I STOOD UP!

I know, I know. Not much of an accomplishment seeing that this developmental milestone should have been completed sometime between the ages of 9-12 months of infancy. What I didn't add to the title of this blog post was that I stood up on a surfboard! I have been surfing previously before when I was in San Diego, and while I am very good at paddling out, due to my billion years of swimming, standing/balancing on land in the water is not my forte.

There weren't too many waves today, which was kind of disappointing, which made it a bit difficult to catch waves by yourself if you aren't quite good enough. The instructors, however, were wonderful, even better than the ones I had with UCSD Rec. As we went in a group, it was discounted from S/45 to S/35 ($17.50 to $13.50, respectively) for a 2+ hour lesson (even though it was a supposed 2 hour lesson). But that didn't matter anyways as the program paid for the cost. SCORE!. What was a bummer, however, was that a couple of us had some damages on the surf boards that we had to pay for. We felt kind of blindsided as we were not told this ahead of time and near the shore, the bottom was EXTREMELY rocky, to the point where you can't wait but must swim with your surfboard, so it was very very hard not to scratch the surfboard your feet and other body parts. I managed to come away unscathed, but not without injuries. I did bruise my 11th/12th rib area on the Left, I didn't even know how, and because there were rocks on the bottom, I was unable to duck under when a big wave came in and my surf board hit me right above my eye. It hurt, but I didn't notice anything until after we were done changing, when MK asked me what happened to my nicely swollen eye. I went to take a look in the mirror, and it really was swollen, then I realized, yea maybe it did hurt a bit.

We were all super hungry, so we went over to the local restaurant for dinner. 

The table we sat on was a glass case with this beautiful sand & shell display

 JS and I split this shrimp dish. We originally thought we ordered lobster because the menu said "langostino" which apparently is "prawns" Oh well, you live and you learn. The dish was muy delicioso though!

MK's curry with vegetables. Now, normally I would never consider a vegetable dish as extremely delicious, but this is some of the best curry I have had and I love curry 

Dinner with Andrew and Ricky

Oh I forgot to mention, we went to Huanchaco for the day to go surfing. If you want to read more about Huanchaco and the beautiful reed boats we found on the beach, visit my other blog (for some better looking pictures as well). 

After dinner, we went to Andrew and Ricky's hostel, which was really nice. We met the rest of the Florida crew and played cards until it was time to go out. It was surprisingly hard to find a bar that was open at 11pm. (Bars close at 5am in Peru, so people don't start going out until midnight) There was one place with alot of music, so we asked about it, and apparently it was a family reunion, so we weren't allowed in. We finally settled at a place and began the party (The band started setting up shortly after we arrived). Like the discoteca we went to on Thursday (which by the way, I almost lost my entire voice from talking), it was super loud although the place was super small. We left not too long after as locals started arriving and couple of us got tired turning down invitations to dance.