Last Day with Carlos and Lima

It’s the last morning waking up in Lima and I have to say it was bittersweet. The morning started off like every other morning. Breakfast with two eggs, slightly garnished with pinches of salt and pepper, slices of bacon, some toasts, Peruvian coffee, orange juice, and a ham and cheese sandwich. All great and delicious but they always left me visiting the inodoro very often. I had just finished packing all my things in my room and I couldn’t help but reflect on my time with Carlos. He’s been nothing but an amazing host dad and I’ll always appreciate that from him. Instead of sobbing it out, I thought it’d be better to just have one last great conversation with him before I left. You have to leave on good terms, and Carlos didn’t disappoint.

I take a seat in the living room preparing myself to say goodbye. Carlos comes over and serves me some coffee. He takes a seat and we both stare at the ground awkwardly as if we had just met for the first time. It was the first time I had seen Carlos this quiet. I could feel the tears creep up from the back of my eyes. They were starting to form on the crevice of my eyelids. Just as the first drop of tears began to leave, Carlos gasped. He took in air and finally belched out the words, “Hey don’t forget you owe $40 for laundry. That’s not 40 soles. That’s $40 American dollars.” Goddammit, Carlos. I nonchalantly swept away tears of my face. I went to my room and grabbed the $40 before I forgot. I took a seat in the same place and he began the conversation talking about how a woman recently began experiences massive headaches and didn’t know what was happening to her. He told me she went to the doctors to get her head checked out for any signs of tumors because it had been bothering for her for some time now. She was only 26 years old, so it would have sucked to have a brain tumor that early in her stage of life. After a CAT scan of her head, doctor’s had just discovered that they had found teeth and hair lodged in the deepest parts of her brain. It’s got to be some sort of freaking miracle that they were able to remove that from her brain because she’s still alive. Anyways, doctors had found out that the teeth and hair had identical DNA to her and they concluded that the remnants were that of her unborn twin sister that she ate when she was inside the womb of her then-pregnant mother. All I could think of at the time was – what a savage. I get that killing an unborn child can be justified with ethical reasoning, but this lady devoured her sister out of hunger. If abortion is murder, then this lady came out of the womb a first-degree murderer. Nothing ethical about using hunger as a means to commit crime.

The phone rings. It’s the van. It had just arrived outside the apartment to pick me up to go to the airport. I say my last goodbyes to Carlos, we hug it out, and I make my way out to the van. We finally arrived at the airport and we started boarding the plane immediately. An hour passed and we finally arrive in Cuzco.

Wow. Not only was I amazed that we were almost 12,000 feet above sea level, but that people actually live here – whole towns and cities! We get off the plane and immediately you can feel the difference in altitude. You really couldn’t tell how thick the air was until you got outside, but you could definitely feel your breath shortening. Taking one step here was equivalent to taking ten steps at sea level, so fatigue was quick. We grab our belongings and took a bus directly to the hotel. It was our first day in Cuzco. Some people need to acclimate so most of us stayed in to adjust. And that is exactly what I did for the rest of the day.