Cold Feet and Dark Brown Hair

Well, like I said before, it's always cold feet in Lima. apparently. The cold is always seeping through my clothes into my bones, just like Steve Stern told me last year. It's alright though. I still think I prefer this winter to the snowy, sad, dark, slushy, gray winters that await all of you Holiday Cheer sorry fools in Wisconsin. Anyways.

Now that I don't need to use a fake ID to buy alcohol and get into bars, I'm dying my hair again. To be dark brown. Even though I could pass for a boy (or a lesbian... god willing) with my short hair, I consistently get whistled at, stared at, honked at, and stopped for by a variety of males. With very few expectations and only one major plan of being as inconspicuous as possible, I'm not doing very well. So, maybe this box of Garnier Nutrisse tintura permanente de color chocolate moka will do the trick. Purchased from none other than Wong- Lima's version of Wal-mart.

School starts tomorrow. Despite a half a year of me telling myself that I would take easy classes, not spend every hour in the library and sit down for more than 2 minutes, I don't know know if that will actually happen. I finally started looking at my potential schedule this afternoon. After the welcome speach from someone official at the University talking about how academically serious everyone is, how well-known the school and faculty is, and how demanding classes could be... I started to reevaluate. And then I was looking at all of my options. I am going to take 3 or four courses. I wrote down 10 that I wanted to take.

On Saturday, we went to el Centro para ver la Plaza de Armas and some other things. It was great. We went on a tour of la iglesia (church) San Francisco. It was magical. Plenty of amazing architecture, crucifixes, saints, paintings, books, and staircases to last a whole vacation. Thankfully, underneath this particular church, the reason I wanted to go in the first place, there were catacumbas, catacombs. It was weird, dark, moist, dingy, basement-smelling, with low ceilings. There were rectangular boxes filled with bones, organized by type, all neartly in order. Then there was this 10 meter-deep semi-circular space with a really pretty design created by altnerating rows of skulls and other bones. The lady explained everything, in spanish, but I didn't understand.

That very same night, some of us went to a reggae concert. It was small. Like big house party size. If I had to venture a guess, the kind of size that a sigma chi party would be on any given weekend. It was at a bar called el Oso (bear) which was a bar in a house, essentially, with a stage in the living room. The clientelle. Peru's version of hippies. I think there were a lot of people younger than 18. There was also a lot of weed being smoked. Of which I failed to partake. Rather, I made no concerted effort to try to partake in doing illegal drugs in a foreign country. Thanks to the four cuzquena beers and one pisco sour I managed to drink that night, I was well on my way to falling asleep standing up, while bobbing my head to lyric-less reggae music. And so were the others, I believe. So we left early, some time after 12. After a very safe taxi ride back to San Borja, the neighbor I live in, and a bit of a struggle with unlocking the door, I managed to fall asleep instantly.

Now I'm going to wash out my haird dye.