From a hostel in Madrid to a cake shop in Lima

  Cusco, Peru
Friday, May 11, 2007

The Longest Day - from a hostel in Madrid to a cake shop in Lima
 
Well, how to start?
It´s just so nice to sit down and relax for a while with a cup of coca tea - a drink brewed from the coca leaf, designed to fight altitude sickness (it tastes alright but it´s not really working so far...)  It´s nice to take it easy because the first few days have been a bit crazy.
I ´did´ Madrid in a day. It was basically a whirl-wind tour of the art galleries with a cafe and a kebab or two in between.

Dancing - Madrillenos style

I then had to get up really, really early on Monday morning for my flight to Peru. I´d never left Europe before, so the thought of a 12 hour flight across the globe scared the hell out of me. To combat this fear, I was going to use these 12 hours to enter the world of Sudoku, a world I´d so far resisted. I´d also filled my bag with chocolate and books but all this entertainment was completely unnecessary as I soon got talking to the woman next to me - a 41 year old Peruvian lady called Ines who worked for an international hotel in Germany. She barely spoke English and I barely speak Spanish but she spoke fluent German and I understand  a tiny bit of german so we had a stuttering conversation over 12 hours, interspersed with films and a little bit of sleep. Anyway,  at some point in the conversation I told her about the 12  hour wait I was going to have in Lima before my connecting flight to Cusco. Without a moment´s hesitation she asked me if I wanted to come for dinner with her family in Lima and rest for the night. My head swam with thoughts of ´who the hell is this woman?´, ´is this family they going to cut me up into little pieces?´, ´this would never happen in England´. I accepted.
The craziest part of this was when we met her family at the airport. Her 2 sisters, brother, dad and grandfather had all turned up. She hadn´t seen them for about 6 months, so you´d expect them to be perhaps a little annoyed that I´d weasled in on this re-union. I was all set to call the whole thing off and just run away as fast as I could. But they met me with smiles. Ines gave a quick explanation and they welcomed me straight away, saying that I  was more than welcome to come and stay the night as well.

The cake shop

So we all got in a taxi and headed across the dusty streets of Lima. I was bombarded with questions and my pigeon Spanish was stretched to it´s limit. ´´voy trabajar en una escuela en Huancayo, soy proffesor de Ingles´´....´´no entiendo´´
We then pulled up in some back street. this couldn´t possibly be a house. We were outside a small shop surrounded by houses. Every one was going into the shop so I followed. Ines told me that the shop was theirs and they lived next door. Things were about to get even better. Ines´ family ran a cake shop! They said I could help myself to any cake I wanted. Annoyingly, with all this craziness I´d lost my appetite and settled on an apple strudle.
I met more of Ines´ family, her brother amd various cousins / friends. I told  them all the basics... where I was from, what I´m doing here, what England´s like, I can´t believe you own a cake shop!
Dinner was ham, cheese and bread and we finished it off with a small shot of bailey´s that Ines had bought from the duty free.
Ines and her sister then insisted that they would wake up at  4 am and come with me to the airport. They made a bed up for me in their living room and left me to watch a DVD of peruvian music.  
Anyway, they kept their word and I made my flight. I´m still in one piece and I´ve arrived in Cusco. Hopefully, this insane level of friendliness is a sign of things to come.
This would never happen in England.