Back in Limaaaa

So I am finally back from our Rotary trip to Northern Peru and Ecuador!  It was a good time with lots of heat and beaches.

We traveled to the following cities (and maybe others that I don't remember): Trujillo, Chiclayo, Tumbes, Guayaquil (Ecuador), Las Salinas (Ecuador), and Piura .

Enjoying the pool in our first hotel

We saw lots of ruins/archeological sites.  These tours were terrible with the heat and sun.

There were like tombs and from what I understood, when someone of royalty died (naturally) they killed his favorite servants and wives (and occasionally pets/animals) and placed them around him in the tomb so that he would have people to serve him in the next life.

Some artifacts in a museum

City plaza in Tumbes

Don't remember if this was in Ecuador or Peru...pretty place we took a boat ride, there were tons of birds.

On an island there was like...a crocodile reserve/farm/I don't really know hahaha

In Guayaquil, Ecuador

In this park/plaza in Guayaquil, there were tons of iguanas like this one.

A street in Guayaquil

I really liked Guayaquil; it was cleaner and better looking than Lima.  But I'm still happy to be in Lima.

And there was a spot in Guayaquil where they had some Galapagos tortoises (turtles) not exactly sure about the correct name haha

Came across dollar coins and 50 Cent coins.

In Ecuador they use American dollars (a fact that I knew deep down but for some reason it didn't get through my head that my peruvian soles would be useless there--I had little money to spend in Ecuador haha).  But with a few exceptions: the dollar coins in my picture above, I also got a 50 cent piece (really large) and some of the coins said Republica de Ecuador on them.  In Ecuador prices were cheaper than in the United States, but more expensive than in Peru.  Go Peru!!

Here was a nice beach we visited in Ecuador

At this beach, a bunch of people got cuts from like, we don't really know what they were, little sharp fish? haha there were also jellyfish and some people stepped on urchins and stuff like that. 

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Some of the students going on a banana boat

boat with the ecuadorian flag

Our last hotel was in a great location right by the beach!

The sky one evening at a previous hotel

Emilie and I at one of the many beach stops

Jump shots on the beach

And we visited an ostrich/emu farm at one point

Dead jellyfish on the beach.  Apparently sometimes they can still sting you after they're dead (thats what someone told me)

And I don't know what this was but it looked cool hahaha

At one particularly cloudy, boring day on the beach, some students had the idea to draw a large circle in the sand and have sumo wrestling matches. Hahahahaha so many people gathered around to watch, tons of Peruvians even!

So yeah, that was our trip!  My favorite parts: 

• I really liked visiting Guayaquil, it was a very nice city.  I guess I can't really fairly compare it to Lima because Lima is a capital city with a much larger population, but Guayaquil did seem nicer and cleaner.
• In our last hotel we were essentially ON the beach, so the two nights we stayed there we had bonfires and it was pretty nice.

We had a bit of bad luck on this trip.  Bad things that happened:

•  At one point we visited an ostrich/emu farm.  While we were inside the gates of this farm (which was just kind of out in the country, very little traffic on the road that passed by it) the tour bus was left outside, most of our belongings left inside it (because we had always been told we could leave our things on the bus, unless we were changing buses).  Anyways, when we got back, we were just about to pull out when we came to the realization that 3 backpacks were missing.  Everyone panicked and began checking their things, everyone was thinking 'The bus was broken into!' but wait a second, if the bus had been broken into, why would they have only taken 3 bags?  Also, the bus driver was in the front of the bus (sleeping, but still present haha)...so it hadn't been broken into...What seems to have happened is this:  Unfortunately, the students in the back row of seats (which were higher up than the rest of the seats, and were nearly level with the windows) had left a side window open.  Someone looking for some stuff to steal probably came by, and not only saw the open window but saw three backpacks sitting in plain sight on the seat, just within reachable distance.  And so that is how those three students lost their cell phones, all their money, and for two of them, their passports.
• One student received a phone call one morning with news that her mother, who had been fighting with cancer for over a year, had passed away.  She will return to her home country today.
• One day on the beach, some play-fighting (aka a large boy attempting to push/throw a girl into the water) resulted in a broken foot.
• Lots of people got sick.  I was stomach sick for just a day.  Many people got diarrhea or were throwing up at some point during the trip.

I think that's all the major bad stuff haha.

So we got back to Lima at night on the 28th.  Last night I had dinner with my friend Andre and we went to Papa Johns, where our friend Eduardo works.  It was so great, this picture makes me laugh so hard.

And this morning I woke up and went to take my clothes out of the washer to hang them up to dry to find that a red t-shirt has left various red and pink splotches and stains on several articles of my clothing, including one of my nicer and better fitting pairs of jeans.  What a bummer :(