David Grajal

In October I went for a week long trip to Peru for business reasons. However I didn’t want to flight all over the world without also exploring the local culture. I enjoyed 5 days in Peru, 2 of them in Lima and the rest exploring Lima, Cuzco and the Sacred Valley.

This experience have been my first time in South America and also, my first experience in a country where you can touch, listen and smell poverty. It was short, but revelatory experience. After those days, I changed. A bit. You always change your mindset when you visit other cultures but this time has been different. In Peru the people is happy without any of the artificial modern complications we enjoyed on Europe. At the end of the trip I felt closer to human nature.

In Peru I had my first hands-on contact with South America Spanish. It sounds old, like stuck in time. The grammar they use is the same, the pronunciation sounds sweeter. The vocabulary is clearly different. They use the same words as in Spain with different meaning and they use completely different slang. In Peru the people doesn’t seem influenced by the American English as Mexicans do but they often mix Quechuan words with Spanish in their conversations. When I was speaking with locals we could understand each other without problems but sometimes we needed to ask for the exact meaning of the words.

I really liked the trip. It was intense. Not a lot of time but lots of experiences. I really want to explore the entire continent.
Many places to visit… and lots of different cultures to discover.

Tags: peru

This entry was posted on Sunday, December 14th, 2008 at 8:25 pm and is filed under life, travel. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.