Visit from the folks

This past month has been a pretty busy one! After wrapping up the computer classes in February, I had a good week to relax before heading to Lima for a week and a half. It was the first time I had been in Lima since finishing training over 6 months ago. It was a bit of a shock entering the city of over 8 million people after becoming accustomed to life in my little village of 1,500. At first all I wanted to head back to Piura, but after a couple day I really came to enjoy the abundance of American restaurants and shops and the ability to blend in with the other tourists. I was in Lima to plan for a video project that I will be coordinating with a couple other volunteers. The goal is to create a video documenting the goals of Peace Corps small business program in Peru.

I stayed in a very touristy part of town called Miraflores which is one of the wealthier sections. There I visited McDonalds, Pizza Hut, Starbucks, Dunkin’ Donuts and a number of other fine eateries that I’d been missing. I think I got a little too used to them… (and now I’m back to eating rice and eggs)

Mom and Dad arrived at 2am o the 15th. We only had one day to spend in Lima so we kept pretty busy. We spent the morning in Miraflores, eating breakfast by the ocean and then stopped by the peace corps office in the early afternoon. After lunch we went to the center of the city to visit a historic church, famous for the catacombs located beneath its foundation. We took a tour of the church and the catacombs which was really interesting. Over 125,000 people were buried under the church.

That evening we took 14 hr overnight bus ride to Piura. In piura we toured the market and I showed them all of my favorite spots before heading to Tunal. We spent the next day and a half there, walking around town and exploring the rural life of peru. My host father showed us around his plot of land which has just about every kind of fruit imaginable! We enjoyed oranges fresh from the tree as well as a fruit called ‘tuna’ which grows on a cactus (no relation to the fish!). Mom and dad also experienced their first latin American fiesta. My host family invited some of my closest friend to give them a bienvenida…. We danced until 1 in the morning… I even made them try the local moonshine! They liked it about as much as I do .

One of the most fun things we did was to roast coffee and cocoa beans in a clay pot on the traditional wood stove. Talk about fresh coffee!!! We really had a good time. We were also really fortunate to have good weather. It barely rained… and was actually sunny at times. The last bit of fun was taking the 3am bus back to the city. It seemed that we hit just about every delay possible, extending the trip’s duration to 7.5 hrs.

In the last couple days in Piura we went to Catacaos, the most touristy spot in Piura, and we took a trip to a commercial mango plantation. My host mother’s uncle is a big mango exporter, owning 5,000 plants! The zone is also a big lemon and papaya producer. Probably the funnies moment in my time with mom and dad was the lunch we had that day. We sat down to eat with our hosts-who had pre-ordered the food. I was thinking that we’d probably have a plate of cebiche and be on our way… After finishing a family sized platter of cebiche the waitress brought out a platter of sudado… just as big… I thought that surely we were finished…. Since we were all really full… but no.. about 15 minutes later they brought us yet another giant platter of chichuron… wow.. that’s a lot of food!!! I felt a bit bad for mom and dad… since dad doesn’t really like fish, and neither of them was really used to the food… but we survived.