Busy first week

So no, I haven't met a llama yet, but that's about the only thing Catherine and I haven't seen during this first week. Animals that we have sighted include tons of dogs in various states of cleanliness, live chickens and little chicks for sale in mesh bags in the market, some birds in the nearby nature reserve, a very fluffy and very dusty sheep coming out of a neighbor's house like a dog, and a few cockroaches in our house (killed so far: me 2, Catherine 1).

Lima is a city of unbelievable contrasts. A twenty-minute bus ride takes you from Tupac, our fairly poor neighborhood where people throw their water out on the streets, to a shopping center called Metro that would fit perfectly in a Maryland suburb. (Metro itself is a superstore that combines something of a Giant, a Sears, and a CVS together. I bought NoAd suscreen there, the exact same brand that I use in the US.) The bus system here is organized chaos incarnate--it really does work, and there seem to be prescribed routes that different buses follow, but mostly it consists of vehicles from small minivans to large buses going along with a guy hanging out the door and yelling where they're going to, like so: "BarrancoChorrilloHuaylas! HuaylaHualyaHualyas!" If you want to ride, you stick out your arm and they stop for you. There are very few personal cars on the streets. And if you think US driving is bad, the drivers here pay zero attention to lanes and honk to let people know they're going around them. It's kind of fun to sit back and watch the chaos as long as you don't have to do the driving.

Well, our time is up... more later.