Visitors in Lima!

Well! Quite a lot has happened in a short time during our mid-year vacation. I'm back in Lima now and feeling surprisingly rested, or at least refreshed, after a trip that rivals National Lampoon for things gone wrong on a vacation. The good news is that I got to see the sun, Cusco, llamas, the sun, Machu Picchu, the sun, about 27,000 chullos (those Andean wool hats with the ear flaps), the Sacred Valley of the Incas, and most of all my mom and my sister. And the sun.

On July 21st I went with Carlos the taxi driver to pick up Mom and Marissa from the airport. I realized that I really like airports--I love going, being on the road to a new destination, and also meeting people who are coming to see me, and airports are good that way. Having my family come visit was the next best thing to visiting home myself; since I couldn't go home, home came to see me. Marissa had finished the new Harry Potter on the plane and I'm not sure she entirely stopped thinking about it at any time during the two weeks that followed. She felt a little out of place because of the language barrier and being the only teenager around, but Mom was fearless, jumping into any and all conversations with whatever Spanish she had available. This was actually quite a bit, and she got along with the sisters (and pretty much everybody else in the pueblo) as though she'd known them forever--chatting with the people in our English class, meeting the music group after Mass and trying out her skills on the drum, telling slightly weird stories about her friends' pets during our welcome lunch with the sisters, etc. It was great. As always, the sisters were amazingly hospitable. They cooked us a wonderful lunch the first day the visitors were here, and Iris gave up her room for Catherine's friend Chrissy who also came to travel with us.

We did a little tourism in Lima the first few days. This is us in the Convento de Santo Domingo, where we learned about San Martín, my new favorite saint. Our friend Ever took us around the city center and we saw the cathedral, which was very impressive. (Only about an hour after the tour ended did I realize I had actually seen the same cathedral before, in February with the volunteers from Tony's... clearly Peru is driving me out of my mind...) There was sun on the Plaza de Armas and very crowded buses on the way back home.

The Cathedral of Lima...

Mom and Marissa also came to my English classes at the school and in the parish. My students really loved asking Marissa how old she was and where she was from, since they are the same age. On the last day of class before the Fiestas Patrias vacation, the school puts on a display of typical Peruvian foods from the different regions of the country, so our visitors got to see that, plus my chorus sang everything they've learned so far in front of the rest of the school. It was darling and they were so proud of themselves.

Wednesday night the sisters said goodbye to us with a lovely little bilingual tea, and on the morning of the 26th our journeys began...