Hola to beautiful South America

Hello everyone!  We left off with a post early in the morning and haven´t posted about Lima.  So to catch everyone up…we LOVE IT HERE!  South America is much more European and a bit more modern than Central America.  It isn´t even nearly as cold as we thought it would be. 

We had a great time walking around Lima yesterday.  We walked to a few cool central plazas in our neighborhood of Mira Flores before heading to some really cool parks.  Lima has gone through a major face lift in the past 5 years so everything is really beautiful.  We walked and took in the city.  There were about 4 parks in a row that we just kept walking through.  They were right on the Pacific coast!  There were people surfing and paragliding everywhere.  We found one park thanks to lonley planet called the love park.  There is a huge mosaic wall with different quotes from literature about love and in the middle of the park is a large stature of a man and woman kissing.  It was really interesting.  I hadn´t ever seen anything like it…the wall that is. 

We headed to the big main plaza, Plaza de las Armas.  We walked all around the plaza and down some cool pedestrian streets.  We were in the heart of the shopping district however, everything was far to expensive for us so we enjoyed just looking.  We found a nice little place to eat along the way.  On a whim since it was still Happy Hour we decided to try the local drinks.  Pisco is the name of their native liquor.  It is everywhere here.  We ordered Pisco sours that were pisco, lemon, and raw egg.   However, it gets weirder, we tried a nocturnal gentelman that was a mix of beer, pisco, and milk!  The crazy thing is that it was actually good! 

Earlier this morning we arrived in Cuzco!  It is really cool here!  The town seems really old, the buildings are all older giving it an even more European feel.  We found an awesome hostel that is really just like a hotel!  We could really get used to all of this flying and awesome hostels.  It is the little things that count in this trip!  haha.  The first thing the owner of the hotel did was to sit us down for some coca tea for the altitude.  It is really good too!  It is literally leaves that you pour hot water over. 

After getting settled in we headed out to explore the city.  We walked really far too because the taxi ride back actually took a while.  We saw the main plaza and stopped in a bunch of stores.  Today is Peru´s independence day so a lot of places were closed but what we did find were souvenir jackpots.  We can all tell we are going to be picking up a lot here.  We found lots of plazas and like I said cute stores.  We are really excited for tomorrow because we have plans to head to the market!  During our walk we caught a religious procession that I am not sure had anything to do with independence but still cool.  We can´t wait to explore more of our new favorite town tomorrow.  We love and miss you all!!!!!!!

Megan