"Que Tal?", Hot Milk, Combi Insurance, and Other Such Peruvian Things

It's been a whirlwind two days, and I'm exhausted. I attempted a short nap after I got home today, but I still haven't gotten the hang of how meal schedules work here so I was worried the whole time I'd miss dinner, and thus only napped a short while until the statistician I'm working with called and interrupted my almost slumber. However, dinner's actually not til 9 PM or later, since my host parents are workaholics and get home at 8:30! We left the house at 6:45 AM.... (!!)

Yesterday, Sunday, I had my first real taste of being out in Lima--my mentor, his sister, and his friend R took me out to breakfast in Surco, a district of Lima nearby where their breakfast, desayuno surcano, is popular. This was no oatmeal and orange juice breakfast. We sat down, ordered, and chatted about all kinds of things, until the waitressed appeared with four platters of fried pork, a tamale, and sweet potato fries. Breakfast.


After we left, there was a parade of little kids dressed in traditional outfits from all different parts of Peru---so cute! We went from there to Barranco, where you can see the beach from a cliff. It was cloudy but beautiful. The beaches are rocky here, and since it's winter, only surfers are out in their wetsuits braving the cold.

There's this bridge where we went in Barranco, called "El Puente de Los Suspiros," or "The Bridge of Sighs," where lovers go at night to sigh together (or so the story goes). It's very old, and is right next to a really pretty yellow church.

All morning, we kept getting passed by these crazy moto-taxis---they're like taxis on a motorcycle cart, really precarious and cheap. They only exist in the towns themselves, and they don't go very far. They're one of many, many ways Peruvians can get around Lima. You'll learn about the combi soon....



Later that day, I met up with some Yalies (!!!), Oscar and Daniel, in Miraflores, one of the nicest districts in Lima, where there are lots of parks and a nice shopping mall and touristy things like these hang-glider-type-things. The sun was slightly out, which is a miracle in the winter, so it was a really nice day to just walk around, and that we did.

Behold, Miraflores pictures!

Exploring the richest area of Lima was great---then I had to get home. See, in Lima, you can take a taxi, which isn't that expensive at all, or a combi/omnibus, which is absolutely dirt cheap. It's a van, basically, with a sliding door and some number of seats, enough to safely seat maybe 12 or so. You'd do a happy dance, however, if there were only 12 people on your combi. Al contrario, they pack 20+ people in there, opening the sliding door at each stop and yelling their destination, exhorting them to get off and on "rapido, rapido!" so they can keep speeding along. The good thing though, is that 1 nuevo sol, or 33 cents, gets you from Point A to Point B, and you even have insurance!

See? Insurance!



.......riiiiiightttt.

So I finally got home, after going the first leg of the journey with Oscar and the second leg by myself on combi, and upon telling my host parents how I'd arrived, they started cracking up in disbelief, and this reaction was faithfully repeated every time a new family member came into the kitchen and heard the story. "En combi viniste, hijita? Sola en combi?" *cue laughter*

I guess it's not really the hip thing to do in these parts, haha. If only they understood the cheap college student mentality...

To wrap up, a few curious things since being here:
1. I'm still kind of iffy on the whole tú vs. Ud. thing, so I've adopted the very South American greeting to avoid this--"Que tal?" It's basically, "How are you? How are things? Tell me about your day," etc. And I also find that my family members repeat this in pauses in conversation, usually after learning something about the U.S. that they find strange or interesting. (Ex. "Y por allá, en los EEUU, hay muchos inmigrantes indocumentados, no? Y como es su situación?" .... "Que tal, hijita, que tal....")

2. Milk. Normal enough, right? You buy a gallon of milk at the store and you drink it, isn't it like that in Peru? No. Last night, the whole family gathered around 10 PM to have leche y pan, milk and bread (with cheese). As I sit down, my host mom pours something from a can into my mug and murmurs, "leche evaporada, aqui le traigo el agua," meaning, "here's evaporated milk, I'll bring the water in a second." And as I tried to figure out what she meant and why we were drinking evaporated milk, which I've only ever seen in recipes for cakes and coquito, she poured boiling hot water from a Thermos into my mug, and there you go, milk!

Since it's winter, all the beverages are hot. This is really hard for me, water-addict that I am, because even the water is hot! They had to cool down the water for me at dinner tonight because I opted out of tea/coffee/hot milk. The strangest part is, it's not really very cold, maybe 60 degrees lowest, but here that's the coldest it gets, so people are in full blown winter mode.

Today was my first day at the hospital, but that merits a whole 'nother post, maybe in a few days once I've seen more...