Sube Sube Sube

After this weekend I’m so over combis. As you may remember combis are the smaller scale buses that run here but ill refresh your memory. Combis are the means of public transit in Peru and like I said they are small scale buses. There’s a guy who works the door letting people on (shouting sube sube sube/get on…) and off who’s also in charge of collecting your money. Combis barely stop for you to get on, most of the time the ride is pretty jerky and they’re often packed to the gills with passengers so you end up standing. If you are standing you better hold or you will end up falling all over everyone in the combi. With that little background I’ll tell you about the trip we took to Lima this weekend.

This weekend both SB and YD had trips out of town. SB went to the mountains (which apparently were amazing) and YD went to Lima. Lima is an interesting experience especially after being in a small town for training and living in an even smaller community. We headed out to Lima Saturday morning. They wanted to leave at 745 but we didn’t end up leaving until 830….ah Peruvian time. Peace Corps rented combis to take us to Lima in the morning. Lima is about hour in good traffic. The biggest thing you notice heading into Lima is the trash. It just liters everything as you get closer to Lima. Also Lima pretty much goes without sun for the 3 months of winter so it’s kind of depressing. While you have to be careful about theft everywhere you really have to be careful in Lima. Robberies are extremely frequent so you have to be conciseness about what you’re doing all the time. The center of Lima is pretty with lots of really old Spanish/Colonial buildings. They also had a huge screen set up that was playing the world cup games which was pretty awesome. We split into our language groups after we got there, then we walked around a bit did some little assignments like asking people what places are dangerous, how much things cost and how to do things. Then we headed to the old congress building which is also the Inquisition museum. Not exactly sure why that was the one museum our teacher chose to take us to….We then headed to Miraflores which is the posh neighborhood in Lima but I have to say I was not incredibly impressed. It is right on the ocean which is cool and they have lots of touristy things. In one strip of shops on the ocean there was a TGI Fridays, Tony Romos, Starbucks, North Face store, and KFC. We did stop at Starbucks though. Our teacher is a self proclaimed Frappacino addict and coffee in Peru is all instant so we were all craving some good coffee. After some time in Miraflores we went and ate lunch (Pizza) with our teacher and her family and watched the first half of the US/Ghana game. We then took a double decker bus tour of Miraflores and said chau to our teacher. We got back from the tour just in time to watch the US loose in overtime. I have to say the World Cup is such a blast when you’re abroad. Everyone gets super into it (Peru didn’t go to the World Cup...they actually haven’t had a good futbol team in a while) which is awesome because in the states so few people get excited about it. I’m not there so it could be like that this year but from past experience I’m going to venture to say it’s not. Shortly after that we started heading back home. Turns out our teacher gave us kind of mediocre directions. So we ended up taking combi to where we thought we were picking up another combi that headed home. We asked a guy where to get it and headed to the stop but after standing around for awhile and not seeing the combi we needed we starting asking other people where it was. Turns out the combi we needed doesn’t stop there. I have to say people were really awesome and went out of their way to help us out. The first guy came back over and at one point there were three people all arguing with each other about what we needed to do. We ended taking another combi to yet another stop to catch the last combi we need to go the rest of the way home. That combi was packed for the hour and half/ two hour ride home. So we all stood for about a half an hour then slowly we all ended up getting seats but not after some people had been standing/holding on for dear life for like an hour. We made home though and spent about in 2 USD in total. So I would call that a success.

As soon as I got home I went to a baby shower witch my host sister. FYI baby showers are literally called baby showers here. They didn’t bother to translate it I guess. The clown from the birthday party I went to was there….yeah there was a clown at the baby shower. Also, everyone goes to baby showers here even all the guys. The mom to-be’s friends set up everything but the she was the one doing all the work during the party like serving food and running errands. I couldn’t believe when the pregnant girl walked through the door carrying a case of beer (for the party not her of course). We played some games which included one where you dance and have to keep switching partners. Yeah, I was about a foot taller than every single person there AND I can’t dance so you can imagine what that looked like. It was interesting but it was a little awkward so I’m glad me and my sister dipped out early.