September 7, 2008

Greetings to all of our friends from chilly Lima, Peru. It was gloomy and overcast today until about 4:00 P.M. then the sun decided to come out. We just said thank you because it was almost dark by then.
A bit of good news Alan took his language evaluation over and received an intermediate mid on his Spanish. He was very happy to have advanced to that level from where his Spanish was in January.
Two weeks ago we had an interesting trip to Ace Hardware to buy paint for our apartment. We had gone a couple of days before to pick out colors. We had some color ideas so we wanted to see some paint charts. Well these paint charts were very old and used by many people so they were a little dirty. You don't just stop by the paint section and get paint charts they stay at the desk with the workers. We went back on Saturday to get the paint and supplies we needed. Alan tells the lady what paint we want she goes to the shelf and gets it for us and comes back and adds water to the paint. Only in Peru! Oh yeah their paint here is in plastic buckets not in aluminum cans. Alan leaves while I am waiting on the paint to get our other supplies. She asks me for our nombre (name). I tell her she is going to enter it in the computer so we will know what color we used and for what room. So after picking up everything we need we head to the check-out the girl totals and it comes to 290 soles (about $100). Alan hands her our credit card and she calls the manager the limit is to high she has got to verify the card. Remember it is only $100.00.
Yesterday we got up and went to the grocery store in the truck. We usually walk to Plaza Vea but we knew we were going to be buying groceries for the week and not what we needed for the next couple of days. The traffic is much lighter on Saturday morning . After we finshied buying groceries we came home and put them away. We walked to a little outdoor market about 6 blocks from our apartment. They have fruit, vegetables, meat, plastic ware and other items you might need. We wanted some fruit for a fruit salad. We bought cantaloupe, strawberries, tangerines and avocados. The price for all of this was only 13 soles (about $4.00). The fruit was very good and fresh too.
The apartment does look very good in the new colors. There was one technical problem we had bought a tarp to cover everything with so we wouldn't get paint on anything in the living room. We opened the tarp up and it was a long tube. Not sure why so we had to cut it open to fold it out. It worked perfectly for what we needed it to do.
Did I mention it is only 15 weeks until we arrive in Birmingham.