11/10/2009 22:30
Friday I had the unusual lessons at the school, but in the after noon I also had 2 hours of cooking lessons where we tried cooking one potato and vegetables dish two fish dishes (one with fish on a spit and one with fish mixed with vegetables) and a dish with dried lama meat. It was fun to try and the food was good except that it was a bit too salty…
After the cooking lessons we had an hour of salsa dancing lessons. I was terrible at it, especially compared to my partner Nicole who I have the Spanish course with and who has done a bit of salsa before. After the salsa lesson we went on to a bar in the area around Park Kennedy where we ended up staying until 2 o'clock and I even ended up dancing for more than an hour.
Saturday I was a bit worn after the exploits of Friday night so I only really got going at 1 pm when I went up to Lima Centro (central Lima) to do some sightseeing there. It was nice to find that my Spanish was now good enough that I could haggle with the taxi drivers. (Even though I still need to learn how get a good price). I went around and looked at the city and at 14:30 Nicole from the school joined me. We then went to San Francisco church and saw the church, the monastery and the catacombs. Then we saw a bit of the main street before having a drink and going home with a taxi. I then went to do my homework for the school before going to sleep early because I was going to a Pisco (Peruvian brandy) festival on Sunday.
The pisco festival turned out to be a bit of an adventure. We had found it in a tourist brochure with the most important Peruvian festivals in October. It was labelled as occurring in Lima, but we found out that it was in Caneté, which is 2-3 hours drive north of Lima. We therefore got up at 6 a.m. to leave home at 6:30 a.m. and find a bus. That turned out to be difficult so we ended up taking a taxi to the bus station where we found a bus to Caneté. However, when we got to Caneté (2 hours later and more than 100 km further north) We found out that the festival was 40 km further south in Santa Cruz de Flores, so we took a taxi there. We finally got to the festival around 10:30 instead of at 9 a.m. as we had planned but luckily found that we had misunderstood the program so nothing much had happened before we got there anyway. Even tough it had been on the calendar as one of the biggest festivals of Peru in October it was actually a quite small festival with about 20 stands form different distilleries/wineries, a tasting contest and some folk dancing. Magnus and I were the only gringos to come there enduring the whole day and as the only gringos we where as great celebrities as the local beautiqueen who was there to hand over the prices for the best wine and pisco. I ended up learning that pisco can be a lot better than what I have tried in Lima even though it does not have to be very expensive. We tried a lot of piscos and Peruvian wines, had a great lunch, saw Peruvian dancing and got to talk to a lot of local Peruvians. It was great. On the trip there we also got to see a lot of the Peruvian costal countryside which is really just desert, except in few valleys where the groundwater is high enough to sustain some plants. The only major cities, like Lima, are situated where a river flows out between the small mountains. Otherwise the coast is a desert.