Friday, May 27, 2016

Free Day, Frisbees, and Papacho's


TGIF. I’ll be honest every day here feels like a Friday. Practicing my Spanish whether it’s at home or at school will always feel like a hobby for me, so I never mind it. But today is a free afternoon for us to do whatever we want and that’s nice. After El Sol, John, Jake, and I went down to the shore to check out the beaches. Others went to paraglide, which seems like a nice thing to do on your free day but I’m deathly afraid of heights or just dangling from high places. So I opted out of that.

The three of us made it down to the beach and at the bottom of the stairs a man with straggly beach hair greets us. He was a pretty short man with tan leathery skin with indigenous features and pretty prominent belly. He looked like Tito from Rocket power. He even talked like Tito. His name was Roberto, but I refused to call him that and I will continue to call him Tito as long as I live. He spoke to us about surfing and wanted us to try it out. We told him that we were not feeling it today but we definitely wanted to try it before we left Lima. Tito striked us a deal for a 2-hour surf for only 50 soles. Everywhere else was offering that much soles but for half the time. We knew we had a steal, but we told Tito that we’d do it next week. So we took his business card. See you next week, Tito.
John, Jake, and I move along the shore getting battered by other surf venders trying to charge us for an hour. Not going to happen. We continue to move onto the next beach where there weren’t many people. We gazed and watched the ocean until John decided to strip down and jump into the ocean. Jake and I said screw it. Let’s do it. We had no towels, swimsuit, or anything. Just boxers. We swam and refreshed a bit and it was great.
We got out of the water shortly, and dried off a bit. We made our way up to the cliffs to meet up with everyone who were paragliding. Ok. So, paragliding actually looked super fun and I totally wished I had tagged along, but I still wasn’t convinced because it was 80 soles for 15 minutes. So, no. I had mixed up paragliding with hang-gliding, which was why I was deterred by the idea. Oh, well. Our friend Anna had brought a Frisbee with her because she’s an ultimate Frisbee player. She earned some cool points there. Instead of watching people paraglide, a few of us went to play Frisbee and pet dogs. After playing Frisbee for a couple hours, John and I headed home to have dinner later that night.
My host dad had promised to take out a small group of friends to one of the best burger joints in all of Lima. Of course, as Americans, we were dying to try this place out. I call up a bunch of people to come out for dinner with my host dad. John, Kathleen, Nicole, Lexi, and Jake all came out and I was happy to know that they had pulled through. It was the beginning of what seemed to be a lasting friendship as the trip moved forward. We enjoyed our dinner with a bunch of Carlos’ stories. He was definitely swooning the girls because they fell in love with him. That’s my type of wingman. We finish dinner and all made our way back home. It was a long free day coming to an end. It was a day we all needed.


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