First Stop - Lima, Peru

Lima Slide Show

This is a picture of Noah and I as we were waiting for the taxi cab driver outside the Lima airport. The sign I am holding was from the taxi driver who was holding it when we arrived. Look at the sign closely. After a full day of travel, I could have used some Gin and my last name is Ford, so we went with him. The driver stated that he knew a little English and I told him that I "hablo espanol a poco a poco." The 40 minute cab ride was an exchange of broken English and Spanish. Noah was throwing out Spanish terms from the back seat to help and Jennifer chimed in with her mixture of French and Russian lessons. Raoul, our driver was a great sport.
We stayed a couple nights at Kusillu's Hostel in Miraflores, a nice suburb of Lima on a cliff overlooking the ocean. The hostel is run by Ricardo, a very helpful 20-something Peruvian. It was a good clean cheap place to stay.
We only had a day and a half to venture out in Lima and Miraflores, but managed to see quite a bit. Lima is  a diverse city as we visited a beautiful new mall with an arcade for Noah, built into the cliffs of Miraflores in addition to seeing ancient Catacombs at the Cathedral de San Francisco and a Spanish Inquisition Museum where we saw many ways to torture individuals.
Lima is a city of 8 million people filled with taxis, buses, and cars, which I assume contributes to much of the smog that lingers over the city. The people are short with black hair. We are not, so we tended to stick out in a crowd. Multiple times while walking around Lima, school girls would smile, giggle with infatuation and point at Noah. The bold ones practiced their Spanish by saying to him, "Hello, how are you?" It was like walking around with a celebrity for me and Jennifer.
We had our fair share of mishaps with language, directions, and money, but overall it was a great way to start the trip. Click on the following link to see a slide show of Lima ==? Lima Slide Show.