Sweaty Onions

Day 1 in Lima is drawing to a close. Seth and I are definitely beginning our trips a bit differently than last time. There were no late night walks around town, and no random accosting of strangers for directions. We haggle properly with taxi´s and use the drivers as unofficial Spanish tutors.

Most spectacularly, for the first time, we found a restaurant using a guidebook. We never owned one in Central America, so the option of taking one with us when we explored the Miraflores neighborhood was a new experience. We decided to take it, ostensibly as a reference for our dinner discussion about the next leg of our journey. I confess I felt we were channeling a little bit of the Hawaiian-shirt-wearing-SLR-toting tourist, but we only pulled it out on deserted street corners when we were sure no one was watching.

We decided to go with the Lonely Planet editor´s choice for dinner: Hot ´n Cool--a sandwich shop purportedly bursting with personality and hot sauce. The pork-pineapple-and-banana chip sub was not a disappointment, along with a glass of pomegranate juice, nor was Seth´s Iberia--a sausage and pepper sub

According to the English translation on the menu, both were served with sweaty onions. One can only hope this a reflection of poor English as opposed to poor food service standards.

On a completely unrelated note, we showed up unannounced at a Peruvian think tank, hoping to learn about their work for property rights in developing countries. The secretary was quite apologetic: it seems that the boss, the economist Hernando de Soto, was in town and everybody was in a meeting with him. She didn´t want to disappoint, so she arranged for us to spend a few minutes with someone. It was the librarian, whose only spoken English was ¨"librarian"!  We didn´t do too badly for our first day back speaking Spanish, but to be honest, it was a little rough.

We´re headed to a Wycliffe Bible Conference, hoping to meet a few translators. Do you know there are over 2,000 languages that don´t have a Bible translation? Neither did we.