29/09/2009
I have made it to Lima. I finally arrived at the place of the family where I am going to stay at 1:30 this morning. I managed not to miss the transfer in Atlanta even tough my plane only got its wheels on the ground at 16:30 and I was supposed to take off for Lima at 17:10. I have heard a lot of stories about how long it takes to go through the US immigration, but for me it went very smooth. I managed to go through immigration into the US, security check, run through the airport, report at my gate and go through immigration out of the US in less than 25 minutes, but I also doubt that it is actually possible to do it much faster than that. I was one of the first people off the Copenhagen flight and the last to check into the gate for Lima and it took almost exactly 1 hour from my plane touched the ground until the next one lifted off.
Of course my luggage was not that fast a doing the transfer so I am still waiting for that. Since the flight took 6 hour the airline should have had time to register that my luggage was still in Atlanta but when I arrived in Lima they claimed that it was there until I had waited for over an hour and they had emptied the entire plane without it materializing. I then spend at least half an hour on the bureaucracy of registering that my bag was missing before coming out of the airport to find that the guy who should have picked me up had assumed that I had missed the plane and gone home. With the help of some translation from the tourist office I phoned a guy at the number of the Spanish school who only spoke Spanish and got arranged to have the driver come back and pick me up but that and the wait for the driver then took another hour of waiting. Maybe it had been easier not to have hurried quite as much and have gotten an extra night in Atlanta. Delta Airlines should bring my luggage at 2 am tonight, so now I am looking forward to having a change of clothes.

This morning I had breakfast with the family at 8 am and found out that they also have a Norwegian boy of my age staying here, it is quite practical, since he speaks a lot more Spanish than I do and can then explain how many of the things work. The Norwegian is also studying at El Sol language school so he showed me the way there. At the language school I told them about the problems with my luggage so they have organized that it comes here to where I stay tonight. They did not have other students at my level this week so instead of 4 hours of group classes I get 3:30 hours of single classes with 1:3o hours of grammatical lessons and 2 hours of conversational training. The teachers are really friendly and it feels like I am learning a lot. It does not feel as if Spanish is that difficult because there are many words which I can understand because they are similar to English or French. After the lessons I had a big lunch with 7 other students from the school, mostly from the US but there was also at least 2 other Europeans, it sounds like there is quite a good social life here.
They said there was wireless internet at the school so tomorrow I will bring my laptop so that I can write emails and update my blog. I may even get a chance to use internet here with the family.
Lima in general is a lot more developed than I had feared even though the Peruvian GNP per capita is not much different from that of India the country feels a lot more like Spain although you can clearly feel that the development does not reach everybody.
I stay in the Miraflores district of Lima, which is the modern commercial centre of Lima so that probably also explains why it feels well developed. The Norwegian guy also said that this neighbourhood and the areas nearby are quite safe to walk around even at night because they have a lot of extra police here and many places it is supplemented with local guard services. For example they have a guard house on the corner of the small park in the small square that the house of my family is on. Due to this it sounds like Miraflores is safer than Noerrebro in Copenhagen. However, there are of course other areas of Lima which are less safe and where one should not go alone at night, if one goes there at night at all.