Que Increíble la Ciudad de Lima

How incredible is the city of Lima!!  SO much has happened since my last entry.  Thursday, Ina (a girl that lives in our house) and her boyfriend invited us to a "gala de bicicletas", where we would dress up in our finest attire and bike ride with three hundred other people to call attention to this form of transportation.  For those of you that live in Madison, you have NO IDEA how good we have it.  "Car lanes" are few and far between, much less "bike lanes".  Also, only AFTER biking (thanks be to God) I found out the city has the highest number of traffic accidents... in the WORLD.  As in, worldwide. Probably would not have rode bikes for 3+ hours had I known that.  It was so fun though!  In the combis and taxis you don't get to experience the city like you do on foot and by bike.   We all made it without a hitch though and even saw some news agencies filming!

Saturday we went to Playa Silencio (Silent Beach) which was a ton of fun.  It's very weird, you get there and there are people trying to hustle you into their own part of the beach and then they bring you chairs and umbrellas.  Only later do you find out that, unless you bought a good amount of food from their nearby restaurant, you had to pay 10 soles per chair.  Not bad though considering the view was increíble! And the waves... I have never seen such large waves in my life!  We noticed a lot of the families bring small pools for their kids to play in, and we figured its probably because one good wave will literally carry a child out to sea, no exaggeration.  We met up with two of our other friends from the program and well as one of their amigas peruanas.  Our family here is growing!

note to todos: wear sunblock! and not just on your back! whoops.

Sunday... words will never describe how crazy and fun Sunday was.  Our peruano friends Michael and Guillermo wanted to go to a Karnaval... so I thought rides and food.  Never did I imagine we would be painted head to toe marching through the streets of Barranco wearing armor made of garbage bags and "playing" a giant water bottle with a stick.  We got to Barranco, a district in Lima famous for its artsy atmosphere, at about 10am and there was a small congregation of about 50 people under the Karnaval sign and they were wearing some seriously weird bright orange leggings.  We thought to ourselves... so, this is it?  We decided to walk around a little bit when we happened upon a woman painted head to toe in purple and red paint with buckets of it just waiting to be slathered on.  She asked us if we wanted to be painted; of course we said yes.  We followed her to a large gathering in front of a balcony of an apartment, where apparently our king resided.  

He stepped out in front of us in all his glory and everyone fell to one knee.  He told us we were his people and so good, and to do him honor in the battle.  Something to that effect.  Then his right hand general in command made an appearance with this thing in his hands, saying "This thing is very special.  We must protect this thing.  We must get it."  I still don't know what this thing was, it looked like a garbage bag.  Then he regressed into his "quarters", and returned with an obnoxious pig face hat made out of plastic garbage bags.  "¿De quién es?"  (Whose is it?)  And someone in the crowd called "It is mine, sir."  He returned with some shoulder armor and asked the same question.  Another person in the crowd called out "Me! It's mine!"  And this continued until most people had armor.

Here's an "action shot" of the armor tossing.  Most of these photos are courtesy of Kalli Wolf, one of the girls we live with who brought her camera.

We then followed the troop as they led us back to the original sign, where a ton of people had conglomerated.  For the next two hours or so we listened to the "bands" of our "tribe" playing their massive plastic wrapped drums, wrapped to avoid being painted on.  We were absolutely covered from head to toe!

We then commenced the parade, where we danced through the streets of Barranco with our little team in the midst of thousands of thousands of people!  Afterwards when I got home someone was in the shower, so I jumped on the computer real quick... who knew Mom, Kenny, Dad, Grandma and Grandpa, and Lisa-Beej-Pat-Steve-Carrie were going to call!!  Hope you guys enjoyed.

I miss everyone at home.  But it is SUCH A BLAST here!  This city is truly amazing.

Ciao,

Keeley