Lima

I'm in Lima! I haven't even been here for a whole day, but so far it's been quite an experience. I got into the airport around 9:15 last night and had no problem gathering my belongings, getting through immigration and customs, and finding my friend Carlos in the airport. He was kind enough to come pick me up and show me around a bit of Lima last night. As we drove from the airport to my hostel in the neighborhood called Miraflores, we passed by the beach, a few brightly lit casinos, and wove our way between more than a few cars. Carlos says traffic in Lima, which in now home to about 10 million people, is disorganized, and I can see why. People change lanes whenever they feel like it, and drivers here have a special penchant for driving between two lanes and then deciding at the last minute which one is moving faster and joining the traffic in that one. Everyone also loves to use their horns. It's definitely part of the Latin American feel that I've grown to appreciate, and that takes some getting used to.

After checking me into my hostel, Pariwana Backpackers, we walked around the area a bit and went into an Irish pub (of all places) for a pisco sour, a local cocktail that contains pisco (a Peruvian grape brandy), lime, egg whites, and bitters. It tasted mildly like a margarita, owing I think to the lime, and on a whole was pretty good. Carlos says there are better ones, so I'll have to seek them out. Today was a day for touring around Lima. This morning, we hopped on a tourist bus that took us around Miraflores and described the importance of the various streets and parks we encountered. It was a good way to see quite a bit of the city, more than I could hope to see on foot, and definitely brought to light the contrast between the old and the new that one finds here. For example, as we drove past Huaca Pucllana, a set of ruins in the middle of the city, we were faced with tall, modern-looking apartment buildings, which our guide said were built on top of other sections of the same ruins. The ruins also house a restaurant that shares their name. A couple doors down from my hostel is a Burger King, housed in an old colonial building. This contrast or juxtaposition of old and new has always seemed funny to me, and I noticed it a lot as we explored Lima.

In the afternoon, Carlos took me to Lima center, where we walked around and passed old buildings, new ones, churches, parks, and plazas. In one of the plazas, an entire array of inflatable Coca Cola soccer balls and bottles were set up, surrounding a giant screen where they'll show the soccer (let's call it fútbol, because that's what it really is) match between Perú and Chile later today, part of the qualifying rounds for the next World Cup. I love how much the entire country supports its fútbol team, and how excited and prideful people get about these matches. You'd never see anything like this in the U.S., much less for fútbol.

We also wandered through the Museo San Francisco, where a tour took us through various parts of the monastery and cathedral dedicated to Saint Francis, the monk responsible for starting the Franciscan order. The majority of the walls were covered with beautiful yellow, blue, and white decorative tiles, which the Spaniards brought to their colonies after being influenced by the Arab presence in their own country. My favorite room may have been the library, where hundreds of books stacked themselves on cedar shelves and covered almost any subject you could think of, and in several languages. The room was complete with two short spiral staircases leading up to a second level of bookshelves, a couple gigantic choir books, and two adorned Bibles. The end of our tour found us in the catacombs beneath the church, where it's estimated that 25,000 people were buried over the years; the bones of many priests and followers alike were laid to rest there, and some of them happened to be on display as we wandered through the dark stone rooms. Especially interesting were two deep stone wells that served a dual purpose in the catacombs: they housed people's remains, naturally, but they also served as a sort of shock absorber for earthquakes and the like. The idea certainly worked, because the catacombs haven't fallen down yet, despite frequent seismic activity. Unfortunately, we weren't allowed to take pictures during any of the tour, so you'll have to let your imagination help you visualize what the place might have been like.

I've got a little downtime before heading out to find a place to watch the game at 5:45, but I'm thinking we're on the late side of things in that respect. People have been congregating at the huge screen in Lima center for at least a couple hours already, and the sound of traffic outside my window is increasingly laced with different horns, those carried by trumpeting fútbol enthusiasts. This is one of the most exciting coincidences ever!

And speaking of coincidences, three of the people sharing my room last night have turned out to be Peace Corps volunteers who have been placed in a small village outside the city of Huaraz. They were on their way back from a few days spent in the Amazon participating in a rafting contest, where they lashed 8 logs together and then paddled for 3 days to the finishline. I've never heard of this before, but apparently this is the 13th year of this competition, called the Great Amazon River Raft Race, and people do take it seriously. Sign me up for 2012!

Pictures will come soon. Until then, know that I'm having a great time being out of the U.S. and send you all my love.