Somehow the second week passed so fast I barely noticed. My tasks are getting serious now at work and I suddenly know most of the names of people around me.

I had several good conversations with collegues, fellow travelers and Angelo (the owner of my hostel) about Perú and life in general and I think I will not cover much of it here, instead I decided to write another post about some of the insights later. It will be mixed with my own perceptions and hopefully include some pictures I still have to take. I’m also planning to cover traffic over here, right now I use the bus to work (which is sometimes crammed to people but feels safe) and in most cases a collegue takes me home (he lives two blocks away in Miraflores). So far pretty cheap and convenient.

Since all the paperwork from the UCSB arrived on the last weekend I wanted to get my visa to finally get everything organized. I spent almost one evening in the lobby of my hostel trying to get the web application to accept by picture and working through pages and pages of questions. After the first ones I stopped wondering why those were important and just wanted to go through.

Unfortunately to schedule an appointment you have to pay the visa fee, which can only be payed in cash at Scotiabank in Perú. I thought well, this might be a bit inconvenient, but no problem. So I tried to walk into a Scotiabank office next to my hostel to discover it was closed already – shortly after 6 p.m. I had thought everything here is like Wong, the big supermarket I always buy my food at. It is open from 7 a.m. until midnight 🙂

The next time I tried was Wednesday morning before going to work. It was 8.15 a.m. and still closed. Now I became a bit clueless about what to do – my next idea was finding a Scotiabank next to my office and going there during the day. When I opened their website and browsed through the locations I found one agency with the exact same adress the office has. I knew that we have ATMs at building, but on the web it clearly said “agency”. So I asked a collegue and was told that we indeed have a fully functioning bank agency inside the building. I went there, paid my dues and was able to access their appointment reservation system on Thursday. The waiting time in Lima at the moment is zero, so I reserved the earliest possible date Friday, 7.30 a.m.

Now I know, why there’s no waiting time. They just call people in no matter how many are already there. So I spent 2 hours at the embassy this morning to have my 90 second interview and the visa was approved – which finally made up for the waiting time.

Additionally plans for the next weekends develop – I will be going to Cuzco with some people to see the legendary Independence Day Celebrations on 28th of July. As foreigners pay three times the price for domestic air travel over here, I’ll be taking the 20h bus ride. I also plan to join some people from Couchsurfing on a trip to the Cañon de Autisha on Sunday missing the soccer game Peru against Uruguay, the last chance to still qualify for the World Championship 2014. Believe it or not: Peruvians are even more obsessed with soccer than Germans.