End of week 1

We've completed our first week in the land of Paddington and it's been a productive week, not that it's felt like that to me (Mark). I keep forgetting we are called here indefintely and this means good strong foundations need to be built. We are starting to formulate ideas that we have had before we came, and also meet up with friends as our last post said. People are very excited in the possibilty of us setting up a discipleship year, what this will look like remains to be seen.

As we settle in we have started to notice the Peruvian quirks, and the differences with the UK.

My favourite so far has been whilst we have been looking for houses to rent. In Peru people advertise their house/flat for rent in 3 ways,

1. in the paper,

2. by hanging up a poster outside the house, or in a local shop,

or 3 through an estate agent.

No real difference here, so it seems. Well we found a flat we were potentially going to rent through a estate agent, more or less. (We decided in the end it was too small) This estate agent however was nothing like the western equivalant. We found him not in the yellow pages, not in his shop, but from a billboard on a random street, manned by a man who was also selling a rug, at the side of the road. The sign said flats for rent, but no contact number. Logically, we asked the rug seller about the sign he was standing next to. He said,' are you interested?' we replied 'yes'. He then ran halfway down the street and to a nearby fruit and veg seller. The seller then came out and said 'yes I know flats for rent, what are you interested in?' We told him, paid him his comission (£3)and then drove to see this flat about 3 miles away.

Another thing to get used to has been the traffic which has completely different rules from the UK. I am not known for my amazing driving in the UK, but I would probably be rated as the best driver in Peru. It is normal to pull out in front of someone, to drive 3cms away from someone else and to indicate that you are pulling over by sticking your hand out of the window (even though they have indicators).

Also the alert ones of you out there may have noticed we are not writing from Arequipa, but Lima, as about a week before we left the UK, our friends Humberto and Esther had to leave Arequipa at short notice and returned to Lima. We are therefore in Lima for the forseeable future.

Finally we have not been hit by an asteroid as i've been asked more than once, as this happened in Puno, about as far away from ourselves as is possible!