First Stop: Lima

Hello readers,

Well now that I've been in Peru for a few days I guess it's time for my first official travel related post. It already seems like I've been here longer than I have, weird to think this is only my third day.

Lima is almost exactly how you picture a Latin American city from your middle school Spanish textbook. The buildings are painted bright colors and there are palm trees growing along the sides of the streets. There's a lot of honking of car horns and the rules of the road seem generally less obeyed. There's people selling food on the sides of the road and big baroque churches everywhere. There was a big soccer game on one night, and literally everyone seemed to have stopped to watch it. Just like how you'd think it'd be.

I stayed in the neighborhood of Miraflores, a very nice if slightly touristy neighborhood full of parks and restaurants, which was alright with me since I felt safe walking around during the day and at night, which I'm not sure would have been the case if I had stayed in central Lima. Along those lines, I was not expecting the city to be so huge, it's much more sprawling than I thought. It ended up being about a 25 min taxi ride to the historic city center from Miraflores. I headed over there my first morning in order to do something and get over the paralysis of being alone in a city I knew little about. I just make it look easy haha, but it is always hard starting out on a new trip alone. There I walked around the Plaza de Armas and snapped pictures of the historic buildings. I also visited the Larco Museum which holds artifacts from Peruvian cultures going back thousands of years. In a similar vein, the next day I also visited the ruins of a huge pyramid right in the center of Miraflores that is still being excavated. I was able to jump into a nice hour long tour where the guide explained what we were looking at beyond just piles of stones and talked some about what is know about the culture of the Lima people. Which brings me to another point - I'm very glad I speak Spanish.

I was concerned going into the trip how well I'd be able to communicate since its been a few years now since I've taken a Spanish class and even longer since I lived in Spain and had to use it all the time. I shouldn't have worried, I've been able to understand like 90% of what is said to me conversationally and my Spanish has been more than fine to communicate what I want or what I'm looking for. It must be so much harder for people who come here with no Spanish or just a smattering because unlike Europe where you're almost always addressed in English, I'm always addressed in Spanish here. It's much easier that I understand it and am able to respond.

As I type this I'm currently in the city of Huaraz, about an 8 hour bus ride North of Lima where I'm going to do some hiking for the next couple of days. Like I had read, there isn't really all that much to do in Lima so I didn't feel like I was missing out on anything after staying two days there. Just one more note, as I was eating lunch at the market yesterday, I ended up sitting next to someone who was from Cincinnati and had worked as a chef in The Senate, a restaurant in the Over-the-Rhine neighborhood that my family had eaten in last December. He said he had probably cooked my hotdog. Small world.