Peru Part I - Lima

One of the benefits of working for a big international company is that sometimes you get to travel to some pretty cool places for work. So when Erin found out she would be going to Lima for a 2.5 day conference, we thought it would be a perfect time to build a quick vacation around the conference and spend some extra time in Peru.

Our first (and last) stop was Lima, the capital and largest city of Peru. With a metropolitan population of over 8 million people, it is a huge city. We didn't see a ton of it, and to be honest, I don't think there is much to see outside of a few nicer touristy areas. There is a lot of poverty, and despite some nice areas, it isn't the most beautiful city.

We arrived on Sunday night for Erin's conference, which ran Monday through Wednesday morning. Erin's company set us up at a nice hotel, the Marriott, a beautiful high rise right on the cliffs overlooking the Pacific. Since we arrived pretty late and would be in Lima until Friday, we decided to rest after a long, long day of travel and just head to bed without seeing any of the town.

One nice thing we got to experience while in Lima was meeting up with a good friend. Our friends Shane and Colleen are currently spending a year travelling around the world, and their time in South America coincided with ours. Unfortunately for them, they had some problems with their camera during their travels, but because of that, we were able to arrange a meeting with Colleen, as we brought a replacement camera down for them and she needed to pick it up. So Colleen flew into Lima on Monday morning and spent the day with us. While Erin was in her conference, Tim and Colleen toured the Miraflores district of Lima. And that night we all went out for dinner and drinks together. Colleen headed back out to (I believe) Bolivia early the next morning after a short but nice visit. If you're interested in following their adventures, you can see them here.

On Tuesday, with Erin still in her conference, I went on my own to visit "Lima Centro", Lima's downtown, which is home to Lima's main cathedral, the main town square, another old church which holds the catacombs of Lima, and the city's main shopping district.

Once Erin was finished her conference on Wednesday, we had plenty of time to see the city on Wednesday and Thursday. We spent more time in Miraflores and Lima Centro, and visited the Mercado Indios, a public market filled with dozens if not hundreds of stalls featuring arts and crafts from the Incan Indians that populate Peru.

We like Lima, but we were happy to be moving on to Cusco on Friday morning. We saw some nice things in Lima, and sampled some great local food like ceviche (raw fish "cooked" by marinating in citrus juice and serviced with cold corn and sweet potato), but it was time to move on.

Check back soon for pictures from Lima. Our computer is running really slowly right now and won't load photos. But some will be up soon, as well as more updates on the rest of our trip.

More To Come Soon...

For our (very few) loyal readers, I'd like to apologize for the lack of updates recently. Between raising a puppy, coaching high school lacrosse, playing men's lacrosse, a surprise visit from Erin's parents, a trip to Peru, and starting a new job right after the trip, we've been pretty busy the last few months. Things should finally be calming down now and over the next couple of weeks we hope to get some updates about our trip to Peru up. In the meantime, enjoy another picture of our favourite pup, Hawksley:

Hawksley

One thing we've been wanting to do for awhile, but couldn't because of circumstances, was get a puppy. Well, now that we're no longer living in a one-bedroom apartment, and we've settled down in a house in Cleveland with a fully fenced yard, there's nothing stopping us.

So, once we returned back to Cleveland after spending Christmas and New Years in Prince George and Vancouver, we started searching hard for a puppy to join the family. We searched a lot on Petfinder.com, visited a local branch of the SPCA, and finally found the right pup at the Cuyahoga County Animal Shelter.

When we found him, he was 8 weeks old, and had been abandoned with his brothers and sisters in a shed. Some of the litter died, and only three boys survived. He's part German Shepherd, and part.... mystery dog. They don't know what he's crossed with, but they think possibly a Newfoundland or an Norwegian Elkhound. Whatever the mix is, he's cute! We had to wait a week before we could take him him (just in case the jerk that abandoned him came back to claim him), and on January 13, we officially became proud dog owners. We named him Hawksley.

It's been a pretty eventful three weeks since we got him. When he's not sleeping (which thankfully he does a fair amount), he's tearing around the house, biting us, chewing on things, and most of all, peeing, peeing and peeing. We've got him going outside most of the time now, but he still has some pee accidents inside and some other indoor pees which we're pretty sure he does just out of spite. Despite this, we love him a lot and are really happy we got him. He starts obedience class in just over a week, so hopefully he'll be a little better behaved real soon.

New York, New York

Over Thanksgiving, we were invited to spend the weekend in Morristown, New Jersey with our friends Jodie and Adam, as guests of Jodie's parents Ed and Maretta. Morristown is only about a 1-hour train ride from New York City, so we took the opportunity to spend a couple of days in the city while we were there.

We piled in the SUV with Jodie, Adam and their Border Collie, Duncan for the approximately 7-hour drive from Cleveland to Morristown Wednesday afternoon. After a relatively uneventful drive, we arrived around 11:00 PM to some great hospitality, and a house full of dogs as Jodie's brother and his girlfriend, also staying at the house, had brought their two labs as well. Erin has been talking about having three dogs one day, and this gave us an idea of what it might be like (a little crazy, but not too bad).

Thursday is, of course, Thanksgiving in the States. It's a stroke of genius if you ask me. They get a four-day weekend out of it, while we only get a three day weekend with our Thanksgiving on a Monday. It was pretty much as advertised in TV and the movies: an entire day dedicated to nothing but lazing around the house, gorging yourself, drinking too much, watching football, and passing out from the turkey. A good time, but not something you could do every day.

On Friday, our hosts had plans to attend a concert in Morristown, so we headed out on our own to the Big Apple. Black Friday crowds meant the city was incredibly crowded, but it was still great. We arrived at Penn Station, and from there walked around mid-town, seeing sights like Times Square, the Empire State Building, Broadway and Rockefeller Center before hopping on the Subway down to Greenwich Village and the East Village. We did a little bit of shopping, stopped at a café and later a small pub before having a very nice dinner at a steakhouse in the area.

Our hosts were free on Saturday, so they took us on a little tour of more of Manhattan. We again took the train into the city and headed downtown. This time we saw Chinatown, Canal Street, Little Italy, the World Trade Center site, and the Brooklyn Bridge. Another great day in New York.

A big thanks to our hosts Ed and Maretta for welcoming us into their house for Thanksgiving, and for the Saturday tour of the city. New York is an amazing city, and not one you can do in a few days, so we're definitely planning on making a trip back, hopefully sooner rather than later.

Cleveland Rocks! (Though we haven't lived through winter yet)

It's been a couple of months since our last update. Chalk it up to us being busy settling in here in Cleveland. Here's an update on what we've been up to:

At the end of October, we moved into our new house in the Coventry Village area of Cleveland Heights, an inner-ring suburb of Cleveland. We love both the house and the area.

Moving from a one-bedroom apartment to a two-story house means that we had a LOT of furniture to get to fill up the house, and it is still half empty. We've managed to furnish most of the downstairs, including our living room, dining room and eat-in kitchen (though the living room furniture will be upgraded), but our upstairs still consists of a half-furnished bedroom (our TV is resting on two German beer crates -- very classy) and two empty bedrooms. We hope to get our guest bedroom furnished early in the new year, at which point we can comfortably host visitors.

Even though it's still unfinished, our house already feels very much like "home". It's our first house together, and we are really enjoying the experience of making it our own.

The Coventry Village area is great. It's one of the few areas in Cleveland that is walkable; there are a large number of shops, restaurants, pubs and cafés within a 5 minute walk of our house. With Christmas approaching, the trees lining the street are all lit up with lights and it is quite beautiful. We've been to a few of the restaurants and pubs, but still have a number to try. We've heard that the area is especially nice in the summer, and we're looking forward to that very much.

Other than settling in, we haven't done anything too too exciting, except for a short trip to New York and New Jersey over American Thanksgiving with our friends Jodie and Adam. We'll have a separate update on that shortly, but it was a great trip. Tomorrow morning we head to Prince George for Christmas, with a short stay in Vancouver for New Year's before we head back to Cleveland.