Hola de Lima!

First things first: I have arrived safely with all of my worldly goods to Peru! And I'm honestly not kidding about the "all of my worldly goods" part - my taxi driver in Lima asked me if I had "toda Nueva York" in my bag after he picked it up. (I never purported to be a light packer. And I think I did fairly well, considering how much of my luggage is related to data collection. So there! Truth be told, though, I barely snuck my rucksack in under the weight limit - 48 pounds, baby! Add another 35 lbs or so for the microscribe plus my backpack, and I have about 100 lbs of luggage in all...)

Yesterday was an incredibly long day of travel, but rather (thankfully) uneventful for all that. Most of the notable moments occurred during my layover in Mexico City, such as 1) trying to describe in my halting Spanish the purpose of the microscribe to a Mexican customs official (un instrumento cientifico para recoger los datos en tres dimensionales?) and 2) forgetting I had water in my bottle from the first flight as I went through security for the second flight and thus having to chug half a liter while two Mexican security guards cheered me on because there was no place to dump it. Good times. At least I stayed hydrated, right?  The day ended with my late night arrival in Lima, where I took a taxi with the aforementioned driver to the home of my hosts, Fanny and Enrico. Props to AirBnB because they are a super friendly and helpful couple. Evinced by the fact that they gave me some nail polish remover to help take off the black paint I got all over my fingers by touching the recently painted front gate of their apartment complex. Turns out everyone thought it was dry. Well, folks, it wasn't. Maybe a sign next time. En serio. Anyway, that's the kind of first impression I make - arriving with 100 lbs of luggage and sticky black fingerprints.

Larcomar

After sleeping for many wonderful hours (given that my taxi for JFK came at 6am yesterday morning and that I have zero luck sleeping on planes, I was a touch glassy-eyed last night, which also probably contributed to the paint incident), I woke up today, organized all my belongings, and went out to explore the area where I'm staying. Fanny and Enrico live in the trendy Mira Flores district, only a couple of blocks away from Larcomar - an open-aired mall right on the edge of the ocean (I wasn't kidding about the haze, was I?). After having chifa for lunch (the Peruvian version of Chinese food), I went grocery shopping to pick up some provisions for the week. I also bought a cheap cell phone to use within Peru and had another linguistic adventure trying to buy minutes for it at the supermarket. You see, my main problem is that I can handle the first few conversational phrases in Spanish quite well and so people think I'm more fluent than I actually am, and thus things quickly go downhill when they start firing at me in rapid Spanish and I'm struggling to pick one word out of 20. Nonetheless, I manage to muddle through and everyone is pretty patient and helpful.

I made aji de gallina!

For dinner tonight, I made myself some aji de gallina (well, sort of; notice the help of the pre-made sauce in the pic). It actually wasn't too bad, even if I was too lazy to hard boil an egg for the traditional garnish. A video chat with the hubby and prepping for the start of data collection have rounded out my evening, and after I finish up this post and try to figure out how to add some photos I'm going to relax because tomorrow will be a long day working with the bones! Huzzah for los datos!

Buenos noches, amigos!