School started this week. The closed campus of la Católica is in a busy part of town between our house and a giant shopping mall. The campus is beautiful, heavily watered, and also full of deer: hanging out, eating grass, having babies. I really want to know whose idea that was.
Our first day of classes was... overwhelming. I still don't know a dead on translation of that word in Spanish. It would come in handy to explain why I sit in class wide-eyed, still totally having a blast even though just being there is kind of stressful, and sometimes feeing incapable of processing all the information that is being thrown at me.
In our last days of summer before school started we went to two orientations on campus, including one about securtity which made it sound like just being in Lima is big game of Russian Roulette. I found out that the unarmed municipality police are called the Serenazgo. We were told to never bother asking for help from the official National Police because they /paraphrased quote/ aren't very good, generally come from a lower class background, are likely to hit on women, and often don't know a lot about the districts they work in. There is also a completly seperate Tourist Police Force in some neighborhoods that speaks English.
I'm still absolutely dying to get the low down on the local politics and opinions of policing.
A lot of the meeting addressed safety precautions that I would never have thought of, which I guess is good. But the lady giving the talk also warned people of "bricheros" and "chorros" with out any social explanation as to why such methods of acquiring money are used in Lima. It was obvious the security meeting had not been delivered as well as it could have been and that students didn't really understand what sort of societal forces are at play that put them at risk when a guy behind me raised his hand and asked, "What do the people who rob look like? How can you identify them when you're walking along a street?"
Before school started we also took a trip to Punta Hermosa, a beach just south of Lima where the top lady surfer from Perú lives. We went with three friends we met at orientation from Bolivia and another from DeKalb, Illinois. The waves were great, I tried some freshly caught fish and enjoyed it, and we had an improptu birthday party with chocolate cake. I'm so thankful to be hanging out with hispanoablantes even though I sometimes feel hella boring when I can't say exactly what I want to say. It's an absolute godsend that everyone we've met has been so patient with us.
This time, I didn't even get a smidge of sunburn :o)
Our combi for an hour and a half ride to Punta Hermosa only cost us 4 soles, about a $1.45.
We went to a cerviche restaurant and there were little bags of water hanging from the ceiling. Apparently this helps keeps mosquitos away. We had fresh squeezed lemonade and maize tostada. I was in heaven. Oh, and this guy was hanging out under the table.
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