La Rosa Nautica in Lima, Peru

First of all, Kathleen is good. Now I’ll carry on. Today was a free day before leaving to Cuzco. Most of us spent the day doing exciting extracurricular activities like surfing, shopping, or paragliding. I spent most of the morning catching on sleep and grabbing lunch with a few friends at KO restaurant – a sushi joint. It’s super delicious and fairly priced. Always get the KO Maki. It’s cooked tuna, avocado, cucumber sticks drizzled in a spicy crab sauce and sesame seeds. Ok, well John can’t really have that. But it’s so damn good. We talked about our day and how a few people went on a hike with our El Sol professor, Romeo. Rumors have it, Romeo had ripped them off of soles after hiring a “personal” taxi driver for them to go. But that’s none of my business. As far as I know, any crushes on Romeo just went down the drain pipe. At least he still rocks that ponytail.

After Larcomar, I had returned home to my host family. I had spent the last few hours having small conversations with my host dad in Spanish about my day and listened to more of his outrageous stories. Listening to his stories about his golden days are always delightful and quite honestly I could sit there all day and listen. But time was short and I had to get ready for our big night out to one of Lima’s highly touted restaurants – La Rosa Nautica. It’s a beautifully scenic oceanfront restaurant that sits at the end of an elegantly designed pier. The rustic décor with large open glass windows that framed the outside view of the Pacific and dim lightings provided a completely serene and sea-calming ambience. It was beautiful. Dinner was beautiful.

The restaurant boasts itself for having many different types of celebrities visiting and so it was to no surprise that we would eventually bump into someone recognizable – at least in Peru that is. But of all the people that we would have expected, I could safely say that I never would even imagine that that person would be Alejandro Toledo, an ex-president of Peru. It was amazing, surreal, and exciting. He gave us a speech and it mesmerized all of us. I couldn’t believe it at first, but it was real. As his speech went on, it slurred on. At this point, I decided that he might have been a drunkard. And he was, but he was still a great guy. He definitely would have made a great comedian like a Peruvian Charlie Sheen.