Trip to Peru Miniseries: Day 4 - Lima

I decided to separate into a post for each day. You can find more post here for Day 1, Day 2, and Day 3.

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I had to wake up early (6am) again to catch my flight to my one day trip to Lima, the capital of Peru. Another day, another city. I read up some information about Lima but didn't really plan the exact path for the trip.

The first thing I did in Lima is meeting up with Guillermo near his office. I met Guillermo back in UChicago as we were a student at the InterVarsity group there. We had a great ceviche (spicy seafood salad) for lunch. He also showed me how to use the metro (which is, surprisingly, a bus on a special lane! instead of a train) to get around the city.

The Cathedral, Lima

I headed to Plaza Mayor de Lima to see the Cathedral, but the main attraction around this area is definitely Basílica de San Francisco with the Catacomb in the basement. The experience is similar to the one that I went to Paris, but this one is underneath the church. Unfortunately, no photo allows inside the church, so I only had the photo of the yellow church. After I finished the tour, I decided to walk around the city a little more and heading to Chinatown for dinner. My friend recommended me a Chinese restaurant that specializes in the roasted or bbq pork. I just got a plate of bbq pork and the fried rice (34 sol or ~$10). It was definitely too much meat for me alone. I took the metro back to my hostel (Kelebek Hostel), which is located in Miraflores, a more touristy area of the city as it will be safer. I walked around Miraflores a little bit and saw a ton of restaurants everywhere I went. I stopped a cone of ice cream before heading back to the hostel and went to bed early for another morning flight (again).

Kelebek Hostel was located in a great neighborhood with a reasonable price. It might be because it was not a super popular season for a tourist or this place is not very popular in general, I end up with an 8-bed room for myself. That was pretty nice. It's hard to compare today trip with the yesterday one which I walked in Machu Picchu for 8 hrs, but I definitely had a good experience in Lima. And now it is time for me to head back to Boston after a full 4-day trip to Peru. With a little bit of flight delayed both in Lima and Santiago, I managed to get back to Boston at around noon. I did go to work that day for a quick meeting with my advisor before the weekend.

Peruvian Chinatown

And that is the end of my latest trip to Peru. It was fun, amusing and more connected than I thought it was going to be. I think the highlight for my trip, apart from seeing Machu Picchu for the first time, is definitely the people that I met along the way from my first roommate in Cusco, the 3 siblings from Poland (Kasia, Kasia, Kuba) to a guy I met in Machu Picchu from Italy (Francesco). We talked to each other and they helped me in different ways from ordering me food/drink in Spanish to taking a ton of photos of me. This trip won't be this memorable without these nice people that I met along the way. Thank you again for all your help and hope to see you all again at some point! (Not that I expected any of them to get a chance to read this, but who knows. Anything is possible)

Outside Basílica de San Francisco