I have a son we live for 5 years.

Google translator has become a mainstay of our journey. We are constantly emailing wwoofing farms and couchsurfers in spanish--which we can generally create without much help, gracias a dios--and receiving many in return, which inevitably get processed by google's algorithm, generally with hilarious results (see title).

So much has happened serendipitously in the last couple days that I am beginning to wonder if this is a very pleasant dream from which I must inevitably wake. Our friend we met in the airport, Olga, took us out to dinner last night with her friend Richard (they are both lawyers in Lima) and we have a date for sunday at 5:00 AM to drive to Nazca where we will fly above the Nazca Lines, beautiful pre-incan formations the purpose of which are as of yet unknown. I've always been fascinated by the mysterious nature of these gigantic, multi-kilometer drawings in the sand, and I feel like a little kid on his birthday when presented with that special guitar or remote control car or whatever it was that I yearned for silently until my parents divined the target of my desire.

Everything is falling into place, in a sense. The days in Miraflores pass quickly, almost too quickly, and it is hard to believe that we will be leaving Lima on Sunday for Nazca and eventually Cusco, where we will be staying for perhaps a week or more and experiencing our first couchsurfing stay of the trip. We are also hoping to trek to Machu Picchu while in Cusco, but we will be satisfied with a postponement until May if the trail is full, which it generally is.

Today we are set to explore Barranco, one of the oldest parts of Lima, which still sports colonial style houses and architecture and many, many, many nightclubs and bars frequented primarily by locals. We were also alerted to the presence of a used bookstore in Lima Centro which perhaps will consume most of the middle of our day as we search for the best way to hone and develop our spanish (we find that speaking it can get very exhausting and perhaps reading is the solution in the interim, especially in a hostel containing mostly english speakers).

But we must get to it now. Sorry for not posting photos directly to the blog, please follow the photobucket link to see our galleries. More to come later!

Love you All,

Sam