lima

lima and i are not friends.

it's a very unfortunate part of our trip that we had to stop through lima to get to cuzco.

and i blame myself because dawson wanted to spend as little time in lima as possible,

and take the soonest plane to cuzco.

but i, being the naive girl that i am, insisted that we spend a night there and bond with lima.

horrible idea.

after many hours of traveling and a few mid-flight panic attacks by me, we arrived in lima.

we went to baggage claim to get our bag, 

(which was another brilliant melissa idea. i had a carry-on packed and ready to go when last minute i changed to a bigger bag that had to be checked, just in case i bought too many souvenirs. i'm not quite sure what kind of things i was expecting to buy in peru?)

and sadly watched as bag after bag came out, none of them being ours.

finally we were approached by a lady who politely told us in broken english that they didn't transfer our bag in time,

and they would hopefully be able to track it down at some point in the next 5 days.

i didn't panic at this point, because i had thrown a skirt and spare underwear in our carry-on. 

wasn't that smart of me?
(i hadn't realized yet that i didn't have make-up, toiletries, extra shirts, pajamas, flat iron, etc.)

then we get to our hotel, at 6am mind you because we had taken the red-eye,

when we were politely told that if we wanted to check into our room before 11am it would only be a mere $150.

we thought of all the things that we could spend $150 on and mentally gave the guy the finger.

then we went to the breakfast room to try to eat our sorrows.

there was a quaint fruit and pastry bar that we hit up, and then a menu with items that looked expensive.

we ate our meager meal of fruit and dry croissants, refused the drink service, said we were done and then got handed the bill.

$15 per person for a meal that would't keep us full more than 20 minutes.

just as we were standing up to storm out leave, the waiter informed us that the price covered everything.

including drinks, the fancy looking menu, etc.

we sat back down slowly and as inconspicuously as we could, and ordered two meals each with hot chocolates to go with it.

we both felt much better after that.

we decided that since we now had 4 hours to kill, we would push through our exhaustion and go to the lima temple.

it was a great experience and turned out to be one of our best decisions so far.

and FYI, we called and asked if it was ok to show up in vans and jeans and they said absolutely.

we got back to our hotel, officially checked in, i took a nap while dawson fought with the airlines in spanish

and then decided to go visit some of dawson's old friends.

as we were trying to get a taxi i thought it was weird how they kept turning us down after daw told them where we wanted to go.

when i asked him about this, he told me that it was because it was too far.

i was informed at the end of the night that it was really because his friends lived in the dangerous part of lima,

where people get robbed and worse on a hourly basis.

some husband i have huh, risking my life like that.
he would have felt so bad if i had been kidnapped by peruvians,
and he would have had to become liam neeson like on "taken" but south american style.

side note.  i don't have many pictures from lima except for these few iPhone ones because i had heard people got pick-pocketed and bag slashed a lot, so i was too nervous to bring my real camera anywhere. but i'm not too sad because there wasn't much of lima that i wanted documented anyway.

moving on.
we visited the people and i had my first of many visits where i have no idea what is being said,
being the only non-spanish speaker.
(i knew i should have bought rosetta stone).

the couple offered to drive us home and to give us a city tour on the way.

little did we know, the city tour was going to turn out to be the longest 4 hours of our lives.

"this is our old dentist that we don't go to anymore"

"this is a park. this is another park. oh and another park"

"this is the street that goest by the ocean"

"this is another park"

we finally went to the main plaza of lima and that was actually fun.

there were people dancing and singing, kids running around, stands selling some delicious and some disgusting looking food...

we walked around til we couldn't take it any longer and politely asked to be taken home.

in our hotel room we realized we were tired, starving, and had no toothbrushes.

it was at this point in the trip that we could either break down in tears, get in a fight, or turn around and go home.

i'm so glad that we chose secret option D,

which was look at each other and start laughing at how ridiculous our day was,

and how we felt like we were in a really horrible comedy movie.

we had no choice but to go get empanadas that were so hot they burned our mouths and drink inca kola.

the next day we woke up and visited another family that dawson was very close with.

i was tempted to steal the youngest girl, genesis, and take her with us.

but i knew that the language barrier would be a problem so i decided not to.

then we hurried back to our hotel, packed up, checked out and got the hell out of lima.