waiting for the airport, books.

We´re in Lima, our flight leaves tonight. We don´t really like walking around Lima since the air is so thick with pollution, and the traffic is bad and it´s crowded overall. This city is really for visitors to fly through, not to be in for any extended period of time.

We went to another Govinda´s, apparently there are three in Lima. Neither of the two in Lima are as good as the one in Cusco, but they´re cheaper. Lots of fake meat with starch and oil and salt, not my cup of tea, but Roman likes them.

I´ve been reading a really good book by Paulo Coelho, a Brazilian author--Veronica decides to die. Also author of The Alchemist. Suicide is very interesting; I´ve never had the desire so it´s more interesting than morbid to me. I´m not into fiction, but there´s a lot of truth in this guy´s books. It´s also a simple, quick read--so I´m reading it in Spanish; I´ve never read a full book in Spanish before, but since the English version is simple, the Spanish is doable (also closer to the original Portuguese but much easier for me to read than Portuguese).

We met some Dutch people at the hostal... makes me want to study a few Dutch phrases. They were saying their language is so hard that no one learns it, so they have to leanr other languages (they were being frank, not conceited). So of course that piqued my curiosity. Wish I had time for foreign languages in grad school. My great hope is that at some point, they´ll let me take a Spanish class. If I take the next in sequence, of what I took in college, it´ll be very easy--just an intermediate comp and conversation class. I can go, practice, learn, and not really have to study outside of writing papers. It would be fantastic.