Lima again

First of all, thanks to those who have sent emails or commented so far. It´s so nice to hear from you, especially since I´m still getting used to everything. And no need to worry! I´m a-ok.

Anyway, last night I had to use the ¨I´m engaged¨ trick to ward someone off for the first time. One of the employees at the hotel here came into the dorm room while I was the only waking traveller, sat down on the next bed over, and proceeded to ask if I had a boyfriend, if I was married, if I had babies, what I was doing... I´m not sure any of what I said deterred him at all, but I think I managed to convince him I wasn´t interested. Anyway, I´ve never experienced that kind of super aggressive forwardness before. On the street it´s easy to ignore, but cornered in my dorm room it´s not so easy. He´s perfectly harmess (don´t worry!), just annoying and he put me in a defensive mood. That was last night though; this is now.

To save time and to save repeating myself to myself (hahaha), I´m going to copy bits from my personal journal to account for the rest:

¨12 Sep, 11pm -- Last night I was sitting in the little cafe outside my room talking to Michi from Switzerland and Jen from England when this drunk middle-aged Bulgarian man came over to join us. He had a hard time with his English but managed to tell us about his trek up the highest mountain in Ecuador and how he was temporarily stuck in Peru because he lost all his documents. His light-hearted but very drunken jocularity prompted the British girl to raise her eyebrows a few times, but he seemed harmless. We three younger travellers left soon after a second drunk guy joined in the conversation though. He was out of it and probably on some kind of bad drug trip. He tried to give me his email address because he live in Cochabamba (where I´ll be travelling soon), but he was so intoxicated that he couldn´t remember half of it and didn´t notice that parts were missing (and I didn´t let him know either).

...

¨So far I have found Lima very warm and inviting, which is nice for my first time visiting a foreign city alone.

¨Just as I wrote that last line an employee of the hostel who knew I was still awake came into the room with a surprise cup of tea - a perfect example of what I just said.

...

¨13 Sep - 5.16pm -- I went to see the Inquisition Museum today; it had a bunch of plaques I couldn´t read and a neat display with wax models of torture victims. More interesting than the museum though were the school girls I met while waiting to use the bathroom. Four of them, probably around 8 or 10 years old, crowded around me and I had a wonderful smiling conversation with them about our names, where I was from, whether I spoke Castellano (a formal way of saying Spanish) or Ingles... The children are all very curious.

¨After that I went to the central market. It is large and under tents, and kind of dirty, but now I know where to buy single packs of toilet paper and cheap fruit and other foods.

¨I also went into the San Fransisco convent and had a partial tour in Spanish before I abandoned the group with a 60-something year old English woman (from London) to look around on our own. Lillian, as she is called, is travelling around South America for 3 months on her own, and had lots of wonderful things to say as she and I marvelled at all the old bones piled in the catacombs underneath the convent.

¨The library in this place was stunning! So old and filled with books dating back to the 15th century.

...

¨I like Lima, but I´m looking forward to moving on to Ayacucho tomorrow. I haven´t seen any blue in the sky since my arrival - it is grey and smoggy all the time, day and night.¨

That´s all for today. I probably won´t be on the internet tomorrow, partly to save money and partly because I will be checking out of the hotel at some point and heading to the bus station. The next entry will likely be from Ayacucho. Until then, ciao.

P.S. The keyboards here aren´t so good so if there are weird spelling mistakes you know why!