After all the excitement on my day of arrival everthing seems to continue on smoother lines now. Shortly after writing my blog post yesterday I was picked up at the hotel by the Rodriguez family. I then stayed at their home yesterday and today. It’s planned that I’ll return there after Arequipa. I’m now waiting for my plane to Arequipa which is scheduled to fly at 19:40 (it’s 18:40 in Peru now). Through a contact in Arequipa I was able to confirm my stay at a family in Arequipa and they should now know I’m coming and pick me up from the airport. I spent most of today and yesterday learning Spanish. I did not invest too much time learning the language while still in Switzerland because I just didn’t have any time left to invest. I’m looking forward to learn that language full-speed now and it definitely should be a lot easier than Japanese. :-) Even though I have lost much of the Japanese I knew there are currently many situations where I wished the people would understand that language, because I can only think of the sentence in Japanese but not in Spanish (of course if they understood English or German or French that would be even better). But anyway, staying with a Peruvian family and learning at a school for one month should do wonders to my Spanish abilities. Maybe I should also switch my computer’s language, which thanks to the wonders of Mac OS X (or Linux for that matter) is easily done. There’s not much more to tell for now. Just a question to the gadget-equipped part of my readership: does anyone know if it is somehow possible to send MMS from Peru using an Orange mobile phone? The information I found on the Orange Web site about roaming in Peru says there is no way. Would be nice to be able to moblog from time to time.

I have now safely arrived in Lima, Peru. Checked in at a Hotel and am now using some free WiFi available from my room. So I was almost able to call my mum using Skype. Unfortunately she is not online with a microphone-equipped computer. But still: the wonders of modern technology… Anyway. With arriving there were no major problems. Flight, Immigration control, luggage check, etc. Though the flight was a bit uncomfortable. I had a bad seat (right in the middle, with one person to the left of me and two on the right). According to the ticket I was sitting on the aisle but I wasn’t in the mood to fight with the person who took that seat and switched quietly. Also - and more important - during my Austrian Airlines flight to Tokyo I had my own TV screen, while here with Iberia there were only a few shared ones. But as the flight only makes for two of the ca. 220 days of my stay in Peru, that’s not too important to me. But after coming out to the reception hall the problems started. I have a contact in Lima where I can stay for the first days in Lima (two days now and a few days after coming back from language school). At the airport a tourist office guy chatted me up and told me he was sent by those people. Actually he asked me whom I’m waiting for and I told him the name. Then he said he was sent by them. While I found it highly dubious in the beginning, it started to make sense after a while in the conversation. So he helped me to get to a hotel and we went for a drink. During the drink he asked me about my friend “Willy S.” (full name known to me). I did not know such a person and told him so. We then realized that I was waiting for “Wilson R.” and that he made a mistake at the airport. He was actually sent by Willy to pick up another guy. Ouch! I phoned my friends here in Lima, told them about the problem, and they are now coming to pick me up this morning. Somehow I always seem to have some similar problems when arriving in foreign countries. When going to Japan I had met a nice young Japanese guy on the plane. In the airport he helped me get a ticket for the train. It was more expensive than the price that I expected, though (I had detailled information about how to get to my target when arriving, including ticket price). So I asked him about this. And only after about 15 minutes of discussing he finally realized he had purchased the wrong ticket. A few weeks later a friend told me, that maybe that guy at the airport had purchased a ticket to Ishikawa instead of Ichikawa (which sound quite similar, especially when pronounced by a Swiss guy who does not speak Japanese well). So after all that excitement yesterday I stayed at the Hotel, watched a bit of TV and slept. Though I’m probably quite jet lagged because I was not able to sleep the times I wanted to. Tomorrow, October 1st, I’m flying to Arequipa for language school. By the way: my time zone is UTC-5. You can always check my current time online.

Und schon bin ich in Madrid. Sitzreihen 37 bis 50 sind am boarden. Abflug um 12.40. Nächster Halt: Lima.

Die folgende Story ist zwar bereits ein wenig her, aber immer noch interessant. Nach dem Wirbelsturm welcher New Orleans versenkte, stiegen die Benzinpreise offenbar ziemlich hoch. Da ich kein Auto fahre bin ich davon nicht persönlich betroffen. Deshalb habe ich keine Ahnung, wie teuer Benzin normalerweise ist und habe darum noch das “offenbar” eingefügt. In dem Zusammenhang habe ich eine auf den ersten Blick witzige Story gelesen: einige Tankstellen konnten den Preis nicht auf die über drei Dollars pro Fass hochschrauben. Ihre Zapfsäulen waren zu alt dafür. ...

My reports from Peru will mostly be in English, because the audience is more international than it is with my usual blogging topics (which mostly center on Politics, Switzerland and some technology). So for all people who don't understand German, it might be nice to be able to exclude all my blog posts which are not related. There are two ways for doing this. First, you can just look at http://weblog.patrice.ch/en/. This includes all English posts on my weblog. The according feed (for your RSS reader) is http://weblog.patrice.ch/en/atom. ...

Eine Weile hat es sich abgezeichnet, doch erst seit letzter Woche ist es definitiv. Ich habe die Möglichkeit in Lima, Peru einen Teil meines Zivildienstes zu leisten. Für die Tear Fund werde ich dort am Lehrerseminar Diego Thomson im Bereich Informatik-Ausbildung arbeiten. Dabei handelt es sich um eine Fortsetzung der Arbeit, welche Matthias Stürmer im Frühling dieses Jahres dort gemacht hat. Den Oktober werde ich aber erst in Arequipa an der Sprachschule verbringen. Danach bin ich für ca. sechs Monate in Lima. Abflug ist bereits morgen, am 29. September. Ich freue mich auf diese geniale Gelegenheit und werde hier versuchen fleissig zu bloggen. Sicher fleissiger als im letzten Monat… ;-)