Larcomar and La Punta

I just looked at my blog and realized it's been almost 2 weeks since I last posted. Normally I'd chalk that up to being busy. But I actually had no idea that it was that long. Time has been going so quickly here that I thought it had only been a week or less than I wrote.

Since I last posted, I've been on two volunteer excursions. For the first one (August 25), we went to Larcomar at Miraflores. Miraflores is built on cliffs overlooking the ocean, and Larcomar is a shopping center built into those cliffs.




The restaurant itself

Sushi boat for four. You can't see it, but the pieces of fish were massive.



After cutting our trip from 3 hours to 1.5 hours (we got a taxi partway for only 10 soles and avoided all the traffic), we went to a sushi place at Larcomar. I've spent time finding the best sushi in Phoenix, but this place blew it out of the water. It's not that the sushi was different in some way. All of the rolls were normal, but the fish was amazingly fresh. Normally I don't like eating pieces of fish that aren't part of a roll, but I found myself downing big chunks of fish (no rice, no nothing) as if they were candy.

After the sushi, we went for ice cream. There are two types of ice cream in Peru - normal and gelato. While the normal ice cream is just okay, the gelato is absolutely out of this world. One scoop is 6 soles, while 2 scoops are only 7 soles. So I found myself with two giant scoops of gelato - manjar blanco and pecan. (Manjar blanco is sort of like a Peruvian caramel, but is creamier and blended with some sort of milk. I don't know what it is, but it's amazingly good.) Then we followed that up with seeing Inception at the theater, since the other 3 volunteers had never seen it. Then as the combi sat in traffic for three hours, I napped all the way home.

The other volunteer excursion happened yesterday (September 1). There's a part of Lima (technically it's in Callao, which isn't actually a part of Lima) that sticks out into the ocean into a point. Hence its name - La Punta.

Link to a map showing La Punta. The other points on the map are Miraflores (left) and Huaycan (right).


The main town was painted in beautiful colors like this



Our purpose was again food. La Punta has the best ceviche at a reasonable price, and the town is both beautiful and not touristy.

It was a gray, windy, freezing day, so we were probably the only tourists in town. That meant that we got even more attention than normal. Every time we walked past a restaurant, the hostess would do everything she could to get us into the restaurant - waving the menu in our faces, talking about the food, offering deals, and so on. But Sara already knew of the best place to go. It was a tiny little restaurant with no one else there, but it was so yummy. We each ordered a massive plate of ceviche mixto (in the picture above) that came with a huge pile of different types of fish, shrimp, octopus, and who knows what else. Besides that, our plate had regular and sweet potato, a big pile of choclo, banana chips, and an oyster. Then there was also an unlimited supply of this roasted, salted corn and a personal fish appetizer. I also bought an Inca Cola, which the most popular soda in Peru. It's bright yellow and tastes like bubble gum, but it doesn't leave that awful sweet aftertaste and is surprisingly addicting.

After La Punta, we went to Plaza San Miguel for a little shopping. We're going to a LLI friend's party in Lima on Friday, and some of us didn't bring a lot of nice clothing. After all, we're living in Huaycan. So we spent a little bit of time looking around to find something cheap, then got gelato (I sense a trend here). After that, we browsed nearby Inca markets. They were really cool, and I'm definitely going to return closer to the end of my trip to buy some things.

Other than the two volunteer excursions, we've been hanging out with our friends in Horacio a lot, which is a lot of fun. Horacio is a smaller, quieter version of Huaycan. Each night, people gather to play volleyball on the main street. (Horacio is so quiet that they can string a volleyball net across the road every night and not have to worry about traffic.) Sarah is really good at volleyball and played in college, so we go over at night to play. They're really awesome and competitive, so I just sit on a stoop to watch the game and talk to everyone for a couple of hours. They're all really nice, so it's great to hang out with them.

When we went on Tuesday, we brought the card game Uno to play after the volleyball game. Everyone had never seen the game, but they thought it was so much fun that we ended up playing about 10 games. The group of people we gathered was the weirdest collection of people - there were Tara, Sara, Marta, and me; Walter and Bladi, our first friends in Horacio; their friend Victor; Walter's brother Miki; and three flamboyantly gay teenagers. And we had met a hippie named Eberson earlier, and he came back to talk during the game.

Besides that, I've been spending a lot of time reading and making all of my lesson plans, which is probably what I should be doing instead of writing a blog post right now. So far, I've read a biography of Teddy Kennedy (only decent book available at the Miami airport), Walden Pond, Civil Disobedience, and Eat Pray Love (which I finished in 3 or 4 hours). To slow myself down, I picked up two books in Spanish on Quince for only 5 soles. They're short, but it should take me a while to finish them.

All in all, I'm having a great time. I've only been here 3 weeks, but I already can't imagine leaving. 3 weeks is almost a month, which means I'm already done with a quarter of my time here... I actually contemplated taking a gap year from school and coming back here after Christmas. I won't, since I ought to finish college eventually. But I found myself seriously thinking about it.

I think I'm becoming completely addicted to traveling. I wanted to take this time off to slow down and think about my future before I rush headlong into a major and career (which all seems to be coming so quickly). While I haven't had any revelations, I do know that my job will have to take me abroad. In my mind, there's no option about it. And having a solid starting point to work with feels really good.

Nayely

One of my favorite (and without a doubt one of the most adorable) students in Zone Z.



In case the video doesn't work, here's a link to the video on youtube.

Pizza Hut and Charades

Yesterday was Kristen's last day in Peru, as well as one of our "weekends", so she wanted a treat for lunch -- Pizza Hut. When she first said that, I thought she was crazy. Why come all the way to Peru to eat Pizza Hut? But I went along with it.

The Pizza Hut is at Ovalo Santa Anita (Ovalos are massive roundabouts that serve as landmarks and commercial areas), so we took a combi for an hour to get there. When we opened the door, I was so shocked. Instead of seeing a normal Pizza Hut, we had stepped into a classy restaurant. It was really big with lots of tables and comfy booths, all painted and decorated nicely. After we sat down, a waitress even gave us menus.

The others explained that Pizza Hut has a really great special, which is why they love to go. For only 11 soles (about $3.50), we each get a personal pizza, breadsticks, salad, and a drink. I "splurged" to change the americano (cheese and ham) pizza to a supreme for only another $1.50.

One thing I love about Peru is that chain restaurants don't survive here unless they put a Peruvian (aka yummy) twist on their food. For example, instead of a soda, we could get frozen lemonade as our drink. The sauce for our breadsticks was a spicy, creamy tomatoey sauce instead of marinara. Then our salad wasn't the normal, boring pile of lettuce with ranch dressing. In addition to the normal salad stuff like lettuce and tomato, the salad had pico de gallo on top with cheddar cheese, carrots, cabbage, and a light creamy dressing. It sounds really weird, but it wasn't like any other salad I've had. It all worked together somehow. The pizza wasn't really different, just way better than from Pizza Hut at home.

In other news, I just acquired a new roommate. I was in the same room as Tara, the girl from Australia. But Marta, a new volunteer, just flew in on the same day as Kristen is leaving. Since Tara doesn't speak Spanish and Marta doesn't speak English, we figured that it would be really mean, though amusing, to make them room together. So we did a room swap, giving Kristen's room to Tara and letting Marta sleep in my room. I can understand Marta when she speaks, but I am having some trouble speaking back to her, so I think that the next two weeks are going to be a really funny game of charades.

Cataratas de Antankallo

I'm the little person standing next to the big sign!


From the left, it's Sarah, me, Kristen, and Tara. In the background to the right is the waterfall.

Every Wednesday, Sarah organizes an excursion for all the volunteers. Unlike last week's failed attempt to learn surfing (the weather in Miraflores was really cold and windy), this week's excursion to Matucana was awesome.

Matucana is a little town about two hours east from Huaycan, up the in the mountains. It was so beautiful -- all of its buildings were painted bright colors with murals, it was surrounded completely by mountains, and there were trees and grass everywhere. Its main attraction is the "Cataratas de Antankallo", a beautiful waterfall in the mountains above it. Our plan for the day was to hike there and have a picnic at the waterfall.

Getting There

We all woke up at 6, left Huaycan at 7, got to Chosica by 8, then caught a bus to Matucana. Because we were up late the night before, all but one person fell asleep on the bus ride up, and we almost missed our stop. While every website had said the bus ride would be 2 or 3 hours, we arrived at Matucana in only 1 hour.

After getting off in the main plaza, we figured we'd be able to easily find the trail to the waterfall. After all, it's the only thing Matucana is known for. But we couldn't find any signs or anything, so we decided to walk to a government building nearby and asked the man where the waterfall was. He was very nice and said that we just had to walk 3 blocks down the main street and take a left. So we took off down the street expecting to see an obvious trail or sign, but hit the end of the road a couple of blocks later. We doubled back and asked a shop owner where the waterfalls were. They said to go two blocks back down the main street, so we walked towards where we had just come from. We walked three blocks without seeing anything, so we turned around, and asked another man where it was. He told us to go two blocks, then take a right.

By this time, the whole town was directing us. (Apparently the town doesn't often see a group of gringas looking for the waterfall.) When we got to a corner, we'd stop and point, and the people nearby would yell at us to keep going. We accidentally turned down a road that led to a bunch of farms and got some very funny looks from all the farmers. But eventually we turned on the correct road...which promptly turned into a fork. All we had to do was stop, and the people nearby started pointing to the left, then had us turn right again. After walking across town about 5 times and running into a big herd of cattle and a few donkeys, we finally reached the base of the trail. At the base of the trail, a dog started walking with us, and he ended up leading us down the trail to the waterfall and back.

The Hike Itself











The first segment of the trail was a series of switchbacks up the side of a mountain. (You can see them in the first photo above.) Between the altitude and lack of sleep, another girl and I were having some trouble with the hike. But we eventually got up, taking lots of photos along the way. After that we had to walk along the side of a mountain. There was a tiny path cut into it, but at the edge of the path was a sheer drop off. As if that wasn't intimidating enough, we came across a massive sign saying "Dangerous Curves". The sign was probably double my height, and perched very precariously on the side of the cliff. (You can see the sign and me standing next to it in the very first photo.)

After finding a trickle of water running across our path ("It's the waterfall!"), we eventually made it to the real waterfall. It was so huge and had so many different levels that I couldn't get it all in a photo. (Because I didn't get many good pictures of it, I borrowed a friend's photo of it to put on here.) After lunch there, we hiked down and caught a bus back. Despite the fact that I only had half a seat to sit on, I fell asleep immediately and didn't wake up until 5 minutes before we had to get off. After a shower and several servings of lomo saltado, I collapsed in a chair with three cups of tea to watch The Count of Monte Cristo. It was incredibly fun, and we hope to be repeating the process in a few months with all of the new volunteers.

View from the Roof

The view from the roof here is great at night. It's only two stories up, but I can still see most of Huaycan. There's even more that's not visible at night, because the houses up on the mountain don't have electricity. Where the lights stop is the bottom of the mountains.

Laundry

I just did my first load of laundry by hand! There aren't washing machines or dryers here, so everything gets hand washed. I had to soak everything in soapy water, rinse it out, soak it in new soapy water, scrub it, rinse it out, then soak it in clean water. That took a few hours, since the clothes had to soak for at least a half hour each time. Then I hung everything up to dry on the roof, which took about a day and a half. When I took my jeans off the line, I ended up laughing since they were completely stiff. But they're softening up as I wear them and they feel pretty normal now. It was actually a really cool process. Of course, eventually washing everything in a washer and dryer and actually getting it clean will be great, but I'm completely happy to do this for a while. I don't think I've ever felt this accomplished about doing my laundry!

Pictures: Zone Z and Lunch

I took a few photos today that I thought I'd upload. The first one is of the classroom in Zone Z where I teach twice a week. The building used to be a really beautiful room that LLI was renting from a church group, but the group decided that they needed the building elsewhere. So they picked it up completely, moved it to another zone, and put a little shack in its place without telling us. Behind the building is a really colorful cemetery sitting on the edge of the mountain.


The next photos are from lunch today. When Sarah came back from the market today, she completely filled up the fruit bowl in the middle of the table. The orange fruit with purple streaks is a pepino (which means "cucumber" everywhere else in Latin America). It's bright yellow on the inside and tastes sort of like a cantaloupe. Also in the basket are grenadillas (on the right), which have a hard orange shell. They look nice on the outside, but they are greyish green and pulpy on the inside. They taste great, but I'm still having trouble getting over how they look. Then the green lumpy fruit (I don't think you can see it) is a chirimoya, which is soft and white on the inside with big black pits. The rest is normal fruit -- bananas, apricots, apples, tangerines, and pears. The apples are really small here, about half the size of my fist.


The second photo is of lunch itself, which was absolutely phenomenal. I had fish and vegetables in a lime sauce, white rice (which is served with every single meal here), and chocolo. The chocolo is a wonderful Peruvian variety of corn that comes with massive kernels.