I've been super busy since returning to Peru from
Costa Rica. It was an awesome trip and I got to see all of my family and some family friends that I haven't seen in a long time. After a short trip back home, I was back to the daily grind in Lima. I'm finishing up the project that I've been working on all year. My research partner and I are starting the writeup and should have a rough draft of the article ready to go in a few weeks! I'm also making some good progress on starting up a project for someone else to take over next year.
My first weekend back in Peru, I went to a city a few hours south of Lima called Paracas with a few friends to go camping on the beach. Paracas is known for the
Islas Ballestas, which are a group of small islands completely covered with Boobies (a bird), penguins, seals, and sea lions. There are no natural predators to these animals (such as sharks or killer whales), so there are literally thousands of them all over the place. We got to take a boat tour right up next to them, and even got to see a seal teaching her young pup how to swim!
We then went to the Paracas National Reserve to a beach to camp at. We walked to the end of the beach and were literally the only people within sight. We got a chance to do some body surfing, throw a baseball around, and hike among the sand dunes and cliffs.
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| Mother seal teaching her pup to swim |
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| Farley and Janella at the Islas Ballestas |
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| Me at sunset looking over our beach |
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| Eating ceviche in Paracas - Janella, Farley, me, Andreas, Adam, and Isis |
Farley, one of my best friends from Peru recently moved back to Colorado, but before he left we made sure that we had an awesome weekend of a despedida. The weekend started out with a concert that we had been looking forward to ever since October - Shakira! The concert started out with Train, who sang a few of their old songs such as Meet Virginia and their new hit Hey Soul Sister. They put on a decent show, but we were hoping that they'd play a little bit longer. After a short break, Ziggy Marley came on stage and played a few of his songs as well as a few of his dad's classic hits. Shakira played for about two hours with a mix of her old songs and new songs. She put on a great show and it was a good start to the good-bye weekend. After the concert, we stopped for a "quick" game of blackjack at a local casino. Five hours and 100 soles ($35) later we were out of there - just in time for sunrise!
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| The opening act Train |
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| Ziggy Marley |
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| Shakira |
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| Dancing? |
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| Andreas, me, Farley, and Isis at the Shakira concert |
While in Costa Rica, I mentioned to my cousin Tom that it would be awesome if he came down to visit me in Peru when my sister Annie comes. He instantly rearranged his work schedule and cleared the entire month of April for vacation! He's been here for a week now, and we have been going out to eat all types of food, got massages by blind ladies, and illegally drank beer during a dry weekend in Peru due to the presidential elections (we're rebels). He took Spanish classes for a week to freshen up for the rest of his stay. So far, we've had a different type of food for every meal and he is yet to have something that he doesn't like! We even spent all day Saturday volunteering in a poor area south of Lima planting trees, building fences, and helping build gardens with young kids in the area.
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| Building a fence for a garden with Tom and Beto |
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| Planting trees and flowers in the garden with the kids |
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| The whole group - 35 of us - Peruvians and foreigners living in Lima |
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| Sleeping after a long day in the sun |
Tom will join my sister and two of her friends on a hike to Machu Picchu starting Friday (I thought about going again for the fourth time, but instead I'm going to go with Mari to a wedding on Saturday... I even got a tailor-made suit made just for me!), then I will meet up with all four of them to go back to
Puerto Maldonado, then up to Máncora to spend a few days just four degrees south of the equator with Mari and Janella! I'll have more pictures and stories to share after that!
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