Fried Peruvian Dumplings, Mountian Music, and Shaking What Our Mama´s Gave Us...

The day before we spent in a place called La Punta. It is a strange sort of calmness that you find after many miles of Lima crazyness and gnar. I am tellin´ ya, Lima is a crazy bastard of a city. Not really that safe for a person of my skin tone. A lot of places aren´t safe for any skin tone! It is freakïng crazy. Lots of violence and robberies...third world style. So we drove through many, many sketchy neighborhoods before reaching the tranquility of La Punta. La Punta is called that because it is "the point" of land that enters the Pacific Ocean north of Callao, the barrio that the Lima International Airport is located in. You can´t drive any farther than La Punta. It is surrounded by the beaches and the boats of the wealthy and there are police everywhere so you feel safe in an unsteady kind of way. We walked all over the place and ate a local treat called Picarones. These are like beignets, a dough that is fried in a circle like a donut in hot oil, and served on a plate of honey. Man, the texture and flavor of those things are great. They are made with a type of local potato flour. They have an interesting orange color. I will someday try to reproduce them in a kitchen.

The night before that (I am working backwards here evidently) I got together with my ex school mates and we went to this rocking cultural dance called Las Brisas De Lago Titicaca. Each band that played had a dance group from the Sierra that was in full costume reproducing the traditional styles of dance and music culture. After each spectacle, all the people who were there to watch were welcome to come up onto the dance floor to dance to the music for about fifteen minutes. Then another band would come on. There were many, many bands and it went from eight in the evening til three in the morning! We danced the night away to some seriously sick cumbia (Ozzy would have been stoked with the amount of cowbell in the monitor!!) and a lot of merengue and samba. It was terrific. Drinking pitchers of Cusqueña and rocking the palmas...No sleep that night either.

I am out of time for now. Tomorrow I am flying up to a crazy border town called Tumbes...and tuesday the plan is to cross into Ecuador to see Jake and Rebecca. We shall see how things go. Peace and love...