We sleep in a little today before heading down to breakfast. I have the same wonderful fruit bowl which I enjoy immensely and Mister has his eggs with ham, bread, and coffee. We pack up and leave our bags with the hostel for the day and steer towards the nearest ATM so that we can get enough soles to pay the hostel, enjoy the day, and get us to the airport in late afternoon via a taxi.
The ATM is in a local grocery store and so we take a few minutes and explore the store looking to see the different items and what is missing that we are used to being able to purchase. It is a great little neighborhood market - clean and well-stocked. We take our soles and go back to the hostel to settle our bill and then we are free for the day to just go wherever.
We descend down the stairs all the way to the beach and I am already dreading going back up. There is a building out on a pier but it's not open until noon. So we continue down the beach and Mister puts his hands in the water to say that he did it.
We find a little park and sit down for awhile right on the beach and talk about how to get back. There are signs indicating where we can go back up and none of the entrances are near us so we opt to hail a taxi and sure enough -- that is so very easy to do. We get dropped off at Parque Kennedy and as we roam through it, we laugh about the cats again.
I am hungry and ask Mister what he wants for lunch and he says "ceviche". We decide to go to Punto Azul, the place we had tried the other night.
There is a church right by Parque Kennedy - the Inglesia de la Virgen Milagrosa - and so we dart in for a second to peek. It has a slightly different architecture to it and I like it. We are able to snap a few pictures without distrubing the parishoners. We pay attention to the detail on the front of the church and Mister notices a cat sleeping on a ledge. They are certainly comfortable in their surroundings.
Going in the general direction of where we think the restaurant is, it quickly becomes obvious to us that we are missing it somehow and so we use what we know and head back to the hostel. We grab the map and walk the few blocks to the restaurant and enter just before the lunch rush. Mister knows what he wants, but they have many different ones so he chooses his ceviche carefully. I ask for an English menu and order tiradito (a fish marinated in lemon juice) only to discover when it is delivered that it is also ceviche, raw. Cannot do. I enjoy sushi, but a whole plate of grey wiggly fish is just not what I am able to do. I do not handle it well as I am very hungry now and grumpy. The waiter gets a manager and explains that I thought it was a "caliente" dish and lets me trade for something else so I order a baked fish with an artichoke sauce that is quite good. Mister loves his ceviche again and we finish our meal and wander up some different streets this time and run into an upscale grocery store and so we go in and look around. It reminds us of a Whole Foods or Central Market back home, only on a smaller scale. Very clean and well-stocked once again. This one has signs that you cannot take pictures though -- I guess they don't want their concept taken.
We walk up and down the streets and are marveling at the amount of silver they produce and sell there. The inventories have to be worth small fortunes and the people just don't look that well off. We stop in at the hostel again for a restroom break and I read about some ruins right in town that close at 5 and it is 3:15 now so we decide to give it a shot. It is a good walk and takes us about 45 minutes and we arrive at slightly after 4 only to discover that they do not admit anyone after 4 . I ask the guard if we can just go in a snap a few pictures and he lets us go in for just 5 minutes. 
We decide to stop in a local juice shop called La Lucha and have a surtido. It is like a combination smoothie and juice and is quite nice. We sit for awhile just watching as the staff works at keeping the floors clean and safe as it is raining and people are tracking dirt in. Finally, it is time to head back to the hostel to get our bags and depart for the airport in Lima. The hostel calls a taxi, but it is rush hour and there is a big event going on across the street, so traffic is very bad - way worse than normal if one can believe that -- and it takes the taxi awhile to get there. He arrives and we head back into Lima - making a gas stop along the way. The prices ($15.50 soles per gallon) surprise me.
Our flight is at 11:45 p.m. and it is 8 so we have to wait until 9:30 to get seats. So off we go to the food court. Mister goes and exchanges some money that we have left so that I have one of each coin to take home with me and I settle in and read. Once we have boarding passes, it is through security and off to the gate. At the gate we have to go through additional security by United personnel as we are entering the United States. All those water bottles that were okay -- even the ones bought in the airport are suddenly not okay anymore. Amazing. We board the plane and settle in. They serve a very late dinner and we eat and then everyone tries to stretch our the best they can and settle in for the night.
We arrive in Houston early in the morning and are off to customs (very grumpy officials) and ANOTHER security even though we are in the secure part of the airport for connecting flights. With TSA barking orders in English and requiring all the additional security measures, you quickly notice how horrible it is for people visiting the US. Mister comments to a TSA officer that he doesn't hear them announcing anything in Spanish, the TSA guy says "You're in America now." What a great welcome to our visitors.
We dash for an early flight but it fills before we are called. We list for another flight in an hour and head to the gate. As we get there, the gate next to it has a flight to Dallas as well that is running late and so we ask if we can get on and yep -- we will land at Love Field instead of DFW, but that's okay. We arrive in Dallas and grab a taxi (incredibly expensive after what we have experienced the last week) and head home.
It was an incredible trip -- one with memories that we will treasure forever. I feel as though we walked more than 50 miles over the course of the week, but have loved each moment of it -- yes, even the stairs. The people of Peru made the trip. I will always remember watching the young moms take their mantras (square blankets) and lay a child in them (up to about 3-4 years old) and then pull the opposite corners up and tie them. They then take the other two corners and pull them together, pick up the bundle, and flip it around on their backs. The look of heads and feel sticking out the sides will be in my mind forever. It always made me smile. At no point did we feel unsafe or unwelcome in their country -- quite the opposite. People were always willing to help in any way that they could. The amount of history that we were able to absorb was intense and I found myself feeling a great deal of compassion for the Andean people. We would definitely go back and highly suggest it to anyone else. Magnificent!
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