Time, How Does it Work?

Buenos días (good morning), buenas tardes (good afternoon), buenas noches (good night); whatever time you are reading this, I hope you are having a great day!

I can’t believe another week has flown by in Peru. Sometimes it feels like the days drag on and other times it feels like they are over in a blink of an eye! Time is such an interesting thing here. Most people seem to be awake by 7:30 at the latest and eat breakfast right away. Then they don’t eat lunch until about 2. If a family eats dinner here, it’s usually around 7:30 or 8. One day this last week some of the girls and I wanted to go get some lunch around 12:30, average lunch time for us, and not a single restaurant was open. I don’t think they open until 1:30 or 2. I still can’t figure out what time stores are open here. People walk really slow here but drive really fast and crazy. I don’t understand why they don’t just walk slow and drive slow or walk fast and drive fast. Two girls were out power walking yesterday with weights in their hands and I passed them. I wasn’t even walking fast!

Friday we took a class trip 2 hours away to a town called Matucana. We hiked 2 hours to go see some waterfalls there. I have never hiked before so it was a little difficult for me to figure out how to put my feet on the loose gravel at first. These hiking trails to the waterfall had no rails of any sort, so if I would’ve stepped wrong on the 4 foot wide trail, I would have fallen vertically off of the mountain! Finally we made it to the beautiful waterfalls. I was the only one to get under the waterfall; no way was I hiking all the way there and not standing underneath the waterfall! I ended up warming myself by the grill while we made our hamburgers because the sun was starting to go behind the mountain. On the way to Matucana, the bus driver stopped 3 times to put some water on the brakes because they were becoming overheated going up a mountain. On the way down we did not stop once to cool the brakes which I found slightly suspicious. I recited the Prayer for Protection about 37 times. Not kidding.

We had to cross this bridge to get to the waterfall and I was
a little afraid it was not going to hold us all!

This last weekend most of us UNK students went to the district of Barranco about 30 minutes away from our district of Surco. Barranco is right on the coast and it is a very touristy area. We were told by the UNK students from last year that we needed to go to a place called El Burrito Bar. It is a small restaurant with no sign indicating that we had arrived. The only sign was the one on the menu, other than that we had basically walked into a hole in the wall. We got there at 12:40 and they told us it didn’t open until 1 for lunch. So we walked around a little bit and showed up at about 1:10; it still wasn’t open. So we waited outside until they let us in around 1:20. Peruvian time is real. When we were walking around town we were getting lots of whistles from the guys there. One guy stopped in the middle of the road to say wow. A group of grandpas told us, "Hey pretty ladies, thank you for walking." That was all said in Spanish of course. It's weird that guys can do that here and it's normal. In the United States we would just call them creeps, in Peru it's your average Joe. We decided it's because we were a group of 8 gringas walking around. Probably not something they see every day. 

Classes this week started getting a little bit harder. They gave us vocabulary words to study for a test, a reading assignment in Literature, and we had a group test in Grammar. Who do they think they are giving us homework? 

The calluses started peeling off my fingers from not being able to play guitar for so long. I decided that could not happen because it’s so hard to build them up again. So I talked to my parents and they told me they would help me buy a guitar here. Today Shelby, Abby, and I went to Miraflores (another district of Lima) to look for a guitar. Finally I found one for 170 soles. I was prepared to spend about 200 dollars on a guitar and I ended up getting one for 50 dollars! You’re welcome mom and dad! The sound is a little twangy but I can live with that! So not to worry everyone, my calluses will not be leaving my fingers anytime soon.

The famous mural in Matucana! With the dogs we met at
 the top of the mountain that followed us down.

Tomorrow I’m going to the beach again with my family and I hope to get some homework done there!

Have a good day, afternoon, or night! Besos








Random Things

• A baby shower is still said "baby shower" in English
• They say a lot of English words here (laptop, clip, baby shower)
• People have soccer goals set up on cement and play on the cement
• I've determined the motto here is: "Show up late, drive fast"
• They pass on blind curves! 
• There don't seem to be many driving laws here. They make their own lanes, go through stop lights that are on red, and don't follow the speed limit. 
• Stop is actually written in the subjunctive tense here which means it may or may not happen. I don't want my stop to be optional!!!