what´s red and white and red all over?

answer: the two mice who decided to vacation near the equator and not put on sunscreen!

people, we are a couple of crispy-fried mice!! but OH MY SOUL we are having such an amazing time!! after my last post on wednesday, we walked around lima and checked out a few places our host, helena, recommended. we walked around the miraflores neighborhood, which is extremely gorgeous. we walked along the ocean for miles. there were some great parks. one was called the ¨love park¨ because of the giant sculpture in the middles of two people making out. apparently that set the tone for everyone else because EVERYBODY was making out. sister mouse and i were the only people not sucking face with someone!! we also got the check out this cool ancient ruin in the middle of the city called huaca pucllana. we stopped at this street side taco stand and grabbed a delicious lunch before meeting up with our host, helena. she wanted to show us all her favorite parts of lima. we has such an amazingly great time with her. she is absolutly the best. in fact, we like her so much that no matter what state her apartment is in, we are going to stay with her the last two days of our trip. one of my favorite things we did in lima was ride on the CRAZY city buses. they are these tiny little buses that a person hangs off the side and yells where the bus is going to. and about 25 too many people are crammed on, and they are driven by crazy drivers, and i think it is wonderful! also everything is soooo cheap here. ours meal cost usually between $2 and $4 dollars. i love it!!
at sunset we walked to a park in a nearby neighborhood, barranco, and it was packed with people everywhere. it is carnival time here so the whole country is in one big party! we got some kind of strange and delicious dessert at an outdoor cart in the park. it was a mixture of two kinds of sweet rice, and some jam-like stuff made from purple corn with chunks of fruit in it. it was pretty tasty. Then we met up with one of helenas friends from couch surfing, Enco. he picked us up in his car and we went down to the beach. there was a restaurant on the ocean that had outdoor seating so we sat out there and helena and enco ordered us some tradional peruvian food they wanted us to try. potatos, corn (that is about 30 times bigger than our corn), and steak on skewers. there was fried cheese in corn tortilla, some kind of delicious chicken, and inca cola. helena and enco kept asking us what we thought of the beef. it was good, we said. do you know what it is, they said? Cow heart. yup. we ate cow heart. good thing i didn´t know before i ate! it tasted fine though. we walked along the beace for a bit after dinner, then enco took us back to helenas place. helena and i got dressed to go out and sister mouse decided to skip the club and sleep (given that we hadnt gotten much the night before). secretly i think she likes sleeping there with that mangy pooch (however, at some point during the night sister mouse must have tamed the wild beast because he didnt bother her too much). so helena and i headed out to meet some of her friend at a disco. it was a huge club and there were tons of people there from all over the world. apparently there was this really well-know peruvian band playing that night that played modern kumbia music (a kind of latin dance music). oh my soul we had so much fun! when we got to the club we greeted everyone in our group. (when you greet people in peru, you kiss them on the cheek). so i started kissing everybody with our group. helena grabs my arm and says, ¨you can stop kissing everybody now. you have already kissed everyone i know and now you are kissing people i dont know.¨ so i am a friendly american. what can you do... well we danced and danced and danced until about 2am, then we went back to her house to wake sister mouse, pack our bags and head out for our next destination. i had mentioned that we had changed plans in the last post, but we decided to change them back, so we had to catch a 4am flight to a town called puno. in my next post i will tell you about the amazing adventuire we had in puno, but for now i MUST SHOWER because we are pretty ripe by this point. anyways, ciao!
city and sister.


p.s. i only had one comment left from our last post. how do we know if you guys are reading this if you dont comment. if we dont have at least 5 comments before our next post we arent going to leave any more. yup, that´s a threat.