First few days...

Wake up in the morning after saying Hello to half the population of Lima the night before, go to reach for my toothbrush and oh wait a minute I don't have one. But I didn't care about that now because I was in my uncles house which I love.

It was really nice to be there again. I really missed my uncle and aunt and his three children. In no particular order : Fernando, Chelin and Maria Jose. They are all around my age and we always have a great time together. Whenever I'm in this house or I guess in Lima I always feel so chilled, relaxed. Its not that I feel far away from repsonsibility and have escaped, but you just get a different view of your world and its really cool. Don't make plans, go with the flow.

My cousin, Fernando, has a stand in the "Trigal" (fair kind of thing) near the house so I hung out there for a bit. He sells shirts, swimsuits and all kinds of other stuff there. It was cool to go there again, everybody has a little kiosk selling different things. A lot of patrons go there looking to spend the money they got from Christmas or just chill.

Everybody dresses to the warm weather too. Official uniform for guys is either jeans, shirt and oakleys sun glasses, or instead of jeans/shirt billabong or quicksilver shorts/swim suits with t-shirt. Everybody has oakley glasses, everybody. For girls its nice tank tops, skirts, capri, I mean anything for summer. And I'm not sure why but the girls look way younger than they actually are. You have to add like 3-4 years to what age they look like to get their actual age.

Culture there is very open, friendly, get introduced to everyone all the time. Kiss on the cheek when you meet a girl. I mean it sounds dumb to say this because for me its normal, but in Canada/U.S. its not at all like this. You shake hands with everyone!

That night I went with Chelin, Maria Jose and some of their friends to a Chifa to eat. Chifa is what they call Chinese Food in Peru. They are everywhere in Lima, very popular. One our way to the place we wanted to go to Chifa Choy Tac there were at least 8 other Chifa restaurants! The style of food is very different than here though. The dishes are still Chinese influenced and somewhat similar, but the flavours that Peruvians prefer I guess are different. My favourite dish is Arroz Choifa, which is Fried Rice, but it tastes different, so good I'm gonna learn how to make it. Another thing when you order something to drink you have to specify you want it cold or they will bring you warm Coke or the national soft drink Inca Kola (very very good). There is never enough cold drinks, its the same with beer you always have to bargain for cold beer.

That night I went back with Fernando to the airport to see if there was any info on my bags but nothing... The Delta representatives had zero information. I gave them a description of the contents of the suitcases so they could identify them in Atlanta, but the Delta people in US never got this info. The next day I called my parents to see what they could do on their side and eventually I got my suitcases as a result of that, but 4 days late...

After visiting the airport I knew that I would either not see my suitcases ever again or it would take too long. So I needed some clothes. I went with Fernando to a friend he knew and picked up some jeans, shirts, swim suit for a great deal...

I was suppose to go to Arequipa for New Years with one of my cousins, normally we were all suppose to go the 27th (next day after I arrived), but because my suitcases never got there and I lost 2 days from being there I would have had to travel over 30 hours to spend 2-3 days there so it wasn't worth it. This kind of sucked because my cousin, Chelin, had made a lot of plans for us to go with her friends.

The 2nd day I was cruising around with Fernando all the over the place. I got to see some people I had met last year and had been keeping in touch with which was awesome. People drive very agressivly there. Everything is very chaotic, you are constantly on the offence when driving, honking, cutting off everything, and surprisingly there aren't a lot of accidents. I guess everybody is used to it. (I have a story about driving that I'll post later). They also sell you everything you can imagine when you stop at a light. You can buy the newspaper, cigarettes, car power adapters, books (yeah books), banana's, plastic bags basically anything you can think of just cruise around and you can find it.

Alright that is it for now. Stay tuned...