The Noisy American: In Peru

Well the educatin´ part of my trip is over and I´m sitting in the Lima airport at 12:00 am waiting for my flight to Cuzco in 5 hours - ugh. I truely hate airports and this one is really not pleasant. There aren´t even any seats in which to relax. Anyway, ´the air here is quite easy to breathe (at sea level again). Not sure about Cuzco as the altitude there is about 600 meters higher than Quito so it should be fun (might be time to stop smoking). Hopefully I´ll love the gasping enough to venture to Lake Titicaca where the altitude is a pleasant 3800. Taxi, taxi...

Two weekends ago, I visited the Devil´s nose on a class trip. It is the only train in Ecuador and passes thru some really beautiful and varied scenery, from fantastically green mountain passes (of at least 325 shades of green) to desert and scrub. The end of the trip is a 1000 meter descent on Devil´s nose. Quite a trip though it was not the most comfortable ride I´ve ever taken. The only seats are on top of the car on a cushion. The tops are jammed with photo snapping tourists, (but lucky me my camera ran out of batteries the night before the ride and I neglected to bring a charger, so I harrased the woman riding with me to snap pictures of everything. She was pleased.) The ride starts at 7 am but in order to get a ´good´ seat, you need to be there at 6. It was frigging cold and it didn´t help when the train started because then we got the wind as well. At the first stop (after about 2 hours), there were tons of people selling warm clothes. I figured it could only get warmer so didn´t buy any, but they were doing a booming business. I was glad not to have bought anything as the next half of the ride was blistering hot. I felt like produce by the end of the ride - frozen in the morning, thawed and then fried in the afternoon. While riding, children in the villages and farms run beside the train and wave. Unfortunately many people on the trains throw candy to them which I don´t really like. Yeah, I know I`m a spoilsport but doesn´t seem right to get them addicted to sugar and, even worse, to train them to beg for it. If you wanna throw something, I´d suggest colgate or floss to help stem their teeth, rotten from all the sugar, from falling out.

My final week of lessons weren´t exactly fantastic as my attention had started to waver and I was going out much more than studying. If I was doing it again, I think I´d do two weeks on, two weeks off, then two weeks on, again. I went up the teleferiqa on the last day of class with my teacher and a fellow student. The teleferica is the newest attaction in Quito. It´s a trolley car that takes you about halfway up a volcano (to about 4100 meters). From there, it´s possible to climb to the summit. I didn´t quite make it all the way, but I didn´t do too bad. I did much better than my fellow climber, a young healthy woman who almost fainted because of the altitude.

Last weekend I went to Oltava with some friends. It{s about 2 hours from Quito and has a huge Saturday market full of handicrafts. Ho hum for the market as I didn´t carry enough cash to buy anything and anyway wasn´t sure that I wanted to cart stuff all over Peru. I really liked Oltava though. It´s a beautiful little city in the mountains with great clubs and a nice atmosphere. On Saturday, a friend and I went to see the cockfights. Wow! Very strange. Strap some razors on the cocks and let them go at it. It wasn´t to the death, though there was a bit of blood spilt (and sucked - the owners kept sucking the blood off the birds - never heard of bird flu apparently). It was definitly a different experience, though probably not for everyone. Quess what? Again, I didn´t have my camera. As I had no idea I´d end up there, I didn´t carry it. Hopefully my friend will be sending me her pics and I can post some. So far, I have tons of pics of mountains and waterfalls, but little else.

For all of you who forgot to ask, yes I had a fantastic birthday. Ate at an Argentinian restaurant - filet mignon, mashed potatoes, veggies, bread and a grande bear for $12 USD (eat your heart out). Afterwards went out drinking with some friends. And I even remembered my camera!

Well, that took all of 15 minutes to write so now I only have 4 hours and 45 minutes to troll around the Lima airport. Wheeee!