Day 4 - Van Helsing Sucks

Today on the way to Pisco, we got to watch Fast and Furious, the fourth one, and were later forced to watch Van Helsing, which is probably the most terrible movie I have ever seen.

That being said, we are now in Pisco. Its good to be here, because Lima really isn't a very enjoyable place. There are very few things to do, and most of the city is just dirty. On Saturday we went to the Plaza de Armas which is the most historic part of the city. Its got a really old cathedral as well as the governor's palace, which is pretty nice. Outside of the main plaza there is hardly anything to see.

It is interesting walking around in Lima because unlike Mexico, which has lots of white people and Americans, there are absolutely no white people. We walked around for about 3 hours on Saturday and probably encountered about 6.3 white people, the point being that you feel very much like a minority. This would probably be bad if Peruvian people were all angry racists, but most of them are really nice, at least the ones that we have spoken to. We got a roommate at our hostel, Zena, from Brazil. We went to dinner on Saturday night and ate Chinese food, because as it turns out, there are a lot of Chinese people in Lima, though we haven't seen that many.

Sunday we went to Barrancos, an artsy district in the south of Lima, which was actually very clean and beautiful when compared to most of the city. We had our first Pisco Sours, which are traditional Peruvian drinks, as well as ceviche, which was also pretty good. Later that night we headed to the Circuito Magico del Agua, which is a park with a bunch of gigantic fountains with lights shone through them. The biggest fountain shoots water about 100 feet in the air, and another one shot up a wall of water which acted like a movie screen, they used lazers and projectors to broadcast images on the surface of the water, pretty cool. At this time we had also met some other people, Eva from Lima and Sebastian from Columbia. We had to struggle to speak in Spanish with them.

TODAY we are in Pisco. It is basically a shanty town, most of the houses on the way in are made of sticks, tarps, and loosely thatched wooden rooves. We met up with the poeple here, there are about 35, almost exclusively from Australia and England, but a good number of Americans showed up today along with us. The beach nearby is very nice, but it will be a little rough living here. The rooms are not well enclosed, there are doors and walls and everything, its a normal building, but there are gaps in the doors and permanently open windows e.t.c. The shower also electrocutes you if used improperly. Pisco will definitely be an interesting experience, we start working tomorrow morning.