Saturday morning, I woke up without a hangover, but Tesh
didn’t. Alternating hangover days is a good thing
when you’re traveling. If everyone is hung over, you
pretty much waste the whole day and no one wants to go out
that night. Plus, it means that someone was sober
enough to look after the drunken people the previous night.
The
first order of business is to get into our locker and get
ready for our last day in Lima. Unfortunately, we
have some trouble locating the keys. Tesh had been
holding the room and locker keys, but he now had no idea
where they were. In fact, the details of the previous
night were a little hazy to him. He remembered going
to Murphy’s Pub, but he had no recollection of the two of
us going back out to get food. He searched his pockets
and instead of finding his keys, he found a condom.
I joked that I had really taken him to a “nightclub” instead
of a restaurant.
We
start weighing our options. We rule out going back
to the restaurant. Although I remember going there,
I have no idea what it’s called or exactly where it is.
So instead we borrow a saw and try to cut the padlock.
Yeah, right. Umm...I think that padlocks are sort
of designed in a way that makes it difficult for a person
to saw through them. Pesky little locks—they
actually do their job! Next, we borrow a pair of pliers
and simply bend the flimsy ring that was screwed into the
door of the cheap plywood locker. We find the spare
padlock key, which was conveniently located inside the locker,
and get a spare room key before heading out to Central Lima
for some shopping and lunch.
We
start browsing the shops and I pick up some cheap DVDs (actually,
they were VCDs) for my nephew and we start looking for a
place to get the keys copied. We start asking around
for a “casa pour copia las llaves,” and we get pointed in
different directions. Finally, the fourth person we
asked pointed us across the street to some sort of indoor
mall. Rather, it looked like a dark alley and was
populated almost entirely with open-air dentist offices.
It was rather bizarre—there were patients in the chairs
only a few feet from the pedestrians passing by.
We
arrive at a small booth with a key-shaped shingle hanging
in front. We walk up to the booth and find the Key
Maker. Even more than by appearance, this man greatly
resembled the Key Maker in The Matrix: Reloaded
due to his skills. He went right to work, taking out
two blank keys, but not like the ones we have in the States.
The handle looked like a key, but the rest of it was just
a flat rectangle. After 10-15 minutes, he had used
several tools to manually copy the keys. He replicated
the bevels and filed the edges to perfection. We were
watching a true artist at work. What’s even more amazing
is that when we got back and tested the keys, they worked.
We
had lunch at “La Merced,” a restaurant in Central Lima that
was highly recommended by the guidebooks. The décor
of the restaurant was very elegant, with its intricately
carved wooden ceiling. We ordered from the lunch special
menu, which cost only 6 soles (less than US$2). I
wasn’t very happy with my meal, but Rocky’s was very good—the
best out of our three meals. This would become a recurring
theme on the trip.
We
then started toward the Catedral San Francisco, which used
to house an order of Franciscan monks. On our way,
two English-speaking women stopped us. Maribel was
a friendly 22 year-old Chinese/Peruvian student. She
was very friendly, giving me my first kiss of the trip.
Unfortunately, it was simply a European-style greeting.
She wanted to go out with us that evening and gave me her
email and phone number. We agreed to meet them at
6:30 at Plaza Mayor, after going to the Catedral.
Meanwhile, Rocky was engaged in conversation with Maribel’s
friend, a 30-something ex-contortionist. She told
him that she collected coins from around the world and asked
if he had any coins from the States. He reached into
his pocket and pulled out some coins, but they were all
from Peru. The woman looks at them and picks up a
5 soles coin from his hand. She then jokes with Rocky
and basically steals the money right from his hand.
Rocky tried to get it back, but didn’t want to put up much
of a fight since he didn’t know what it would lead to.
She finally agreed to give Rocky a photo of herself from
her contortionist days.
We
continued on our way to the Catedral and Tesh insisted that
we not meet the girls afterward. Obviously, they wanted
something from us, but we couldn’t reach a consensus on
what. Here are some of our ideas:
1.
Plaza Mayor is known to be more dangerous after 6pm when
many of the businesses close, so perhaps they were going
to arrange for some guys to jump us when we returned to
meet them.
2.
They had already suggested that they wanted to join us
at that moment and go with us wherever it was that we
were going, so perhaps they simply wanted an evening of
free food and drinks, since it is customary in Peru to
pay for anyone that you invite out (I had originally invited
them).
3.
The girls had joked that the ex-contortionist (a single
mother) was looking for an American husband, so maybe
they wanted more than just an evening out.
4.
Maybe it was a combination, where they would seduce us
into bringing them back to our hostel and then rob us,
post-coitus. Rocky said that they seemed like gypsies:
circus background, braided hair, flashy sarong-type of
attire, and peculiar hygiene—the half-Asian girl
lost some of her appeal when she smiled, revealing the
advanced stages of gingivitis.
In
the end, we decided not to call them, but I’m still wondering
why she gave me her email address. That doesn’t really
fit into any of the scam theories. As it turns out,
we ended up going out with two 21 year-old Canadian women
that evening...but enough skipping ahead—on to the
Catedral!
Oliver
can be reached at oliver@babblog.com. |
