Miklo came to visit for 1 weekend only

I'm so glad I have such great friends. I haven't seen, or hardly talked to, Miklo in almost 4 years, yet he sent me an email because he'd seen that I'm living in Peru and wanted to come visit. To be honest, at first I was a little skeptical that he'd come but he actually did. He works for American Airlines and so he was able to get a really cheep flight and take off Friday and Monday for a short visit to Peru.

He got here mid-day on Friday, so I was able to pick him up at the airport just in time to get a little lunch and then go back to the school. And poor Miklo had to sit in my night classes and be subjected to a ton of questions from my students.

Saturday we went to Huayco, a small village outside of Arequipa. The village was so small that it didn't have any restaurants and so lunch was just some left over bread and water from a small shop. The village is built on the side of a hill next to the Rio Chili, and they used to have some kind of factory there by the water but now it's deserted.
The streets were really quiet and deserted, and so we probably only ran into a handful of people the whole time we were there. We wandered up and down the different streets crisscrossing the village on the hillside and so we had plenty of exercise just doing that.
There was a tiny, picturesque church fitting the size and feeling of the village overlooking the Rio Chili and terraced fields below.

We climbed down to the river and walked all along the old factory paths before exploring the crumbling old factory itself. There wasn't really a good way into the old factory, I guess because they don't want people going in there, so we had to climb up an old fire escape ladder.




After Huayco we took the bus back toward Arequipa and stopped off in some random town along the way (bigger though than Huayco) and satisfied our hunger with a "menu". Menu is the local meal of the day at the small family run restaurants. Evidently all of these places always serve the same soups on the same days of the week. I guess I haven't been often enough to know which soup is going to be on which day because I feel like I'm always eating Caldo Blanco. They are usually so much food that you can't finish it all and for only  s/. 4-6, about $2. It's a big bowl of soup and then a rice dish with potatoes (ALWAYS!) and some kind of meat and vegetables if you're really lucky. The amount of vegetables they eat here is something I can't get over after living in China, where I'd go days without eating anything but vegetables and not noticing it. Anyway, the food is tasty, the soup always more than the rice and filling to say the least. :) I like trying so many different kinds of potatoes!

Back in Arequipa, I took Miklo to the Mirador de Carmen Alto. 

On the street just down from Carmen Alto,
 there's this long mural of Ramon Castillo. 

And a little local culture