Yo amo RHCP y Mistura!

I should really be doing homework right now but I have so much to blog about!!


Wednesday:


Went to class from 11-1, then waited for Hannah and took the bus with her to my house at 2. My host mom's mom is in town visiting and she made a yummy lunch for us. Then we went to the bakery down the block for some dessert. While we were in there, 3 7-ft tall black guys walked in. I looked at them and thought "If they start speaking Spanish to each other, this will blow my mind." They started speaking English and heard us speaking English and we started talking. It turns out they play on a basketball team here and live in our neighborhood. 
The hilarious thing is, everyone in Peru is about 5 feet tall. And there's not a lot of black people. So as we were standing outside the bakery, cars would drive by and just stare at them. Old women walking in to buy bread would look up at them, then turn around and look at us with expressions of astonishment on their faces. Everyone that walked down the streets would shamelessly stare. I thought I got stared at a lot because I'm pale, blue eyed and tall (compared to everyone else) but these guys must feel like they're in a zoo. They didn't speak much Spanish, and seemed pretty excited to have finally found some more Americans, so they're gonna facebook us and maybe we'll hang out. 
Hannah, Raquel and I were going to be in the same section for the Red Hot Chili Peppers concert, so we were going to go together, but Hannah ordered her ticket over the internet so she had to go to Metro to pick up the real one. Raquel was going to sell the extra ticket to her friend from school, Jorge, so she was gonna meet up with him at UP (Universidad del Pacifico) while we went to Metro. However, when we got to Teleticket, they told Hannah she needed to have her credit card with her for verification before they would give her the ticket, so then we took the bus to her house to get it, took it back to Metro and got the ticket. Meanwhile, Raquel and Jorge went to the stadium to hold us a place in line because people had been camping out there since the day before and everyone was telling us we should at least get there by 4:30, and it was like 6:30. 
So Hannah and I got on the bus to go to the stadium but the traffic was super slow because about 5 blocks from the stadium was the culinary fair Mistura. Finally we got there and found the gate that Raquel was at, but then we had to wait for Jose Luis because he was buying the other extra ticket from Raquel. 
So while she waited, Hannah, Jorge and I went to grab a beer at a little bar. It was pretty fun. There was a TV in the bar playing back-to-back RHCP videos. 

We came back and went in the gate. We saw a huuuge line, but luckily that was for a different section and our section had no line at all! The concert was in their giant soccer stadium and we had gotten tickets for the chairs instead of the floor. Good choice. At first we had to sit in chairs that were kind of spread apart, but then the guy in front of me turned around and said that we could have the chairs he was saving for his friends because they weren't coming so Hannah and I sat together and Raquel was right in front of us. That guy turned out being pretty cool. He spoke really good English and was there with his son, who was about our age. He even went and got our beers for us because he knew which stand to get them at where they were cheaper. 
We ended up getting there after the opening band, The Foals, played. But I was alright with that because I youtube'd them and they were kind of lame. 
Surprisingly, the concert was the one thing in this country that started on time. The band came out at 9:00 and played for about 2 hours. It was awesome! They were pretty far away, but it was still great. 

 They played some stuff from their new album, but also some classics, like Californication, Under the Bridge, Around the World...and they ended their encore with Give It Away.

Flea in his chullo. He even busted out some Spanish!

It was great!!! So worth it. Afterwards, I got a 15 sole t-shirt from the people selling them on the street and then we tried to find a way home. Getting a taxi was not going to be an easy feat. The streets were crowded with people trying to flag taxis down and all of them were full. We started walking towards our house to see if a bus or an open taxi would come. It was like the twilight zone. It was the first time in Lima where I didn't have to just lift my arm and have a taxi parked in front of me within 10 seconds. Finally we hopped on a bus that took us about 8 blocks closer to our house, and then we walked some more until we got a taxi to take us home. 

Thursday (today)

Woke up at 6:45. Was not happy about that. 

Went to the elem school. The kids were actually really well behaved during my class but they made up for that in the 20 minutes after recess when the teacher was late coming back in the room and I was stuck with the little hellians by myself. All I could think about was getting done and going to Mistura!

Mistura is a huge 10-day culinary festival in Lima featuring all the greatest restaurants and foods of Peru. 

Raquel and Jorge had gone there earlier, so I met up with them. We started out at the Pisco tent. We had some "milkshake piscos." I'm not sure that's what they were really called but that's what Jorge called them and they were delicious. Tasted just like milkshakes! Then we went to the Chocolate tent. The chocolate tent!! They had chocolate sushi. They had cacao/jungle fruit truffles (I had one). They had 2 chocolate fountains (We got chocolate covered strawberries there). Then we went to the dessert suburbs of chocolate land and had queso helado, which is just condensed milk that they put in a big metal bowl and stir it around over a tub of ice until it freezes on the side, and they scrape it off and serve it with cinnamon. 

Then we went to get some soup, which turned out to be more like saucy potatoes with spaghetti, but really delicious. Then a chicken dish with rice and beans. Also delicious. Then some juice. After that Raquel and Jorge had to leave, so I stayed with Nicole and Carlin who had just arrived. We walked around the "market tent" for a little bit. It was filled with all kinds of crazy fruits and drinks and breads and sausages, and pretty much everything you could imagine. We got to try a lot of samples. 

And then I saw it. Cuy! aka Guinea Pig! I had to try it, since I didn't have a chance to in Cusco. I shared it with Nicole. It was pretty interesting. You could still see the head and one of the paws. There was a really thick layer of skin, and the hair was still on in a few places. But once you pealed back the skin, the meat (what little there was) was really good! I didn't have my camera, but luckily Carlin was able to photo document it all :)

After that our friend Mary met up with us and we walked around the tent a little more and then went to get some picarones (a Peruvian street food of fried dough with a sweet sauce on it) and then back to chocolate land, so Mary could see it. I had a bunch of Mistura tickets left (you can trade your money for tickets, but then it turned out you couldn't use them at the really good places like chocolate land and pisco land) so I bought some chocolate alfajores (delicious Peruvian cookies) with them. Then we walked toward pisco land and bought some pachamanca along the way. Pachamanca is when they take beans, potatoes, corn, and meat, and dig a hole in the ground and fill it with coals and cook the food in that for a long time. Sound delicous? It was.

By this time my stomach was uncomfortable stuffed. So we went and got pisco sours. I couldn't finish my strawberry one, but I sure tried! We ended up with about 5 Mistura tix left, so we split a manjar blanco filled churro and called it a day around 8:00. 

Mistura was huge, so it's definitely hard to see it all in one day, especially since the lines were crazy long for most of the food. But I got to try lots of stuff and it was really cool to see. And now I don't need to eat for like a week with the amount of food I ate today!