um. hello.

So I'm heading to Arequipa tomorrow. And I am DAMN glad. It's been a nutso week. A couple of nights ago we got hit with a 4.3 Richter earthquake whose epicenter was 4 km away. I woke up in a complete panic but before I could formulate a plan, it was over. Very scary. My heart rate didn't go back to normal for a while...had a hard time getting back to sleep.

Today, the taxi driver Javi had organized came on the wrong day and started an argument with me at 420 am, trying to convince me to go to the airport anyhow. When I was unmoved he told me he would wait outside, just in case.

And to cap it all off, today the airline called me for a fraud check. It's true that my credit card got stolen last year and I "bought" about $3k in lumber, so my credit card company freaks out every time I spend outside of the US. I already had my fraud check with them a couple of days ago when I bought the tickets. So when the airline called today, they too wanted to check my identity. How? I had to give them the first 4 digits of my credit card number, of course. I tried to explain to the hapless idiot on the other end of the phone that they were unlikely to find any credit card thieves who DIDN'T have the credit card number... but he didn't seem to understand.

Oh, peru. Occasionally extraordinarily frustrating. I'm excited to see a volcano, the white city, the deepest canyon in the world, some condors, and to eat amazing arequipeño food, to balance it all out.