Strange Days

Beautiful Lima Peru!

A typical "calle" in Miraflores

The awesome traffic in the streets (not even meant sarcastically, it really is cool)
Plumber´s crack immortalized in stone

The juxtaposition of Lima´s past and the technology of the present

The coast line at night

A sweet fountain at Ovalo Bolognese

The church near mi escuela

They have Scouts in Peru, and the building is wicked near my hostel. Weird.

The dishes I mentioned in the last blog post

Purple salad thing!!!!!!!!!

So I finally have some pics! I have been checking out Miraflores and practicing Spanish pretty much constantly. I met some climbers and hopefully next week I can go out of the city with them to climb. Some highlights thus far:

The buildings here are really cool. Most are just very blocky and stucco but they are still all in bright colors. Occasionally there are old colonial buildings and they are a sight to behold. The juxtaposition is what makes Lima so cool. Also the roads. I love the roads here. Everyone drives like a mad man and they use their horns all the time. Like "hey I am going to come up and pass you on your left because you pulled over without warning to pick up a passenger". The buses are small and the combis are smaller and buses are everywhere. It´s crazy because apparently the whole country didnt really have cars until like the 1990s. I still can´t understand anyone. It made me realize that, as hot stuff as I thought I was for knowing the Spanish I did just from high school, I really can´t do anything because I have no experience listening to or understanding Spanish. Some might argue that I have no experience listening period. Anyways the other night I walked all the way from my hostel to this neighborhood called Barranco and then walked around some more and by the end of the night there was no way I was going to walk back because the dogs were a barking. I decided to attempt to use Spanish and ride the bus and I couldn´t understand the guy collecting the money to save my life.

Oh about those guys. They are awesome. Any time the guy driving a bus or a combi (a wicked small potentially dangerous bus van thing) sees a person on the side walk they think might remotely want to ride (e.g. the person looks at them) they swerve violently over to the side of the road and another guy, the ticket guy, leans out the doorway and yells the names of the streets that the bus hits and generally tries to get the person to ride. Their intonation is hilarious and they sound like a commercial from Tejano radio.

Anyways. again. Do I get off track like this when I talk? So I get on the bus, I can´t understand the guy and I start freaking because it looks like we are heading way from Miraflores, and I´m like "crap, I´m gonna spend the night in some shady highway pit stop with a bunch of chickens." But then the bus started heading the right way but ended up really far from my hostel, so I still ended up walking wicked far. Good times.

Another highlight thus far was going to a market yesterday with my classmates from Spanish school. The market was nothing special, very similar to a hispanic market back home. Except that EVERYTHING is in Spanish, and, they have the craziest fuits I have ever seen. They have every fruit we have in Texas and then ones they have in California and then ones that don´t even make it to the states. I don´t have pictures of them tonight but I will. My favorite was the chirimolla. It is really sweet and delicious but the only crazy thing about that one is the texture of the meat. And that the outside looks kinda like a turtle shell. There were two really crazy fruits, the first one I can´t remember the name of but it was sort of brown on the outside and the meat was bright orange and it was so dry it was almost chalky. It was a little sweet but it made you want water it was so dry. In a fruit! The last was the grenadia, which looks like an orange but pretty much perfectly round and with a big green stalk. The skin is hard and brittle and when you break it there is this sac inside that looks the white stuff inside an orange. Inside the sack however, are a bunch of seeds held together by what is most adequately described as snot. It looks like a bunch of fish eyes all squished together. Don´t get me wrong it tastes really great, it is super sweet. But the consistency is a little too much to handle.

The last thing I wanted to post about is the changes I can sort of feel happening in my mind. Right now I speak Spanish super slowly because I think in English and translate, and I can´t understand anyone. But slowly, slowly, I can tell that some of my thoughts are sort of in Spanish. It is a crazy feeling. I will be thinking and a portion of my mind is coming up with Spanish words but most of my mind is confused and tired and wondering why the hell Im trying to think in Spanish. It actually makes it difficult to think of anything at all, as if the two languages are cancelling each other out in my head and nothing comes out. Ironically, this gives me hope because it indicates that I am getting closer to being able to express myself a little more fluidly in Espanol. We will see.