Nothing like a recycled post to get things started...

This is a little something from my first update e-mail I sent out about my travel experiences through the Lima airport. If you're not on my update e-mail list but would like to be, please leave a comment with your e-mail address on it, or send me an e-mail at gbaikie@gmail.com.

I´m staying with a wonderful woman named
Chela, who is my best friend Ruth´s aunt and a most compassionate
woman to have picked me up from the airport last night about midnight
so that I wouldn´t die trying to navigate Lima by myself. And she´s a
saint for putting up with my horrible, horrible conversational
Spanish.

Anyway, I made it through the airport alright, but my big fear was
passing through customs. If you´ve been through Peru´s airport
before, once you pass through immigration and reclaim your baggage,
you must pass through customs, which is the worst thing in the world.
Why? Because you have no control over your own destiny at customs,
which is a worker who gathers your forms and then tells you to press a
button that will either flash red or green before you pass through the
black gate. Now, once you press this button, your fate is nothing
more than a dangerous gamble, for this button decides your future.
Green means you haven´t angered the universe, Red means....well, red
means bad news bears for you. Everything you own will get searched,
and it will be thorough (i.e. time-consuming). So before you get in
line, you stand there trying to gather as many statistics as possible
on how many times it´s flahsing red to best determine which line is
the least likely to ruin your day. However, in the bottom of your
heart you know that you have absolutely no way to pick a ´´good´´
line, so you just pick one, and then you hold your breath. Palms
sweating, you watch as people get the green light, wishing so badly it
were you that was passing through so easily. Finally you´re almost to
the front. One more person to go, she hands her form to the customs
worker, reaches up to press the button with confidence, and there it
is. The red button of doom. And it seems as though a silence falls
over Lima, you can almost hear the trombone´s ´wah wah waaaaahs´´ in
the distance.

But only for a second, because I then realize. I made it! The girl in
front of me got the axe and doom won´t flash twice in a row! The
music changes to an upbeat whistling tune most likely from the fifties
as I happily hand my form over, press that button, and walk past that
beautiful green light with a little extra spring in my step because I,
Gillian Baikie, did not have to get searched at customs.


Well, update from yesterday, I did make it to Trujillo alright with no major disasters, so now I guess I can finally get my Peru blog on the way! Hooray!