To start at the beginning.....
Last yr's trip to Guatemala was but a detour from our ultimate destination: Perú! I was convinced that I needed to see Machu Picchu before I die. This year, our merry band consisted of Bert, Jon, Jianmin, Charmaine, n myself.
We were much better prepared this time! Both Char n I had taken a quarter of Spanish, and C summered for a month in Argentina. Also, I had spent a lot more time bonding with my Peru guidebook, and drew up a rough plan on my post-it pad. Best of all, we had pre-booked our 1st night in Lima, and someone would get us frm the airport.
The adventure started at SFO: arriving in plenty of time to check in, we were horrified to find a sea of people and luggage at the TACA counter. After 1.5hrs of standing in line, and listening to the guy behind us (Mike) talk about himself and all the Silicon Valley bigwigs he knows and whom invite him to their houses in Carmel, we finally make it onto our flight and arrived in Lima without further mishap.
Our Lima hostel was in the tourist district of Miraflores, a lovely beachside district. Monica at the hostel recommended that we go to the LarcoMar mall-- a frou-frou hangout for trendy Limeños and tourists. Our first Peruvian dinner consisted of risotto, seafood paella, seabass, and ceviche. Ceviche is raw seafood marinated in lime juice, and the citric acid denatures the proteins, so it tastes cooked. Read about it on wikipedia here.
The next day, we wake up to find that Jianmin had arrived safely from Cornell. His flight was actually due 2 hours before ours, and throughout the night we had been envisioning all the possible gruesome kidnapping scenarios that might have befallen him. It wasn't helpful that some guy at the hostel (Chris) had just returned that evening from central Lima, after having 2 guys attack his Adam's apple and running off with his bag and camera. Chris was now spending the night commiserating with a Korean girl who had had her bag stolen in a bar at Cusco.
Turns out, JM had not been kidnapped. His flight was delayed due to bad weather, and he also spent some time in an interrogation room in Columbia during his stopover in Bogota. (I'm not too clear about the details here. gotta ask him yourself)
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