Obligatory couple photos:
At the park. :3 You can see my blue hair.
Sharing oreos on the bus ride out to San Jeronimo de Surco to go hiking.
At the park in Surco.
Overall, the trip was fantastic, with the small exception of having a cold for a few days. He took me to lots of parks and malls in Lima, and his cousin and her husband took us to a historical site about an hour away called Pachacamac. We played games together and went out to eat together, went to the movies (Dictator was the only movie that wasn't dubbed), and went shopping together. We took a bus out to a small farm town called San Jeronimo de Surco in the Andes mountains with his friends for two days, where we hiked out to two waterfalls in the area and gazed at the stars in the evening.
As for food and drink, I tried chicha morada, a Peruvian drink made with purple corn, and found it to be very yummy, reminding me of spiced apple cider that we make in the winter here, and Inka Cola, which I think tastes like bubble gum in yellow fizzy drink form. My only gripe about the drinks in Peru is that I'm accustomed to everything being served cold (at least, what I would consider cold), but in Peru, most beverages are served warm (room temperature, or what Juan seems to believe is "cold"). His mom cooked Peruvian dishes almost every day-- mainly chicken, rice, and potato dishes-- but I even tried ceviche, which I thought was a little too strongly flavored for my weak American tongue. I learned to eat cereal with yogurt instead of milk, and I introduced Juan to peanut butter and Reese's peanut butter cups. We made pancakes from scratch with one of his friends and they tried maple syrup for the first time. I taught him how to make s'mores with marshmallows cooked over a fire and made my aunt's delicious Greek cheese pita (tyropita) from scratch for him. He made me his favourite dish one day and we made fries and chicken nuggets together on another.
One of the more peculiar things I learned is that they call lemons and limes the opposite names. Before we met, he would mention using lemons to cook certain things and his mother's lemonade, and I assumed lemon meant... well, a lemon-- the big, yellow fruit. But when I went there and we were cooking together, I noticed he called for lemons but was using limes (the little, green fruit), and I tried to tell him that that's not the way we call them here. Juan didn't believe me until I opened up a Google images page and typed in "lemon" and "lime", but then he typed in the words "limon" and "lima" and got mixed results-- something linguistically interesting has happened here!
As would have been predicted, it was bittersweet. There are no feelings that can compare to being able to physically embrace him. It was only a few days before we were completely comfortable with one another, and by the end of my stay, we were both sure we had made the right choice. One evening, after giving me the necklace in the picture below, he got down on his knees while I was laying in bed and asked me to accept the necklace in lieu of a promise ring. <3
Parting was tear- and hug-filled, and he walked me as far as he possibly could in the airport before saying good bye. We're not really sure when we'll see one another again, as it depends on whether Juan can get a visa or accepted to graduate school or something. I could go down and see him again, but it wouldn't likely happen until, at earliest, July of next year, since neither of us will have much time off at all until we graduate. He would really like to go to graduate school here in the northeast, so we're hoping that we can bring him over on a student visa and I'll just work around here for a while, during which time we'll be able to live together and probably get engaged/married. Internationality is tough stuff, man.
