Welcome to Peru!

Here is the small room that Kena and I shared in Ecuador in my last nights there. It was in Hostal Londres and still only cost us each $5/night, a great bargain! He bought a few roses at a market Tuesday morning to add a little liveliness to the room, but considering we only spent our sleeping hours there it totally did the trick.


Adios Ecuador, it was great knowing ya!


Welcome to Peru!!


This is the first picture I´ve taken while being actually in Peru. I was trying to get a glimpse of the conditions of the city for you. It was through the bus window so it´s not the best condition. The little vehicle in the fore front is a motorized taxi thingamajig and there are a ton of those all over the place here. I never saw any like this in Ecuador but they kind of remind me of the transportation available in India, of what I´ve only seen in movies!

Hello from Peru! Yes, I made it here safe and sound. Let´s see where I left off, oh right in Loja on Tuesday afternoon. After I signed off the computer I went with Kena to the botanical gardens on the campus of the University in Loja. It was a nice tour and the great thing was the student who guided us around knew all the students who had been staying with us in Neverland, so it was like an extended visit with our new friends. I learned a bit about the medicinal plants and got to see a very nicely organized garden. After our tour we made it back to our hostal where we grabbed "Queridos John", aka "Dear John" in Spanish. We had wanted to go see it in theatre since we both read the book on this trip, but we couldn´t because we missed it´s time in theatre. A good thing about South America is all the dubbed media so we were able to buy the film for $1.50 at a DVD shop! We went to our favorite little internet cafe and watched the movie there! It was pretty awesome except for the storm of little kids who came through right as we were watching it and they turned up the volume really loud on their computers as they watched Indian music videos, but hey no real complaints because it was a movie for like $3.00 when you include internet time. Plus Kena bought a chocolate covered ice cream on a stick that we ate while watching the DVD as if we were really in a theatre! For dinner we went to this Mexican restaurant, I know not very traditional in Ecuador, but it was good. I had a mixed-meat burrito with lots of guacamole and spicey salsa, which I washed down with an orange soda--huge flashbacks to meals at Tacoria Rosita and the Mexican orange sodas in high school. Following dinner I bought some fruit at a grocery store to stock up for my bus trip and packed up my things in the room. I bought a bus ticket that day for Piura, the first big northern city of Peru, for 7AM Wednesday morning. Kena was going to Guayaquil (to catch his flight back home) at 10AM, but surprised me on Tuesday night and said "I think I´m going to just go to Guayaquil right now" so I ended up spending Tuesday night on my own in Hostal Londres. As a side note, my watch broke on my flight here so that the button to get the light to work broke off, and now the watch can´t get water on it. Well I forgot that and put it in the river to wash and now you can barely tell what time it is. Why am I telling you this? Because Tuesday night I kept waking up to check the time because I was afraid my watch´s alarm wouldn´t work and I´d sleep through my bus trip. Luckily my paranoia payed off and I was up at 6AM, 15 minutes before my flight. I heard someone else leaving so I scrambled to meet them at the door so I wouldn´t have to wake Gustav (the hostal owner) up again to open the main door. The other traveler asked where I was going, to the bus terminal I replied, so we traveled together. He was actually taking the same bus as I was to Piura so I had met another travel partner at the doorstep of Hostal Londres, for the second time in a row!! What a coincidence! And as it turned out, as we traveled south he ended up changing his mind and instead of going to Lima decided to go to Trujillo with me. This bus yesterday was supposed to be 9 hours, but then the ticket seller told us 8 hours, and it actually ended up being more than 10 hours! Thankfully the border crossing wasn´t too bad and we were even able to cut lines because we were with the group from the bus. My new travel partner´s name is Michael and he is a police officer in Germany. He has been traveling around Bolivia, Columbia, Ecuador and Peru for the past three months and is about to return home in the beginning of June. He has only a few days left here and therefore feels a crunch of time. He wanted to get to Trujillo as soon as possible so we found a bus right from Piura to Trujillo, with a stop over in Chacaloyo, or something like that. That means that we had another 3 hours, stopped for a sandwich, and 3 more hours until Trujillo, getting us into Trujillo around midnight! Then we grabbed a 20 minute taxi to Huanchaco, this little beachtown outside of Trujillo. It was a crazy day of adventures and a LONG travel day for me, from 6AM until almost 1AM. I mean in South America that might not be too bad, but for me that was a lot! The busses aren´t too bad but the one from Loja to Piura was a bit rockety as we went around a ton of mountains. I got bus sick for the first time, not throwing up sick but just nauscious sick. The other buses yesterday weren´t as bad fortunately. I also got to eat my apples and mandarines, but because of feeling a bit sick I didn´t eat an actual meal until my little turkey sandwich in a bus terminal. A few notes on Peru: it is a lot dirtier here. Like trash littering the streets and dirt all over. It kinda smells a bit too. The cities aren´t nearly as nice. The people so far seem quite friendly. I made my first successful phone call in Spanish! We wanted to make reservations at a hostal before arriving so late at night, 1AM, so I called one place that was full and then had a tediously slow convo in Spanish with another hostal owner because he had a hard time understanding my poor Spanish (seriously sometimes I feel almost fluent and other days I feel like I just stepped out of Spanish 1 and barely know the language!). There aren´t any bugs here and yet this morning I woke up with several new bites on my legs, I don´t know what´s going on--possibly there are leftover bugs in my sleeping bag?! I sure hope not!! Oh and just a random bit of fabulous news: I received my placement with AmeriCorps and I am 99.9% sure the site I´ve been assigned to is the bilingual site, HOW AWESOME IS THAT?! I am so stoked I did a little celebration dance in front of the computer a few minutes ago!! This morning Michael and I got up and went to a different hostal for a nice breakfast of pineapple juice, tea, wheat bread (a huge luxury after only white bread all the time) and omeletes. I am now going to go switch some more of my US dollars for Peruvian Soles, buy a new watch and work on Anne Frank´s diary in Spanish on the beach. The weather is a bit of a bummer with overcast skies, but I´ll enjoy it anyways. I was thinking of staying here until Sunday but just emailed the school and may just go tomorrow--I´m anxious to meet my new friends and see the school. I think it is right outside of Trujillo and so I could maybe just take a taxi right there from my hostal. I´ll maybe try another call in Spanish today to contact the school and make final arrangements. I still am missing home but I am trying to put things in perspective. It is crazy all the thinking that can go on during a 19-hour busride. Especially traveling with such a seasoned traveler as Michael is (this is like his 5th or 6th trip to South America in the last few years), my own style of traveling is more apparent. Also I learn things about my style of interacting. Like for example, if I need to speak in Spanish to get a taxi or something, I can do it. But for some reason when traveling with someone else, especially the two males I´ve most recently been with (Kena and Michael), I´ve found myself letting them do all the talking and making all the arrangements. I think this says something about my assertiveness. On the other hand, I find myself constantly looking for the positive of all situations and working on being as relaxed and flexible as possible. This is definitely something I admire in myself and feel like I can only strengthen as I practice doing these things in more difficult situations. Another thing I´ve noticed is how powerful your mind can be: by simply imagining something, I can really feel the effects. For example, after Kena left I felt a bit stressed about my trip Tuesday night, but I just started thinking of sleeping in my bed at home I felt as if I really were in Napa. Or last night as we were going on that bus to Trujillo I had a huge headache and felt sick, but when I put on my Ipod and listened to John Mayer I just imagined myself being at his concert and it was as if I really were there. The mind is a powerful tool that once you dip into it´s strenghts it can to wonders for you. So that´s a look into my unconscious thoughts as I traveled for hours yesterday. Also I found myself getting stuck thinking about people´s names and trying to remember kids from camp or an actor´s name. It took me over an hour just going through the alphabet to remember Emily´s name (the camper I spent almost all of last July with last summer). And the only movie I kinda half-watched yesterday was this movie with Heath Ledger (a name I also couldn´t remember), and Michael thinks it was his last film right before he passed away, which he never finished; so another company finished the film and it was really crappy because they had a very small budget, which was very apparent as the film went on. Anyways, that also took up some of my time yesterday! I´m off to the beach now, send some nice weather vibes my way if you can! :)