PERU DAY ONE

I chose the hostel in Miraflores for two reasons:

1. Lonely Planet, my bible, said it was popular with Israelis
2. It was called the Witches' House

The Witches' House was everything and more. A tudor style mansion in the middle of a quiet neighborhood. A crude picture of a witch drawn on the front gate. Lots of 'Raelis. Lots of beds. Internet. DVDs. Cheap.

In the morning I found Wade in the living room. YAY, WADE!!! (Hi, Wade!) He had just met two nice Israeli girls, Donna and Yael, who were also beginning their trip in Peru. Turns out Donna worked last summer as a Mishlachat at Hess Kramer! There are only four Jews!! After Wade repacked my pack, the four of us set off to central Lima. I had a successful go at the Aeromexico office, changing my tickets to stay an extra week.

Lime is a huge city, with traffic, poverty, loud noises, and trash. We spent all day walking around with our packs gazing about as if on drugs. A summery of our peulot:

• We witness the changing of the guard at the Palace of the Plaze de Armas. Much like Buckingham Palace in London, only the crowd gathered to watch was mostly locals.
• See a ginormous and beautiful Cathedral
• Banco Museum of Money, which has on display Peru´s past currency. Sigh.... USA has the most boring paper bills. When will we get colors? When will we get differently-sized bills? When will we get a kick-ass hero pictured, like Tupac Amaru, the cowboy-hat-wearing native who started an Inca revolution against the Spanish?
• Patronize a panderia and buy cheese and unknown conitas de manjar. Manjar turns out to be caramel, and is now our favorite word. MANJAR, HOW I LOVE THEE.
• A protest (for education?) is going on, and one of the major streets is blocked off from traffic. We sit in the center divider, eating bread and cheese. A gang of kids comes to keep us company. We give them bread. They are cute until they start spitting on my back. As they leave they start play-fighting in the blocked-off street.
• Museo Monastary de San Francisco. I must quote the bible here: "The underground catacombs are are the site of an estimated 70,000 burials and the faint-hearted may find the bone-filled crypts unnerving - if only for the conservationalist's bizarre decision to rearrange the skulls and femurs into striking rings of concentric circles." FABULOUS.
• Deeners and Wade gain instant celebrity status as a school on a field trip (all wearing matching brown track suits with pictures of Madonna and child on back) cross their paths. They all go fucking nuts waving and shouting HI HI HI and asking our name, mobbing the street corner we stand on, giving high-fives, etc.
• Stamp Museum of Peru and Post Office. You know how much I like stamps. I learn the word sello and Estates Unidos.
• Metro super market. Who doesn´t love a good, foreign market? It is here we first see frankfurters in a jar, and buy our first container of manjar.
• Pass a building with naked tiger-mermaid doorknobs
• Walk a bazillion miles (ten blocks) to bus station, where we are told they don´t have busses to Pisco for the rest of the day. Luckily, before Deens loses her shit, we find out that a different company down the block has a bus. We buy tickets and the bus leaves five minutes later.
• On the four-hour bus ride to Pisco, we are shown two disturbing yet bizzarly captivating movies, one a martial arts movie dubbed in Spanish with English subtitles, and two that featured a baby with four eyes (two in each pupil) floating in a jar of formaldehyde. Sadly, we left the bus before we could figure out what happened.

In Pisco, we stay at the wonderful Hostel Belin. Most definitely the best part of the hostel was the large, framed poster of Christina Aguilera above our headboard. God Bless Hostel Belin.