wait, what?

...is what we keep asking ourselves as we wade through the bullshit the airline industry has been chucking at us since we started our journey. We ARE in Lima, and we´re safe in Patti and Javiér´s beautiful house in the Magdalena neighborhood (not far from Miraflores, full of hippies, as our taxi driver indicated last night). BUT. We don´t have our luggage. And no one knows where it is. Especially not the airlines whose job it seems to be to staff thousands of employees solely for the purpose of passing the buck (Ally´s edit: the airline employees have an enormous amount of work to do and its not our place to criticize them and sam is insensitive). We´ve been calling in since 11:00 trying to find out ANYTHING, but to no avail. Ally´s mother claims to have found the elusive holy grail of an employee who can actually do something right (Ally´s edit: sam, you´re a jerk). She thinks our bags are at the airport in Lima. Whoa. Crazy. We might be on the same continent as our clothes, camera, and medication for traveler´s diarrhea (which we assume will set in eventually). So, off to the airport we will go once we have some sort of confirmation that they are in fact there.

Oh. important bit of news: we got a cell phone today. The number is (51) 1-985546741. By calling us, it costs us nothing since the GSM network in every other country only charges the caller, not the callee.

So, baggage aside, we´re having a great time. We tasted alpaca today along with beautiful purees of papaya and naranja (orange). We also toured a bakery (paneteria) that is literally 100 feet from the front door and sells huge numbers of gorgeous pastries and ready-made sandwiches costing so little as to encourage unnecessary spending sprees. All in all, peru consists of three streets and a grocery store to us right now, so of course we´re eager to see and do so much more.

first, let´s get our bags.