Our first date with Lima.

When arriving in Lima, it at once struck us as a huge and chaotic city with way to many people and cars. This first impression proved to be right. Lima houses more than 9 million people, spread across numerous districts, and it seems that most families have more than one car judging from the traffic. When driving from one place to another, maybe only a couple of kilometers away, you should have at least one hour free because of all the trafficlights, trafficjams and people randomly walking across the road. This of course causes A LOT of "honking" and policiesirens, that together with the traffic and barking dogs makes Lima a loud city as well. And it never sleeps!
 The buses are also quite interesting. They come in all sizes, are always full, you never have to wait more than two second for a new one to come and all have a screaming conductors. They are "un poco loco".

We live in the district Magdalena del Mar with the Aviles, the very nice family of the president of "Tierra de niños", one of the projects Strømme supports. We live in an apartment on the top of a buling, the 17th floor, and the view is fantastic. Our first day we went to the SF office in Lima, where we met all the staff and had a very good briefing. The second day went to ESAN, the univeristy where we`ll have our spanishcourse, and afterwards just hung around in Miraflores which is one of the nice districts close to the seaside. This night Peru also won a fotballmatch against Paraguay, and "había mucha marcha"!

This weekend the Aviles took us first along to the birthdaydinner of a brother. Here everyone spoke "spanish on speed" so things went a little over our heads, but we had a nice time. Although very tired in the end. However, the sunday became interesting when we were invited to a first comunion. In Peru the majority of the inhabitants are catholic, and the first comunion is a big thing judging from what we saw. First there was a long ceremony in church, where we stood up and sat down whenever everyone else did, and believe us - that was a lot of times! Afterwards we went to the home of the aunts and uncle of the girl who had her first comunion with  the many aunts of Patricia Aviles. Here we got to see the peruan hospitality live, cause we never sat without anything in our hands and constantly laughed with all of these cheerful women. A really nice day from within a peruan family.

Other things we`ve noticed which we`ll write more about:
- They eat chicken all the time!
- The difference between the districts in Lima when it comes to poverty are huge.
- The people are extremely different in looks, and we clearly see that they descent from different groups such as indigenous, spanish, arabic etc.
- Maia ate the heart of a cow without knowing it, and they eat guinea-pigs here. (That was only funfacts!)
- Lima is very "americanized" (or "snik-amerikanisering" as norwegians would say)

Nos vemos,
Maia y Ellen.