OBAMAAAA!!!!

Only about 2 and a half weeks til I'm an American again, and I cannot believe how fast the time has gone by...it's really bittersweet. But these past two weekends have been really fun! Two weeks ago I ran in the Lima 10K that was at night...it was sooo much fun! While I was running all the people on the sidelines kept yelling, "Yaaa, chica! Gringa!! Gringa!". Then I went to a cultural dinner show that had native Peruvian dances and music...you'll see below that that was quite an experience. That same weekend we took a day trip to Lunahuana to go river rafting. The river was pretty low so the ride was pretty mellow but fun nonetheless. Last weekend three of my girlfriends and I went up to the beaches on the coast in Mancora up by the Ecuador border. It was a weekend on the beach and it flew by way too fast...It actually was warm and had sun unlike Lima. Of course I got super sunburnt, but it was well worth it! Our hostel was a backpacker's hangout for $7 a night and we met people from Canada, Sweden, England, Scotland, Germany, and all over Peru. I even met a Scottish guy named STUART RONALD MACDONALD!!! Epic! I have a couple weeks left, finals are coming up and Mom and Paul will be here Saturday and I'm sooooo excited!! (We'll see what they think of the Peruvian madness haha).

Things I've learned this week:
1. If your host sister gives you a dirty look when you call her a "cerdo" as you're observing that she's left-handed it's because you meant to say "zurda" but instead called her a pig. My bad.
2. Peruvians have the Justin Bieber fever. Their only cure: more cowbell!!!
3. If you are trying to remember all the houses in Harry Potter, just rely on the British guys at your hostel to yell "RAVENCLAW!!" across the bar. Thanks, guys, I was stumped!
4. To make something like a burger or sandwich "Mexican" on the menu Peruvians just pile on some nacho-flavored Doritos. No joke.
5. I've learned to stop being shocked at anything out of the ordinary here. It's best just go with the flow because you will never fully understand why Peruvians do the things they do.
6. Pizza Huts have a breakfast menu but bagels do not exist here.
7. If you're a gringo, you WILL get ripped off by taxi drivers. It's as inevitable as panty-lines.
8. It's not unusual for an entire hospital shut down for a day because the night before was a festival or something and no one wanted to go to work that day. Yep, literally happened in Mancora.
9. I find hair in my food almost on a daily basis, but you just learn to pull it out and keep eating. Never again will I bitch about the food standards in the United States if I survive eating here!

Me and the other gringos that ran in the Lima 10K. The neon green shirts were mandatory but looked awesome at night with 6000 runners.

Rafting in Lunahuana. Sorry Peru, but Colorado takes the cake on this one!

The rainbow Edward Scissorhand brothers doing their Peruvian dance...doing flips and basically breakdancing with a pair of scissors in their hands the whole time. You know what would make this dance cooler?...Scissors! Scissor me timbers!

Also another Peruvian dance that had costumes...this is a prime of example of how the term "P.C." doesn't exist here nor does the concept of personal space. Creepers!

At the Lima airport before heading to Mancora. The Pizza Hut breakfast menu. Please notice that your pizza, breadsticks, or cinnasticks come with coffee and orange juice.

At the beach at Mancora these 3 guys really had to pee..so where do they go? On the side of the wall on the public gazebo. Absolutely typical occurrence in this country. "What's your name? He'll write it on the wall! Mind your business!"

There are about 15 of these guys constantly walking around the beach trying to sell you sunglasses, dvds, kitchen towels, q-tips, literally anything you can think of. We didn't have any money on us sitting on the beach so we offered this guy some of our peach Kool-aid. I bet you this guy wears his sunglasses at night!

Also, we got serenaded by this guy while sitting on the beach! haha Play that funky music, brown boy!

One of the funniest things this weekend: we ran into this kid that captured a seahorse and was keeping it in a plastic cup. Don't worry, he put it's head in the water so it could breathe haha. He was sooo proud and it was sooo cute!

Then he showed off some more and picked up a dying bird to accompany his seahorse. He walked away like it was no big deal. We watched him walk away, completely flabbergasted and stunned, but then remembered..oh, right, this is Peru.

The entrance to our hostel...our little paradise for the weekend!

Our hostel complete with hammocks, palm trees, a pool, beach volleyball, and running water. Aaaah!

The crazy British guys we met at our hostel that kept yelling "Commonwealth!" Of course, I had no idea what that meant so I countered it everytime with "OBAMA!!!"

Mid-crisp getting a slightly darker shade of white. But check out the Pacific in the background...stellar.

We went to get seafood for lunch (which one of the girls got food poisoning from) and of course there were no nutcracker metal things to open the shellfish. What would you need that for? One of my friends just bit into them with her teeth haha, but Laura asked for something to open them with. What did they give her? Garden shears. Pieces went flying, hence why she's wearing her "protective eye gear."

I'd like a Nice and Smoth Smothie with my Sex Burger please

One month to go! I can't believe it...I'm excited to come home because there are some things here that I'm not sure I can ever get used to (like the traffic and dog poop on the sidewalks), but I know I'm going to be sad to leave my strange new home. We've been trying to pack in as many things as we can lately. We went to Oktoberfest here in Lima, which was a wierd mix of Peruvian girls dressed in German outfits, while American music was played and people drank the Bud Light of Peru. Also, we have been to the Peruvian zoo, which was actually really cool; there were even ancient ruins in the middle of the park.

This past weekend we had a long weekend because the Peruvians get the day after Halloween off for some reason. So my friends Mary and Lauren and I went on a trip north of Lima to Huaraz. We stayed there Friday and Saturday, went and saw ruins at Willkawain and Chavin, which were unbelievable how innovative and advanced these pre-Incan cultures were. These structures are still going strong since the 9th century even despite all the earthquakes. Saturday night we visited the Huaraz Plaza de Armas, which was pretty poor looking, and then we had a 10 hour overnight bus ride to Trujillo. Trujillo was a much bigger and cleaner city than Huaraz, and its Plaza de Armas was huge with statues, fountains, and colorful buildings. We spent Halloween night like cool teenage girls at the mall, ate Pizza Hut, watched an NFL game on the big screen, and tried to concentrate on Paranormal Activity 2 at the movie theater while all the Peruvians literally talked the entire time. Our beach-front hostel was in the next town over, Huanchaco, and we got to take some very interesting bus rides (see below!). Our last day, we visited the ruins of Chan Chan (incredible) and spent the afternoon on the beach! This weekend I'm running a 10k Saturday night in Lima, then we have a river rafting trip on Sunday!

Things I've learned:
1. If you want to say "that hurts my feelings", learn the difference between sentimientos and centimos, otherwise you're saying "that hurts my change/coins."
2. If a crazy man in white polyester pants and sunglasses on the public bus pulls a crab out of a plastic bag and starts flapping it around in front of your face...don't be alarmed, it's Peru.
3. "To flirt" here means "to have an affair." Sooo, if your Peruvian brother seems shocked and gives you judgemental looks when you tell him you flirt with a lot of guys, it's what Americans do, it's not that big of a deal...it's because he thinks you're whoring around.
4. Peruvian children are quite possibly the cutest species alive. No contest.
5. Peruvian "business cards" are a piece of notebook paper with just a name, "taxi" in parenthesis, and a cell number scribbled on it. Very professional! :)
6. Just smile and keep walking when a Peruvian says in broken English, "Are you from England? I've been to Michigan." Ummm, awesome?
7. If your daughter has to pee while you're at the beach, let her pop a squat in the middle of the stairs leading down to the beach. What's wrong with that?
8. I learned how mirrors are made. Yep, got even more bored one day.
9. Professors here are paid by the hour, so somehow it's your own responsibility to make up a cancelled class because your professor got "the itchies" from a bad reaction to crab...
10. It's not unusual to see a middle-aged woman at the zoo wearing a flat-billed hat that has grafitti letters that say, "Thug." hahahaha one of my favorite things here.

Mis amigos and I at Oktoberfest with a German cuy (guinea pig)...if only they were really this big and we could actually get a full meal out of them when we fry those suckers up!

We brought our German brother with us to Oktoberfest, he's on the right in the rockin' hat. I'm pretty sure Tina Turner's "Rollin on the River" was playing in the background here. Big wheels keep on turnin!!!!

Mishi mishi mishi. That's how cats say meow here. This is at the zoo, not in the jungle.

The ruins at Willkawain in Huaraz. They built this 3-story building out of giant stones to keep a lookout for enemies.

On our hike in the Cordillera Blanca in Huaraz. We randomly came upon this lady named Juanita with all of her sheep. She only spoke Quechua, but we unmistakeably understood when she starting laughing hysterically and pointing, saying, "Gringas!! haha! Gringas!" Apparently we were a sight to see! We got to take a picture...for a tip of course. Typical.

Our well-named hostel in Huaraz...

The Plaza de Armas in Huaraz...yikes.

On our way to the ruins at Chavin. Yes, whoever wants to steal this picture and frame it because it's so awesome...you have my permission.

The ruins at Chavin. This was a pretty close second to Machu Picchu at being some of the coolest ruins I've seen in Peru. They had a 7 times anti-seismic construction...hence the hundreds of years of existence. I'll go ahead and take the history dork award.

I think this was my favorite part of the whole trip. This was a burger stand in the middle of the street in Huaraz called "Sex Burger" run by two teenage guys. They couldn't understand why I couldn't stop laughing and immediately asked for a picture with them, but were good sports about it, as you can see. hahahahahaha, why don't we have things like this in the US?

This was the hostel we stayed at in Huanchaco. I got some, ocean front property in Huanchaco!

A cathedral at the Plaza de Armas in Trujillo...impressive.

Some of the architecture at the ruins at Chan Chan. If these people can make crap like this out of sand and make it last hundreds of years, they have my respect.

I spy....a gringa on giant old ruins!! Ohp, there I am in my same ridiculous jacket. Class class class!

The bus driver in Trujillo. Literally he's sitting in a beach chair. A plastic beach chair. And the gear shift was literally diagonally behind him. This country never ceases to amaze me: ancient ruins, beach chair buses.

Freshly made picarones...kind of like Peruvian donuts doused in syrup. A whole plate of them cost less than $1. One thing this country can do right is food...wicious!!

hahaha my 2nd favorite part of the trip: We visited a little cafe on the beach that had homemade menus that obviously took direct translations online, thus my "nice and smoth smothie" off the "Smothie" list.

View on the beach in Huanchaco...what you can't see is all the trash on the beach haha.

One of my fav pics. These boats lined the beach in Huanchaco...gorgeous!

C'mon vamonos! Everybody let's go! Where are we going? AMAZON! Where are we going? AMAZON!

This weekend was the trip to the AMAZON!! We left at 4 in the morning on Friday to catch our flight to Iquitos. From there, we caught our boats to where our lodge was on the Amazon. The weather was immediately noticable how different it was from Lima...there was actually sun! The bugs were also immediately noticable. I won't be surprised if I got skin cancer from all the deet I used this weekend, that stuff is so strong it ate away my nail polish and the paint on my watch. But I still got about 50 mosquito and chigger bites nonetheless. Friday we took an afternoon hike through the jungle around where our lodge was and that night I went tarantula hunting with one other girl and a group of boys...talk about branching out of my comfort zone! We found tarantulas on the trees, and even better on the ceiling of our bungalows, super duper. The whole weekend wherever we were going we sang Dora the Explorer's song, "C'mon vamonos! C'mon let's get to it, I know that we can do it!" Abby would have loved that Dora's spirit was in the Amazon haha. The next morning we got up early to watch the sunrise, go bird watching from the boats, and visit a local village. We saw giant lily pads and a jungle man with a giant machete. That afternoon we saw pink and gray dolphins in the river, which was insane because I had no idea that dolphins existed in rivers. We swam in the water where they were but the fish freaked me out so I was the picture-taker haha. After lunch on the boat, we hiked through the jungle. The guide told us to keep our eyes on the ground because there are snakes. Um, no thank you. It was all I could do to keep my eyes forward and tell myself "don't look down, don't look down". I sang the "Bare Necessities" from The Jungle Book to keep myself calm and not have a heart attack. But all in all it was awesome! I swung from a vine, drank water from a giant vine, stood on a termit mound the size of a house, and almost got attacked by a million mosquitoes...all worth it though. Sunday we played volleyball and soccer with a local village and headed back to Iquitos to eat, shop, and catch our plane. I wish I could write more but it would take up 5 pages. There are more pictures on my Facebook because the ones below are just a tiny bit of them.

Things learned in the Amazon:
1. No matter how much bug spray is used, you will get eaten alive. Period.
2. Machetes are your best friend.
3. Malaria pills make you have obscene dreams.
4. It's 100% safe to ride on the back of your man's motorcycle while holding your baby.
5. Likewise, it's totally normal to fit your family of four on one motorcycle.
6. Dora the Explorer could never actually hack it in the Amazon. What a little brown liar.
7. If your bag is covered in soy sauce after you pick it up in baggage claim, just laugh because who the heck would have tried to check their leftover Chinese food??

This is my brother Choche from my new house walking my roommate Laura and I to catch our bus to the airport at 4am. He looked ridiculous in my pink bags but I thought it was hilarious!

Our plane when we landed in Iquitos. "This is your captain speaking, prepare to be amazed!"

These are the boats we were in all weekend...thank God for the canopys.

This is what our bungalows looked like...there were about 4 or 5 of us to a bungalow and about 200 bugs to every five feet haha.

My bed...fully equiped with a bug net. Still I was terrified that bugs were going to climb in but thankfully they didn't...or at least I didn't notice.

I think I'm ready to start my own gang.

George, George, George of the Jungle! I didn't post the picture of where I slipped off because of all the sunscreen on my hands haha.

Sunset at the Amazon. Game over.

Tarantula hunting. I was the loser who didn't have a flashlight so I got to borrow my roommate's lighters that had flashlight lasers on the ends of them. I'm sure I scared off the spiders and alligators with those!

No big deal, just one of the tarantulas hanging out on the roof of our walkway to the bungalows. By the end of the trip we'd walk under them without even hardly noticing. This was as close as I was going to get because I knew they jumped.

Had to look close to find this sucker on the bottom of a tree...the military could learn a thing or to about camouflage from these bad boys.

"Kevin, I'm going to feed you to my tarantula."

The cutest little girl I saw this weekend, totally content washing her clothes in the river. Humbling.

Queen Victoria waterlily. The biggest type in the world. Please notice jungle man to the left with his giant machete and giant intimidation factor. Also, while we were taking pics here our guide says, "This is the perfect habitat for anacondas!" .... ..... .... Cool, bro.

Climbed the walking tree that moves a few centimeters every year. These boots were made for walkin' :)

Some kind of giant centipede thing...

The tree that we made it to at the end of our walk. It's over hundreds of years old.

View from the boat down the Amazon.

Fishing for piranhas with just a stick, a line, a hook, and some chicken meat. We went old school on this trip, no new-fangled rods for us!

The surprising thing, my boat alone caught over 20 fish. Here I am with my first piranha!

And here's my little friend for dinner. Delicious but not much meat and a million little bones that poke you...ouch, Charlie.

Do not be fooled, this sloth is real! haha from the picture thought it looks like a stuffed animal. Moved about as slow as one, too.

After our game of volleyball with the jungle girls. They kicked our butts but then we rallied and won our second game. One of the most fun things I did this weekend!

Back in Iquitos we fed turtles pieces of bread like would feed ducks at home. There was also a massive fish but it's really hard to see in this picture. Just pretend a shark is in the water and that's about the size.

In Iquitos before we went back to the airport. Everyone drives mototaxis and motorcycles, they're awesome!