Connected again!

Saturday, August 02, 2014
Lima, Lima, Peru
Today is the day I finally got to meet the group I'll be travelling with for the next three weeks. The Absolute Peru tour with G Adventures. 

But before that, I guess I should talk about my day .

I stayed the extra night at the Hotel San Blas (the tour officially starts today), so I went down to breakfast curious about whether any of the people in the dining room would be on my tour. I was quite worried when the first people I saw on the way down were a bunch of obnoxious middle aged Americans. Typically middle aged US Americans aren't the type of people you would expect to meet on an Intrepid or G Adventures tour, but I guess I figured you never know. But then more and more of them started turning up. Families, children. There were way more than 16 of them and that caused me no end of relief! Later as I was leaving for the day, they were all congregating in the foyer and one of them invited everyone else out to the middle of the road (the paved footpath down the middle, not the oncoming traffic) for the morning prayer reflection! So when I looked out a little while later, I noticed that there were drums, guitars etc and thirty odd Americans singing loud Christian songs. My idea of the tour group from hell!

First things first I went to find a coffee . The only place was Starbucks, which was down near Chili's. It allowed me to read some more and use the free wifi. The last few days had been pretty hectic so I was relieved for the down time before the craziness of the tour was to get started.
 
I then went to find some shops where I might be able to get a sim card (or chip, as it's known in South America). I found the Movistar counter and was told to come back in an hour because the guy was at lunch. Apart from the supermarket and a few little stalls outside, there was nothing in this area to do at all. I had no idea how I was going to kill an hour. So for some reason I wandered up to the carpark on the roof and found a little juice shop. They made the most amazing fruit salads, with yoghurt and little pieces of cereal and some kind of weird syrup. Mmmm, so more Game of Thrones and fruit got me through the hour. 

Of course when I returned, the guy still wasn't there, so I did a bit of grocery shopping. When he finally returned, we had quite an amusing time trying to communicate . He ended up getting out his laptop and opening Google Translate, but the translations were terrible and we had no idea what each other was trying to say. In the end though, I got the sim card I wanted. The only problem being that I wanted a microsim and they only had full sized sim cards. I asked if he had something to cut it with (I had read that there are special cutters that can cut it into the right shape). He laughed at me but then got out the scissors, traced it with a pen and cut it! It was too small and moved about a bit in the phone, but with a bit of wriggling I managed to get it to work and then I was connected again. Amazing! Well not before the guy had to spend about 10 minutes calling all sorts of numbers and logging onto different websites and sending different texts off. All in Spanish. No way in the world I could have figured it all out myself!! My hero :)

Anyway, that was a lot of time spent writing about a sim card!! On to more interesting things.

I wandered down further into Miraflores for a spot of geocaching and a little shopping, then returned to the hotel to get ready for the night .

When I returned to my room, I found that a extra bed had been put in there for my new roommate. I met her, her name is Collette and she's a PE teacher from England. Really nice girl and vegetarian too!

So we went down to the foyer to meet our group around 7. Our guide... sorry, our CEO (Chief Experience Officer - vomit) is named Harold. Peruvian guy, seems nice so far. Has a bit of a problem with his throat. The group mainly seems to consist of teachers from England! They are all on school holidays at this time of year. Haha Collette and I were a bit disappointed to notice no eligible bachelors! Only two out of the 16 are men, both with their partners.

I guess I could go into the group:
Collette, Farah from Malaysia, Emily from Sydney, Monique from Melbourne, Susan from Germany, Conche from Spain but living in London, Emma from Birmingham, Sarah from England but living in Boston, Liz from England, Dean and Abbie married couple from England, Clair and Dave relatively new couple from England, Linda and Kimiko from Canada.

I would go into my first impressions, but I'm not sure if that's helpful or interesting. Everyone seems retty lovely anyway.

We then went for dinner at this big restaurant down near the Chili's and the Wong. It certainly had a huge range of menu items, including quite a lot of things that I could eat! That rather surprised me. Having two other vegetarians in the group is certainly going to make things easier for me. I had my first pisco sour and it was incredibly strong!! Perhaps it's been a while since I've drunk much alcohol, but that one drink got me quite quite drunk. 

All in all, it seems like it's going to be a good group, though it will probably take a little while to get to know everyone better.

 
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