First impressions: riding thru Lima

We just arrived in Lima airport and riding in a taxi toward our hotel.

At first, it seemed like everything was just like Northern Europe. Cloudy skies, 15C, the taxi driver is tuned to a radio station, which plays Brian Adams and U2. The roads seem pretty well paved, they even have fresh lane markings on them.

Some guy on the street saw our taxi, and yelled out "Gringos!" with a smile on his face :) That was a fun welcome to this new country.

Turns out the radio we were listening to in the taxi was just for us, and in fact the taxi driver normally listens to something else. He switched to a different radio station, and it sounded just like Mexican radio in Los Angeles, I couldn't really tell the difference. The music was happy-happy tunes, simple rhythms and a lot of wind instruments. Not my cup of tea, but it was funny to hear.

After a while, the city looked less and less appealing, nasty, unfinished buildings, fishing strings with drying laundry started to slowly dominate the skyline. In fact a lot of Lima reminded me of poor Mexican districts of Los Angeles, just a little bit dirtier.

The air is quite unclean, mostly just exhaust fumes from cars, and not so much industrial smog. It's hard to breathe at first, but we're getting used to it quickly. On the left we have a shanty-town of hundreds of poor residents, and in front, some villas as well as the European-styled city center.