Doug says he´s found the world´s best sport: bus surf­ing in Peru. We hopped on a mini-bus tonight on the way back from dinner (omigod, ceviche mixto – amaz­ing mar­in­ated raw fish and sea­food in lime and chil­lis) and I can´t count the number of times it almost crashed. I don´t actu­ally know if sit­ting would have been any better.

Doug is find­ing it very odd being stared at. I don´t remem­ber if I men­tioned that a girl took a photo of him on her cell phone because the long blond hair stands out so much. We´re trying our best not to be the loud tour­ists; I blend in but he just can´t. We´re doing better than the gaggle of Amer­ic­ans in the room across the hall from us though. In this abso­lutely amaz­ing city of cheap, fresh food, Doug spot­ted them eating Pizza Hut *in their room*. We know we´ve been told only to eat cooked foods to avoid bac­teria, but that´s ridiculous.

There was a protest today in Cent­ral Lima. It seems that the gov­ern­ment has decided to comand­eer the retire­ment funds of the build­ing work­ers, or at least, that´s what I was able to garner from the little Span­ish I under­stand. Doug took photos while I was asking ques­tions. Now if only we actu­ally write that up, it´ll be like we´re real journ­al­ists or something.

We loved the little statue of the mother of the nation in the Plaza de San Martin. Appar­ently the artist was com­mis­sioned to create her with a crown of flames (llamas) but no one thought to check on the double mean­ing and so she has a cute little llama on her head. We´ll post photos later, I´m sure.

Other than that, we´ve done touristy things: found a decent place for espresso, walked by the beach and along the cliffs, gone to the National Museum and looked at ancient ceram­ics, posted post­cards to daugh­ters and par­ents. It´s all good, as Doug would say.