Buonas Noches senoras y senores

So far so good with the Spanish.  Picking up a few more words here and there but to be honest, it's hard to go wrong.  See if you can work this one out, for example:

Nonetheless, Gosia is still having some challenges.  To a 'good evening' at the hotel reception, she politely replied 'great nachos'...

From what we've seen so far, Lima is a great city.  The weather is spectacular with a constant warm 23 degrees and no wind to speak of even at the beach.  Apparently Lima, being set on a desert plain, is the second driest metropolis behind Cairo.   You wouldn't know it from the surrounding greenery and parklands. It is also very clean.  People sweeping everywhere and even scrubbing concrete curbs at night (which pleased Gosia greatly).  She was also most impressed to see a young shop assistant in an ice creamery applying sanitiser to his hands before serving her soft serve (before you ask, no, she didn't make him...).

Police and security officers seem to be simply everywhere, hanging out, riding around on Segway's or in wheelchairs.  Certainly, not looking serious.

Crossing the road and general regulation of traffic is a law in itself.  You are really toying with your life stepping out onto the road.  Four lanes of cars suddenly merge into two without any order.  Noone is polite and everyone just pushes in.  The only warning are horns going off all the time.  9 million people live in this city and clearly none have read this sign:

Surprisingly, despite witnessing a great many near misses, no accidents.
Our taxi trip to the hotel allowed us to experience it all first hand.  We were in a car, not dissimilar to GS's old Datsun 180, which barely made it up the hill.  No functioning seat belts, and we nearly cleaned up a motorcyclist on our way to getting lost because the driver couldn't find the address, and of course had no GPS.

We spent today walking around the coastal tourist area of Miraflores.  There is a cool shopping centre with bars, cafes and flash shops all sitting atop the cliff face.

 

shopping centre by day                    shopping centre by night

All in all we like Lima so far more than Buenos Aires, which didn't make a good impression so far - the area we saw was very dirty.  We have decided to reserve judgement until we've had a chance to have a better look around in a couple of weeks.

We are looking forward to the next challenge - heading off to Cusco tomorrow in preparation for our trek.  By lunchtime tomorrow we will be 3400m higher than we are now, so it will be interesting to see how the bodies adapt.