Estoy in Peru!

So far, Peru has been treating me pretty well. Actually, to be more accurate, Luis has been treating us very well. However, my body is struggling somewhat to adjust to the new order of things, like meals. Last semester I ate at 8, 11, 3:30, and at some point after that. Today I had hot chocolate at 11:30, lunch at 2:30, and dinner at 11:30, with just a little icecream in between. The difficultly of obtaining water safe to drink is a pain as well. It's all good though, I'll adjust.

Fun Peru things for the Day:
-I learned the proper way to greet people as a female in Peru: offer the hand with a bent elbow and kiss the cheek of whoever it is, be they male or female. I got some practice at our breakfast/drinks this morning, as we met up with some Lima medical students. I'm assuming for the cultural experience, as they aren't coming to Yantalo.
-Caleb (one of my two traveling companions, along with Jenny--you'll probably hear a lot about them) and I went exploring in Lima and found our way down the cliffs to the beach! It involved a lot of Frogger, a beautiful garden path, a sketchy green wooden stairwell with uncomfortable smells (which turned out to be a tsunami escape route), and just a lot of stairs in general, which weren't so bad on our way down, but turned out to be not so much fun on our way up. We didn't do much more than watch the waves and listen to them pull the rocks (it was a small rocks/gravel beach, not sand) and feel the water, but it was fun. Caleb also added further evidence to my theory that boys, rocks, and water cannot be in the same place at the same time without the boy throwing a rock into the water by announcing before we left that he needed to throw a rock into the ocean :) We got pictures with some cheery surfer guys (though we were admittedly a little worried about them stealing the camera) who were part of a surfing school and offered to meet up with us for surfing lessons in Trujillo on Friday (about 13 US dollars, including wetsuits and boards and a guarantee to get up on the first lesson. There's a good chance we're going to do it :) ). It was fun, though I'm excited to go to the beach for reals. As in, get in the water.
-Lima driving: ok, so maybe this wasn't fun, but it's certainly interesting. If you don't like getting cut off, never drive in Lima, because it's standard procedure. People use the lines and even their blinkers, they just switch lanes like crazy without any warning but a honk of the horn to let you know they're there. They also turn in whichever direction they want from whichever lane they want, whenever they want, which makes intersections really interesting. I'll admit that one of my most common mental phrases is ''vamos a morir,'' or, ''we're going to die.'' No worries, I'm not actually in real danger, it's just a different method than I'm used to. The frogger thing too. Anyway, that's Peru so far! I'm alive and well and learning Spanish, since everything is in Spanish, including the people I'm with. Adios!