I’m a bit behind in posting, for which I ask your indulgence. I’ll temporarily skip over my adventures of the weekend, and briefly write that a vague tickle in my throat on Sunday night developed extraordinarily rapidly into a pretty bad illness. This is 2024, however, so the big question was whether or not it was COVID, especially since the symptoms seemed identical to those when I contracted COVID in May of 2020. Dear Peruvian Tolkien Society friends pointed me to a MiFarma web page.…
Being a shy fellow, I received the last-minute news that there were two additional guests on my walking tour of Barranco with a bit of trepidation. Three or four hours not only with a tour guide I was unfamiliar with but also with two other guests? I need not have worried. After an hour or so, the tour guide (Mau) left the three of us alone briefly. The more extraverted of the two other guests turned to me and said, “You seem like a nice person!” which she immediately followed with “Is that a weird thing to say?” …
I’ve used Airbnb extensively since 2015 for lodging, in locations close to home that I know well and further afield in Edinburgh, Prague, Paris, and more. Only once before, however, have I ever booked an Airbnb “event” (a day-long cruise along the cost of Martinique). It was a success; and, based on that success, I thought that finding the “right” experience(s) in Lima might serve as a useful introduction to the city. I picked A magical walking tour on the bohemian side of Lima, hosted by an artist (actor and author) named Mau,…
People who know me well know that, despite being a shy introvert, perhaps paradoxically, I love meeting people and getting to know them. And so, after much delay, I reached out to the Peruvian Tolkien Society to let them know I was coming to Lima. The next day.…
The long leg of my flight from Burlington to Lima (almost 8 hours from JFK to LIM) was decidedly red-eye, leaving just before midnight. I had elected to pay a modest upgrade charge for a little more elbow and leg room to make the night just a little less awful. This was one of those co-branded flights: it was nominally Delta, but it was really a Latam flight. Somehow, though I had a boarding pass that showed the upgrade (in row 12) that I had printed out last August when I made the reservation, Delta then reported last week that I was in row 35.…
