Lima

Lima is the capital of Peru, it borders the Pacific Ocean, although they claim to have beaches, they are terrible, they are made of rocks… not sand, and the sun had a hard time poking through all the fog surrounding the ocean. When referring to a beach… No Sand + No Sun = No Fun


Peruvian food is priced economically, very unique, and quite good (rico). Devon and I ate 2 or 3 course lunches, mainly composed of ceviche, a tangy dish made from raw seafood, chicken or fish accompanied by rice and beans, then some sort of dessert for approximately $2 USD. Peruvian food is amazing, but it did wonders to my stomach. I spent a lot of time on the toilet during my brief stay in Lima.

The buses are crazy, the markets are great, and the plazas are beautiful.

Here is one story from our brief adventure in Lima.

I made a reservation for a hostel which was nice enough to offer a pick up service from the airport. A representative from the hostel told me a driver would be waiting for my group (grupo) at 11:45 in the Lima International Airport. I was so excited to walk out of customs, and scan through the myriad of driver’s holding up signs with important people’s names on it, until I found mine, then slowly stroll up to the driver and say (Si Michael es mi nombre. Gracias por manejarnos) Devon and I waited in the pickup area for 45 minutes it’s safe to say my airport pickup fantasy did not materialize. After waiting for what seemed like forever, but was actually 45 minutes, an Israeli girl asked us if we wanted to share a cab. We really have a knack for becoming friends with Israelis. We said okay, the Cab driver dropped her off, and I kindly asked the driver if I could get out of the taxi for a split second to find the address of our hostel, because I neglected to write down the address to our hostel assuming they were picking us up.

Finding the address took more than a split second, but after 10 minutes of internet searching I found the address. I ran back to the cab and happily presented the address (direccion) to the taxi man. He looked at the address and told me he had no idea where our hostel was. So he pulled over and made about five different phone calls to find out where our hostel was located. Meanwhile between phone calls he kept guilt tripping me saying I should have wrote down the main roads our hostel was next to, that I should have brought a map… etc. I guess I assumed a man whose job is to drive people around a city would know where streets were… Silly Me! Peru and assumptions must not go well together. He finally got us to our hostel and decided to charge us an absurd amount of money for the ride, in Peruvian Standards, because he had to do so much work to find our hostel. I am definitely going to try this technique when I get back home.

“Oh you ordered the steak and I brought you the salmon…” “I’ll replace that salmon with the steak you ordered but I am going to have to charge you extra.” “You might be wondering why you will be charged extra… well I will explain since I made a mistake with your order and gave you a salmon instead of a steak, I am going to have to tell the chefs the situation, and then make sure the chefs make your steak faster than they normally would, after they make the steak faster than normal I am going to have to grab the steak, and bring it to your table. As you can clearly see I am going to have to do four extra things I normally would not have done if you would have been content with that salmon I brought you.”

That’s some good Peruvian logic.

Well I don’t have much else to say about Lima.