this is me

did i really see an alpaca as soon as i got out of the taxi? (yes, i wrote "llama" on the original post) cobblestone roads? 4 soles (it´s about 32 cents to the Sol here) for lunch or dinner, and 2 for breakfast? People dressed in the clothes i´ ve seen in history books? I get to see Machu Picchu on Saturday? 15 soles a night for the hostel? Adorable children running down the hills in their school uniforms? After tearing up at Extreme Makeover Home Edition while waiting for my room to be ready, I may end up crying of happiness. Lord knows I was ridiculously excited when I saw the Dunkin' Donuts in the Lima airport this morning. Hard to tell if the nausea I felt upon landing in Cusco was sugar overload or altitude sickness. There´s a reason I´ ve been dreaming about coming to Perú since I was 13. A week from today I will be somewhere between Miami and NYC. Yesterday I flew from Recife to Rio to Buenos Aires to Lima, and after arriving at midnight got back on a pla...

that i haven´t blogged at all lately - that´s due to trying to detox while at the beach, and also to the fact that this site was down and deleted half of my blog entries, so i don´t exactly trust it anymore. anyway, i´m coming home 12 days from today (the 22nd), and will be in Havertown for a couple days, then apt hunting in DC and hopefully visiting my best friend in Charlottesville. since i last wrote, i moved from that hostel in the middle of nowhere outside Salvador to one in a great neighborhood super close to the beach, and stayed there 3 nights. on Sunday i took a 10-hour bus ride to Maceio and was amazed at all the palm trees while we drove (like, forests of them). Maceio lived up to its reputation (given to me by a friend from Georgetown) - i stayed 2 nights in a slightly stinky hostel and then 2 in a great pousada one minute from the beach, and got plenty of sun. now i´m in Recife, and will be here until i fly to Lima on the 14th. from lima i´ll go to Cusco from the 15th to t...

happy august everyone! i am finally in northeast brazil , which is the area of the country that originally got me interested in studying brazil in the first place. i arrived in Salvador yesterday, excited to stay at my hostel close to the beach....only to discover that really the only thing near the hostel IS the beach (and a supermarket) and it takes at least 1/2 to get to the center of the city. that ´s what happens when you book hostels online. :) i think today i will go to the Barra area of Salvador and check out two hostels that are in a fun neighborhood and transfer all my stuff there tomorrow. rio was uneventful overall - it stopped raining Sunday night, so i went out to dinner with Priscila and Edna, and then Monday went with Priscila to work, wandered the Jardim Bota nico a little bit, had lunch with Pri , wandered a bit around the center of the city that i got to know pretty well when i took classes there in January, and then took the ferry home to.............take a n...