With an 8 hour lay over in Lima and not a whole bunch else going for me, I decided to go head to the closest cinema and watch a movie. I have no idea what movies are out (or available in Peru), but I figured it would at least be an interesting adventure.
And I was correct. Thanks to some helpful women at the airport, I was given the name of a near by “mall plaza” and thus a way to pass my 8 hour lay over. I put my luggage under the sleepy eye of the luggage security guard and off I was. I had a sweet taxi driver who apparently works in the city while his family continue to live in the countryside. He told me he only sees them a few times a year. It was fairly sad to hear. So I told him the next time in town, we’ll go to a movie.
Once again I found it really difficult to be in a mall, but at the same time I really enjoyed myself. I laughed when I saw young couples on their first dates. I watched the man in frount of me watching the movie promos on the television in the food court. And a big thanks to Natalie, a worker at Subway, who was just so funny and charming. She asked me about if learning Spanish was hard. I told her that it wasn’t so bad, and that English was harder.
She told me the problem was not hearing it spoken often enough. Then I told her my example from Nicaragua where Pablo said that everyone calls “strike” “stri-kay” because that is how you would say it with Spanish pronunciation, rather than “stri-k” with a hard k. She just laughed.
I ended up going to see Mirror Mirror with Julia Roberts, for a lack of other titles that looked promising. Or maybe I really wanted to see a light-hearted movie about a woman so desperate to keep her good looks that she would kill a young woman in her prime. Hard to say. Who doesn’t love a good attempted murder movie every once in a while?
While waiting for the movie to start, I had to admit I felt slightly out of place. And possibly like some sort of freak. The mothers and kids would stare at me with a kind of intensity reserved for zoo animals. Then they would decide against sitting next to me. I felt like I was really smelly or something. But eventually a woman and young child decided to risk it. They sat next to me.
And while the woman went to go get popcorn the little girl was staring at me. So I said hola. This then somehow turned into showing each other different hand tricks. She showed me that some people are capable of making an M with the lines in the palm of their hands. I showed her that I had double jointed thumbs. Then she showed me she could isolate her final joint in her index finger so it looked funny, a trick I could do too. It was one of those really funny moments where I am glad that kids don’t need to talk to someone to be entertained.
Eventually she did try to talk to me, and had such a high pitched voice I couldn’t understand her. It was a very abrupt end to our conversing and entertainment. So I had to entertain myself with the remains of my popcorn until the movie started. Which it turned out was dubbed not subtitled. So I spent a good portion of the movie trying to grasp what was going on. I am fairly certain I got the gist of it anyway.
Somehow it was so perfect. It was just what I needed. An escape from an airport and experience the “real world”. While many of you may not think of a mall as the best place to do this, but somehow it was what I needed. To see young teens on their dates. To see old couples walking around holding their partners hand. And the portly fellow watching the movie promotions on the television in the food court.
Interacting with locals and feeling less like a foreigner, was great. Even if the little kids stared at me.
I ended up taking a taxi back to the airport with a sweet taxi driver who told me to take care of myself. We talked about the fact their are good and bad people in this world and that you could never be sure who was who. But by far my favourite thing about him was that he had an Elvis figurine hanging from his rear view mirror.
Then before I knew it, or in reality another four hours later, I was on my flight to Easter Island.
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