Again I didn’t find a micro going till IBM so I walked to the metro and just went the last few kilometers by bus. When I told my collegues how I got there they just laughed at me and one knew a website, which has some routes mapped, which helped me finally find the right line, which I’ll try tomorrow.
The IBM building is quite big, has a nice soccer field, cafeteria and an e-cafe where you can play Wii or PS3 (on which Fifa matches are common). Seems like in Peru it’s not that easy to get the “Great place to work” award, which IBM holds here as well for several consecutive years.
One of my collegues was really worried about me taking the laptop on those buses and tried to persuade me to take a safe cab instead, but that would cost 10 € per day. Still I was lucky – we found someone, who lives in Miraflores right next to my hostel and he offered to take me home. He was a little ill this day, so he went shortly after 4 p.m. and I had a good excuse to leave work early 😉
On the way back he told me about a Peruvian airline which everybody loved, because of their new planes and cheap prices. After a few years of operation it turned out this company wasn’t making money by transporting passengers, but cocaine on their planes, so they were closed and now Peruvians miss that airline 😀
I just received a mail telling me I finally got accepted at the UCSB! I wouldn’t have believed that it might work this fast, but it’s nice however. Now everything will work as planned if I manage to get the acceptance package sent to Perú and get my American visa from here…
Because I was not really tired, I decided to stay up till the early evening to avoid jetlag. So I enjoyed my breakfest and the very friendly owner of the hostel gave me a map of the area and explained how to get to the important places. I went to a supermarket to buy a few things and get some soles. Fruits are really cheap here (0.50€ per kg of melons for example), but things like ham and juice (whyever) are really expensive (apple juice starts from about 1.40€ per liter which gets you organic juice in Germany).
Afterwards I was tempted to go to the beach, but decided it might be smarter to explore the way to the office without my laptop. I was told there was a microbus running from only two blocks away until a few streets away of IBM, but I couldn’t find the right line and decided to walk to a metro station, because I wanted to try it anyway. It was about 2.5 kilometers, but the area felt save to walk. The metro works like in New York, you only get on with a valid card which you can preload with money. Every ride costs 1.50 soles, less than 40 cents.
Buying the card was a bit difficult, because I didn’t have my passport or ID, but after some discussion it somehow worked without it. The trains and stations are in operation only since a few months and look really clean and well-maintained. Trains run every 15 minutes and are very punctual. I went three stops to a really big road called “Javier Prado” where I finally had the courage to try a microbus.
It’s a really interesting experience. You have multiple lines going through the city and the buses very from very old and rusty to new and big with up to 40 seats. Some just show a number on it, most also some places they’ll be driving to. There is always a driver and a – let’s call him conductor. The conductor always stands in the door and operates it manually. At every stop or simply when there are people on the sideway he tries to get people on the bus by shouting places it goes by. Also those conductors try to speed up people getting on and off by shouting things like “baja, baja, baja” at them. During the drive the conductor also collects the money from people (as far as I figured out between 1 sol and 2.50 soles depending on the trip lenght).
The second one I asked whether it goes to the end of Javier Prado said yes and even offered to tell me when I had to get off to walk to IBM. That worked perfectly, I paid my 1 sol and walked to the office to take a few pictures.
On the way back I wasn’t this lucky and got on the wrong bus, which went to Miraflores (I had asked for that), but not near where I wanted to go. Fortunately I had Google Maps so I got off when it became clear we were heading to the wrong direction and walked about 7 kilometers home, which was nice to see the city and take a few pictures. In general it feels very save (I haven’t been to bad areas though) and is also amazingly clean, you see guards, cleaners, gardeners and policemen everywhere.
I just arrived in Lima. The LAN flight had even better service than British Airways and I did not have any problem with my visa. Admission took about 60 seconds. At the customs section I was then lucky. There you have to press a button and randomly a red or green light appears. I had the green light and didn’t need to have my bag checked.
When I got out of the gate I already saw the sign “Mr. Hoffmann” and was greeted nicely. We rode a new Toyota through deserted streets (at 5 a.m.), which are very clean and in good condition, thought some neighborhoods around the airport do not look very appealing. You also see people sleeping next to the steet, but it’s not really many of them.
Because my single room is still occupied until afternoon I now have a group room just for myself even with a balkony. So far Lima looks really nice 🙂
Till now my travel was smooth. I sat next to a women from Spain on the flight from Berlin to London so we ended up talking about traveling, music and South America mostly in Spanish which was a good start for me, but also reminded me of my limited ability to communicate (understanding works quite well though) compared to English.
On the flight to Miami I unfortunately did not get the seat I booked but a window seat which was nice to get an overview of the Miami area, but a little bit unconfortable as it is more difficult to just get up and take a walk. I had ordered a vegetarian meal which usually is better than the standard meals in my experience and also in this case. The “special meal” passengers got their food before the regular meal was served and it was really good. Unfortunately 10 hours don’t pass that quickly so I read half of the book “My Exile Lifestyle” from Colling Wright. My thoughts about it are covered in this blog post.
Generally the flights till now were better than I had expected, the British Airways staff was really nice on both flights and I did not leave the plane hungry 🙂
It is 20:30 in Miami right now. We arrived from London early, but the passport check took about an hour. Afterwards I actually wanted to go searching a geocache, but as soon as I went outside I had to admit that idea was a bit to spontaneous. Although the area is nice, there are steets and cars everywhere and it is pretty impossible to leave the airport walking.
So I just sat outside for a few minutes enjoying the 30°C and afterwards took the Miami Mover (a train-like, automated bus) to the car rental center to get a little closer to downtown Miami.
There wasn’t much to see over there, leaving the trip itself (3 minutes) to be the main attraction. At this point I realized I would have to spend the remaining four hours differently and went searching for a wireless connectivity inside the airport. I ended up in the Miami International Airport Hotel Lobby with some food and drink from Starbucks (which was quite cheap compared to what else is available here at the airport) and no internet writing this blog post to submit it later (technically tomorrow) in Lima.
I already mentioned the interesting blog of Collin Wreight I found while (not) packing my bags. I wondered about whether I could read it during the trip and the $1.90 book “My Exile Lifestyle” in the Kindle Store seemed to be a good and cheap way for not having to think of a quick way to convert the blog for reading on the kindle.
After having read half of the book on the flight to Miami, I wondered about my motivation to read about other peoples’ traveling experiences and whether it might impair my own desire to explore or instead widen my horizon and thereby encourage digging deeper or at least experiencing a similar experience.
I came to the latter conclusion, because I think traveling is not mainly about going to the sight one after another, which are indeed less interesting the more you already know and have seen about them.
The most interesting aspect of traveling in my opinion is what you can experience in situations, that are at least to some extent unplanned thus allowing and unbiased view on things and the flexiblity to do just what your gut tells your in that very moment or decide between very limited options. Those are the moments where it’s easy or even neccessary to get out of the comfort zone. Now you know the main reason why I usually don’t care about reserving seats on trains.
After another busy but very intersting week in Munich I found some time again to share some experiences. My parents took the long train ride to visit me, so we spent most of the weekend trying to see and discover as much of Munich as possible, but with a focus of indoor activities because of the bitterly cold weather.
A very nice place was the Schloss Nymphenburg which is impressive in winter but must be really awesome in summer – it’s beautiful and just huge. Even the fresh snow didn’t seem to pose any problem to the masses of runners we saw, in warmer times I can only imagine as a paradise to go running. Maybe I’ll get the chance to spend another internship here in summer, I’m sure I would take it. Right next is the Museum of Men and Nature, which was very interesting and features a lot of interactivity, so you don’t get bored.
We also saw the Transportation Exhibiton of the Deutsches Museum where we spent more time than planned on the history of transportation, old S-Bahn trains, cars, bicycles and much more, I would really recommend it for a cold winter day, especially because it has so many old things you can inspect instead of just reading about them.
Naturally we also stopped by the Marienplatz, Karlsplatz, Maxmonument and several other sights, but another highlight of the “tour” was trying quite a good variety of food including the original Hofbräuhaus, Bretzelina (which has the best Bretzen in Munich so far and I tried a lot) and Vapiano. The real highlights to me were Milchhäusl (very small place offering affordable, organic but traditionally bavarian food) right in the English Garten, Basic Buffet and Hänsel und Gretel at the Marienplatz. All those three restaurants have a quite unique philisophy which I always prefer to generic places like Starbucks – which are nice but not really a reason to visit another city for. Sadly 99% of the people don’t seem to care much about those individual places, but I hope they’ll still be able to survive.
That’s it for now, feel free to comment, I’m open for feedback and would like to hear your opinion.
Because weekends are so short you have make intense use of them 🙂
Our team of three collegues and me found 9 geocaches including the glorious Mystery-House on Saturday with a nice Pizza in between, we went to eat real bavarian food, tried to climb down a bridge (which didn’t work out unfortunately) and went swimming.
Today we’ll most probably check out Drive-Now, I’m really exited to see how it works and whether we’ll find a parking spot afterwards 🙂
I’ve arrived in Munich last Thursday, but have been busier than I had thought, so I procrastinated my first post about Munich till today 🙂
I love the city, it feels considerably cleaner and more friendly and everything feels to be within walking range. I’m staying in a nice flat together with a fellow student near “Englischer Garten” which might be better than Central Park in NYC as it is more than five kilometers long (I tried jogging to the end yesterday but gave up after about 5 kilometers as I had to get back as well).
I also found some pretty nice caches, but they all seem to be camouflaged pretty poorly here in Munich – I wonder how muggels in Munich should be so different from muggels everywhere else…
Though I’m using Youtube pretty rarely it gave me a good video suggestion lately (the first good suggestion ever actually) which resulted in me subscribing to the whole channel. Most of it is too advanced, but it’s very motivating and I’m really curious how long I can motivate myself to do some regular workouts – I get bored pretty fast normally and fall back to jogging, biking and such things where I can always see places I haven’t been before.
That’s it for now, I will update you on my Munich experiences whenever some things worth sharing happend (probably pretty soon).
