Feliz Cumpleaños

No more cold showers! What a way to celebrate turning 26 on the 26th of November!

Hostel Friend´s House 368 Capac y Colon, 24 soles per night, includes a breakfast of eggs, bread, butter and jelly! (This is rare in South America.) We´re in heaven!

Here we are in Lima, Peru. The first question we asked the woman at our hostel before agreeing to a room was, are there hot showers? We quietly endured about 5 days of the ol´ ice-cube shower in Trujillo.

Lima turned out to be a pleasant surprise. Most people don´t even bat an eye at our presence, which is amazing (or maybe we´ve gotten less beautiful since Trujillo...) We´re in Miraflores, the nicest part of this huge, 8-millon-person city. We´re basically between downtown Lima and Barranco, the night life-bar district.

We arrived on my birthday and celebrated with our most expensive meal yet, $20 a person, in a beautiful Italian restaurant known for it´s homemade pasta (honestly, nothing compared to my dad's, but it was good for South American Italian food.) From there we walked with our bloatation devices (expanded stomachs... we coined the phrase after the eating effects on my birthday and Thanksgiving) to eat Italian ice-cream which was well worth the $6 and by far the best ice cream we've eaten in 2 years.

We then checked out a part of town called "Pizza Street" (there was a lot of pizza and also annoying people jumping out of each and every door, trying to convince us to enter their restaurant bar). We were tried and full and really just wanted a drink or two, so we didn't feel like old fogies going home at 10:00 on my birthday. Everything was going smoothly until a group of Colombian guys started dancing with us. They told us they're in a famous band (not impressed), they sing vallenatos, which is romantic music from Columbia (still not impressed), and that the minute we walked in the door, they knew they had found their future wives (hmm even less impressed). One of them asked Laura if anyone had ever been so forward with her before. Only 95% of the men she's met in the last 2.5 years, she told him. They invited us to their show the next night. We didn't go.

Little did I know, this was only the beginning of my birthday celebration that would last for 2 more nights...