where we were from. We ignored him and started walking back up the cliffs to our hostal... and waaay down below on the coastal highway we could still see him, just a tiny speck now, waving furiously at us. Haha. He just didn't know when to stop. We then went to Miraflores, a nice area of town just north of Barranco. We chatted with a man in the park (in Spanish!) about visiting Colca Canyon in the south (2x deeper than the Grand Canyon), got some ice cream and dinner (in that order, we really confused out waiter), went grocery shopping at an amazing grocery store (it had purple corn and biodegradeable bags, what more could one want?), and that was about the last of our adventures in Lima.