Touchdown in Peru

Ah finally! Nice to stretch my long legs after being flying for hours and hours. My driver (Diego), was waiting and ready with a smile in Lima and took me to a very nice hostel in the heart of Miraflores, located on a beautiful hilly strip of coast line 30 min outside of Lima. Miraflores is the place to be.... safe, relatively clean, near some great surfing spots, excellent cuisine can be located all over; it's unfortunate that I was only here for one night. I plan on coming back and exploring it further.

This photo was taken from an excellent restaurant recommended by the lonely planet guide called 'La Rosa Nautica', located on a pier. This place was top-notch, and the only thing that I can think of to complain about was the dated Acoustic Alchemy nu-jazz playing in the background. Service, cleanliness, layout and ingredients... all very well done. Even the prices weren't too bad. For about $40 USD (including taxes & tip) I ate like a king.

The menu was entirely in spanish, and I could only make out about 5% of it. I saw something that looked like 'traditional ceviche', and another one that sounded like it was 'grilled conch', so I ordered both. I also wanted to try some peruvian wine, so I had the waiter recommend a good cab.

Those rows of big looking corn-like things are in fact huge 'Corn Nut' sized corn kernels. They were tasty and a little bit sweet. The ceviche was excellent and the sauce was tangy but not too bitter. I tried eating one of those green leaves but they didn't taste good. The orange thing is a pepper cut to look like a flower, I tried a little bit of this and it was yummy.

While these don't appear to be conch shells (even though I saw another couple get some in their meal), I was still very happy with this plate. The sauce was AMAZING! The stringy stuff on top appeared to be roasted stringy green onion on a bead of sea salt. There was some amazing fresh bread that they served that I used to lap up all the juicy goodness.

I finished off the night with a traditional cocktail called Pisco Sour. Pisco is a traditional form of grape brandy. A pisco sour is to peru as the margarita is to mexico. While a refreshing drink, it is not really my taste. I'll probably try it again, but it's pretty sweet and the egg froth weirds me out.

I did a little research and found a basic recipe for pisco sour: 1 part lime juice, 3 parts pisco, ice, sugar to taste, 1 teaspoon egg white for frothiness, Angostura bitters. Combine the lime juice and pisco in a blender. Add sugar to taste. Add plenty of ice and blend. Spoon in egg white and blend again. Serve immediately in a nice glass, use a drop of the bitters on top for decoration.

Baby Laptop

Strange how all of a sudden 'netbooks' appeared on the scene over night. I've been in the tech industry for almost a decade now, and even this little revolution has hit me by surprise. It's a positive tech revolution though! Considering a good deal of what internet savvy people do is now part of what is called 'cloud computing' (another term to appear almost overnight). All the applications the vast majority of people need are online now anyway. The netbook revolution and it's timing makes perfect sense. Laptop manufacturers have been getting away with selling SUV equivlant laptops with high profit margins for years now. It took non-name brand firms such as Asus, and MSI based out of Taiwan to rock the boat, and now everyone including Dell and HP have jumped onboard. I don't think most of us need all those features anyway, but just like people that buy an SUV and drive it in town all the time, I think there was a feeling of safety knowing that you had it all just-in-case.

For my trip to Peru I wanted to have something that would last 3-6 hours on a charge, was baby small and easy to tote, had built in WiFi, and had enough CPU power to play back all my favorite video standards. After doing a bit of research and price searching I found the MSI Wind.

After searching high and low for the best price, I ended up getting the fully loaded version (6-cell battery, 802.11N wifi, bluetooth) directly from CostCo's website for $399 including free ground S/H. I read reviews of it getting between 4-5 hours of battery life, but so far I've only been able to get around 3 hours 30 minutes out of it on a full charge (I was watching DivX video, or using WiFi pretty much the whole time though). Not bad, but I think that with a little tweaking of the power/eco settings I could probably squeeze out more. I'm happy with it so far, and am using it right now to type of this blog in a hostel in Cusco, Peru.