PERU LAST DAY

We have our last lunch at the vegie place again. OBVIOUSLY I get Arroz de la Cubana. Wade is already sick of this dish and so he has another sandwhich. Sick of fried egg and fried banana and rice? What??? We've only had it for the past five days. In order to get REALLY sick of a dish, I need to eat it for two weeks. After Thailand, where I ate Pad Thai for lunch every day for a month, I couldn't go near noodles for about ten weeks. And then I could only stomach it a few times a year. Now I am back to normal, though, eating Thai about twice a month.

BACK TO PERU. We spent the afternoon walking sloooowly around the city, trying to figure out if there was anywhere we needed/wanted to go. We got some beads in one store (though not Peruvian in the slightest, they were super cheap), I interneted while Wade journaled and post-carded, and we wandered some more. We stepped into Metro, the ginormous supermarket, and bought some bread and chocolate for the plane. Wade bought some ugly, small Peruvian things to stuff into his friends' packs back at Outback. It's a thing they do, I don't know.

With six hours to go, we considered all the various means of getting to the airport that would take more time than a taxi: catching a bus, getting a collectivo, taking a taxi there and then back and then there again, walking.... At this point we thought we saw the president of Peru in his motorcade about to enter the Palace, and so we sat down on the steps of the Cathedral and waited. Nothing happened. The motorcade was just a group of fancy cars passing by. But we kept sitting and talked about our trip. It was really peaceful, sitting there with the cars going by, watching the pigeons circling the plaza, not having to mind our time. It was like wasting time, but in a really pleasant way.

Until this guy walks up to us and says he is practicing his English and would we mind if he sat down and talked to us for a while. Wade said OK, we had a bit of time before our plane took off. The Peruvian did most of the talking, asking us about American customs and American lingo, accents and proper grammar. I felt a bit intruded upon. It is one thing to walk up to a stranger in line for, say, some attraction, and talk to them about the attraction or their travels thus far. It's another thing to walk up to two people sitting in a public plaza in the middle of a conversation.

In any case, we finally excused ourselves to catch our plane, retrieved our luggage from the hostel, and caught a cab to the aeroporte.

Wade's plane leaves at nine-thirty. Mine leaves at one. Sadly, I was not able to check in until nine.

After Wade checks in, we sat upstairs not eating Pizza Hut or McDonalds (the first we had seen in this country) but instead munching on our Metro breads and chocolates, reminiscing about our trip. It was bittersweet. I was so ready to go home, so ready to fall into my own bed with my own sheets and my own blankets, but also sad to be leaving someone I shared every second with for the last three weeks.

We did goodbye at the airport tax booth.

As I walked downstairs, a small cry welled up inside me. I was caught by Hawaiin beekeeper Matt, who was returning home after seven months in Equador, Bolivia, and Peru. We talked for a while about this crazy country, until it was time for me to check in.