Peru!

Greetings from Peru! We've been here for four days now and have been having a good time, except for the cold! We spent the past few days exploring Lima and trying to navigate our way around the city using public transportation. Lima is huge, sprawling city of about 8 million people (about a third of the total population of Peru) and since it is winter here it's overcast and cold everyday.

Jose Luis (the friend of a friend that we stayed with) was a great host and gave up his bedroom for us for a couple of nights. On Saturday night we went with him and some of his friends to a Salsa concert in Callao. The music was good, but it was outside and even though we each had on about 5 layers, we were still freezing. We were ready to leave by around 11pm, but had to wait for everyone else until 2:30am because we were told it was too dangerous for us to get a taxi by ourselves. We were pretty miserable by that point, but we made it home safely and happily crawled into our sleeping bags.

On Sunday we went to the National Museum and spent a couple hours looking at a photography exhibit about the history of Peru from 1980 to 2000. Most of you probably know about the Shining Path and the war that raged between them and the military for decades. It was a powerful exhibit with many images that were hard to look at, but it was also interesting and helped me to further understand some of Peru's complex history.

This morning we went off in search of sleeping mattresses and found a couple large inflatable mattresses that should work. Then we packed up all our stuff (we have a lot since we have our three large backpacks, three daypacks, and three suitcases of donations) and got a bus to Pisco. The bus ride took about three and a half hours and as we got close to Pisco we started seeing evidence of the recent earthquake. Piles of bricks and building materials litter the streets and some whole city blocks are completely destroyed.

After getting off the bus we took a taxi to our 'new house' and so far have only met a few other volunteers (most people are still working for the day). We'll be working six days a week, about 8 hours a day and I'm looking forward to plunging in tomorrow and getting into a routine.

I gotta go to dinner, but I'll try to write again soon,
xoxo, Katie