Happy Thanksgiving to all my friends and family! Here in Lima it was just another Thursday but the pictures of amazingly prepared turkeys definitely made my mouth water. I hope you all had a lovely time with your families.

I'm thankful for having the opportunity to travel. I'm grateful that I have the freedom and resources to step away from my career in order to take stock of my life and what I want for myself. I know that most people will never have this opportunity.

Last week also marked the halfway point of my trip! I'll be returning to the states in February for my cousin's wedding. Now is a good opportunity to reflect on the past two months and look forward to the next two.

So far, my trip has focused on exploring South America, learning how to Kitesurf, learning Spanish, and writing this blog. However, there's one aspect of this sabbatical that I have not yet explored: passion projects. I have 10 years of coding and 2 years of business management experience but I have never successfully built anything outside of my primary work. Full-time work consumes my energy and I have always found it difficult to work on side projects. I want to use this time to invest in anything that sparks my interest.

With that in mind, I started building a tool this week that should turn any audiobook into a language learning tool. We'll see how it goes!

Next steps

So, turns out you can extend your visa online! So I don’t need to go to Chile. Here’s what the rest of my trip will look like:

B: Paracas - The poor man’s Galapagos
C: Ica - Oasis in the desert with sandboarding and dunebuggy racing
D: Arequipa - “The gastronomical capital of Southern Peru”
E: Lake Titicaca - The largest lake in South America
F: Cusco - The Historical Capital of Peru.

Another week in Lima

I was pretty introverted this week, focusing on Spanish and side projects, but I made sure to get out to see the city every other day. I got around using the bus system which is hilarious and crazy. Fortunately, I found an app called TuRuta which is pretty good at mapping out the bus routes.

There was one fun intersection where all 4 ways were blocked by drivers. It was a real life version of the game Rush Hour.

Catacombs of San Francisco

In central Lima, adjacent to the Presidential Palace, sits the 400-year-old Basilica y Convento de San Francisco. Beautiful gardens and religious relics adorn the grounds surrounding the ornate cathedral. Look beneath the beauty, however, and you will find a massive graveyard. Over 25,000 bodies were laid to rest beneath the structure. Wealthy donors received private tombs but the bodies of the common people were laid atop the bones of others, covered in acid to accelerate decomposition, and dissolved until only the largest and sturdiest bones remained intact. This process repeated thousands of times leaving massive piles of bones.

Cathedral

Decomposition Pits

As we toured the tombs, this quote kept running through my mind:

Everybody should do in their lifetime, sometime, two things. One is to consider death...to observe skulls and skeletons and to wonder what it will be like to go to sleep and never wake up-never. That is a most gloomy thing for contemplation; it's like manure. Just as manure fertilizes the plants and so on, so the contemplation of death and the acceptance of death is very highly generative of creating life. You'll get wonderful things out of that.
- Alan Watts

Huaca Pucllana

Amidst the high rise hotels and residential apartments of Lima's Miraflores district sits an ancient mud pyramid built from 200-700 CE. The pyramid acted as the religious center of the "Lima Culture" and later the "Wari Culture". The tour guide casually described the human sacrifices that have been uncovered at the site. Dozens of women believed to have been sacrificed each time the pyramid started a new phase of construction; babies buried alive with mummified corpses; quite macabre.

San Bartolo Beach

Lima has many beaches, but the ones in the city tend to be very crowded. We decided to head south to San Bartolo. The beach is small and pretty much empty. The water is beautiful turquoise and not too cold. Great for swimming.

Thanks for reading!