About two weeks ago, I was walking back to my hostel in Arequipa when I saw a group of little boys with water balloons fleeing in my direction from down the street. I continued on and as I got to the corner, I saw a group of three 6-8 year old girls with a bucket of water balloons smiling mischievously at me. I interpreted the smile as “we’re going to ambush those little boys with water balloons,” so I smiled back and continued walking by them. It turned out that in Spanish, that smile actually translates to, “we’re going to completely soak you with water balloons.” When I got back to the hostel still dripping wet, they told me, “Oh yeah. The kids are playing Carnivale. They love to get foreigners.”

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I was walking back to my hostel from the Arequipa city center and I suddenly noticed that almost every business on the street was a driving school. It seemed like more driving schools than you’d need for a city of only a million people and a LOT more driving schools than you’d need on a single 3 block stretch of road in any city. I broke out my camera and I turned on the “driving school count overlay” feature so I could get a full count of the number of schools.

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I’m currently in Arequipa, Peru. It’s Peru’s second largest city, which apparently doesn’t change the fact that it’s incredibly small. Conveniently, it’s also incredibly cheap. The first gym I found cost S/1 (~$0.35) for a day pass, but it turned out that pretty much all the machines were broken, so I had to splurge for a fancier gym at S/3 (~$1) for a day pass. Prices are so low here that people often refer to the city as “Arecheapa” although by “people” I mean me and only in my head because I would get made fun of if I said that out loud.

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