Quik Thinking

In the morning we caught a flight to Lima, for which I was finally forced to check my umbrella. Lima was a lot warmer than Cusco but not as pretty, although as a large metropolis filled with regular people it felt more "real". I was surprised to see that Scotiabank has a substantial presence in Lima! Sadly, the beach has pebbles instead of sand. But we were able to find outstanding fish and chicken dishes to eat. The traffic is pretty chaotic and some cabbies are just nuts! In the evening we met up with Michal's friend Heidi, who lives in Peru, and one of her coworkers (Aaron) for dinner and then hit up a club.

The next morning Aaron met us at our hostel and we all took a bus to the national museum. The bus system in Lima bears describing. First off, it's not actually one system at all; instead of a single municipally run transit authority, there are several bus companies that run buses along the same routes in competition with each other. It's a lot like Karachi, except nobody hangs off the sides of buses. Unfortunately, it was nearly always too hard to figure out which bus would get us where we wanted to go. I missed being able to rely upon Google Transit.

At the museum we checked out the exhibition about the Shining Path, a Peruvian terrorist group that caused the death of 69,000 people over the course of 2 decades. We only spent an hour at the museum because it was free and we soon grew hungry. After lunch we took a cab downtown and wandered about for a while, soaking in the atmosphere. I loved the promenade so much that I could see myself living in Lima if only I spoke Spanish. As we were leaving, we ran across the wedding ceremony of somebody pretty high up in the Peruvian navy. It had taken up most of the Plaza de Armas and some of the soldiers were taking pics with anybody who wanted.