Classes Start, Blogging Slows

Now that I’ve been in Lima for two weeks I feel like I’m really starting to get used to the city.  I know how to take the buses to all the important places and have found some great spots to eat (and let me tell you, there are tons of them).  I don’t have too many photos that are relevant to this blog post, so I think I’ll just throw in some random ones for your viewing pleasure.

Taking a stairway down from the cliffs to the water.

Gotta love a city on the coast.

Something that is super unique about Lima is that there are ancient ruins throughout the city.  On our way back from a movie theater that was surrounded by fast food restaurants and retail stores we passed by an excavation site.  There were also some ruins casually in the middle of the zoo I visited this weekend.  It’s really cool to see the juxtaposition of the modern and ancient parts of Lima.

What, your zoo doesn’t have ruins and palm trees?

On Sunday I had an amazing lunch with my family that included a seafood pasta dish and an appetizer of scallops still in the shell with all kinds of magnificent seasoning. I’m not one of those people who takes pictures of food, but maybe I should become one for the sake of my dedicated blog readers. I’ll work on that.  I also got to join my host sister, host brother, and his girlfriend on a trip to the Peruvian equivalent of Costco.  Just like the American Costco, it was pretty magical (and full of free samples).

Schmoozing up a storm.

This week is shopping period for classes, which means I am visiting tons of classes to decide what I want to take for the semester.  The teachers all seem nice and interesting, but it’s super intimidating to try to keep up in college level courses conducted in Spanish with students who are native Spanish speakers.  It helps build character, right? And hopefully will help improve my Spanish a lot.

I’ve spending a lot of time getting to know Santos, the woman who works in our house 6 days a week.  Often she’ll join me for an after dinner snack or I’ll do the dishes with her and we’ll chat.  She has 6 children who live with her mother in a town in the jungle region of Peru, but it is really far away, so she rarely gets to see her kids.  She moved to Lima to support her family and sends money back home to pay her children’s food, clothes, and education.  Santos told me that her goal is for all of her kids to graduate from high school.  She’s such a dedicated mother and it’s really great to getting to know her more and more each day.  A couple of nights ago the two of us watched a Seventh Day Adventist movie that she wanted to see.  It was really interesting to have a conversation with her afterwards when she asked me about my religion and beliefs.  It was hard to have to speak in Spanish when trying to explain my beliefs in a way that didn’t offend her or put hers down.  I threw out a lot of vague phrases like “helping others” and “love” when explaining my Unitarian Universalist church.

My host family’s dog, Cha Cha, in our lavish backyard enjoying the bone that I brought her from the US.