Hablando espanol

So, I met up with Santeri yesterday morning, and we now have one day in Lima behind us. We didn't do anything super special, just basically took in the city, tried to get a handle on the layout, enjoyed some good food and tasty drinks (Pisco Sour being the local specialty - tastes kind of like a margarita sans the salt) and chilled by the seaside. Quite literally later at night, as it gets pretty cool as the sun goes down.

We met up with a British backpacker girl who was traveling solo, and ended up grabbing lunch and pre-dinner drinks together, then met with Santeri's friend Eija for dinner. Eija has been in Peru for a couple of years now, working as a Spanish-English translator at a local software start-up and fighting the local bureaucracy to get a work permit. It's kind of funny to think of someone moving from Finland to Peru and having trouble becoming a legal immigrant, usually the image is quite the reverse (you know, Cubans/Mexicans paying ridiculous sums to be smuggled into the US and having to live under the radar...) Anyway, as of yesterday it sounded like Eija was winning the battle, so keeping fingers crossed. It was also funny how the locals reacted to her name - it's pronounced exactly the same as "ella" (feminine pronoun in Spanish), so it's a bit like going around introducing yourself as "she". Ended the night at the hostel bar, with muy cheapo chellas and loud salsa music.

Santeri spent most of this morning recovering from jet lag, so I got up earlier to run some errands. Specifically, I had to get a ton of laundry done, as those dive boats in Galapagos tended to deposit a ton of seawater on whatever I happened to be wearing for the day. So, I asked the hostel for the nearest laundry shop, but it turned out they couldn't get it done until 6pm the following day, 3 hours after my flight to Cuzco took off. Fortunately my Spanish/Portuguese/French/English coctail of languages carried me far enough to ask for alternative shops with same-day service. They gave me an address and pointed out a direction, and off I went, of course having left my map at the hostel.

After a while I started thinking I'd gone far enough, so stopped to ask directions from an elderly gentleman. He wasn't sure, so pointed me to a nearby policeman/park warden/security guy, who seemed to know for sure. As I followed the directions, I came across the man I'd first asked again, and he offered to walk me to the place. I was happy to find I could kind of carry a conversation in Spanish; we discussed my impressions of Lima (it's big, with 10 million inhabitants; Helsinki only has half a million, and all of Finland 5 million), I learned that he was a retired "comandante" in the Peruvian military, and explained I'd served a year in the Finnish air force; I also learned that Peru used to have a conscription army, but since 1999 it became voluntary. After a five minute chat, Felix and I parted ways, after he explained how to get to my destination and warned me against crossing a street in the wrong direction ("Muy peligroso, como Harlem de Lima"). Anyway, I found the place and got a promise my laundry would be done by 2pm. It felt great to be able to get along with my Spanish, given I've never formally studied the language and am basically making half of the words up as I go :-)