Lima: Pisco Beds and Sour Bugs

       We got into Peru and made it to our hotel without any problem, and we began our 4 day stay in Lima.   The hotel was a bizarre place with a couple statues of Michelangelo's David and huge gilded frames in the room, despite the fact that the frames were mostly empty.  The clear reason that the hotel didn't fail to meet our expectations was the little animal habitation on top of the hotel with tortoises, peacocks, macaws, and pigeons.   The breakfast cook, Carmen, had a love/hate relationship with the macaw in the photo, Pepe.  She spent about half of her morning telling Pepe to get out of the kitchen and stop eating the furniture.  It was our very own love story during breakfast.  I miss those two.  But the downside of the hotel was the bed bugs.  Big bloody fuckers. You think we would have moved rooms, but for some dumb dumb reason, we decided to stick it out and spray the hell out of our beds with deet, which only limited the amount of bites.  Megan is still healing, and I'm convinced I have a egg sac deposited into my ear. 



       Turns out Peru has its own national drink--the Pisco Sour.  We figured that the national drink would be some sort of nasty undrinkable thing made from a certain type of tree bark, but that was far from the truth.  Pisco is a grape brandy, which is then mixed with egg white and lime.  Jesus H, is that a drink!  It tastes almost like a margarita. So Megan and I decided to make a run of the town, sipping our way through.

Parque del Amor, right on the Pacific, surfers in the water, but the waves, that day, weren't much to get wet for. 

       I'm trying to limit my comparisons to Guatemala to about 10 a day (god bless you, Megan).  But, I've been really surprised at how expensive it is here and how high the "standard of living" is (there's got to be a better term than standard of living, but it will have to do for now). But of course, when leaving Lima, the shanty towns appeared outside of town.  Arequipa doesn't seem any different from Lima, in that regard.  In Peru the poor have been pushed out of town, and the wealth/poverty seems to be a much harsher division than it was in Guatemala, . 
       I'm feeling much better about my biggest worry, which is that I would have to cut the trip short because of sicknesses related to my Crohn's disease and the immune-suppressant medicine that I take.   In Guatemala where I could hardly make it one month without quite a bit of worry, almost all of the food came from the local market, and here most of the food comes from the supermarket, so hopefully that helps cuts down on amoebas and whatnot.  On to Arequipa, from sea-level to 7,600 feet, from largest city to the second.