Back home in Peru...

Just a super brief rap-up of the last couple days...

My flight from Newark to Lima was overbooked on Tuesday, so I volunteered to stay behind, for $500 Continental credit and a night in a Holiday Inn and food. Lo and behold, it was overbooked on Wednesday as well and they offered me the same deal, plus a bump up to first class if I waited until Thursday. Of course, I did. I saw this as a sign that I must continue traveling, hee heee.

First class was nice, especially the scotch. They also treated me like some important cellist, funny as that was with my plaid shirt and boots. So the cello survived another couple flights as a carry on, which is always great.

I got to Lima, went through immigration and the immigration officer pointed out that I come to Peru a lot. He said ¨Welcome home! How long do you want to stay?¨It´s important to note that all countries in South America give you 90 days, sometimes only 60, but never more. So I told him that I would stay about 3 months, and he said, ¨Oh, well, I´ll give you four. Are you sure you don´t want five or six?¨ Nice, huh? And I really do feel like I´m coming home, as strange as that might seem. As different as things might be. Except for the pollution here in Lima, I´ll never like that.

So I sent out a message to a guy named Ulises on couchsurfing.com (If you don´t know what that is, I suggest you do a little browsing over the page, as it seems to me to be one of the neatest new social experiments going on. And if you´re really brave, sign up and host some travelers who might be just like me, or maybe totally different). Ulises picked me up from the airport and now I´m staying at his family´s house, with his mom, sisters, nephews and another couch surfer from the Czech Republic. It´s all good, except for the speed of this internet. Taking that into consideration, I´m off for the night... just wanted everyone to know that everything is great!