"Life is going to be an awfully big adventure." Peter Pan

2/4
You’ve probably heard it before. Maybe a professor said it to a student. (Or, less likely, but perhaps more appropriately, maybe a student said it to a professor.) Of course, the place you heard it most often was at the dinner table when your mother placed that dish you hated right down in front of you. Cauliflower. Sixteen bean soup. Spinach souffle. You choose. It was the meal that made meatloaf look good. A meal, that, were you given an option of a last meal, you would choose because death was a suitable follower. Naturally, every reasoning power in your little frame attempted to show her the injustices of such a disastrous dish, and naturally she responded with something like, “If you don’t like it here, why don’t you go to a poorer nation and see what it’s like?”

We all know that we’re not suppose to actually go to a different nation and try it out – we're just supposed to eat our food and be quiet – but I’m getting the chance to live the opportunity every American child has heard about. Right now I’m sitting in the court yard of a house that is happily situated in the middle of six or seven mountains. (Picture Mordor’s coloring and you’ve got it about right.) I’m told, though, that the mountains aren’t mountains at all, they’re hills. Big hills.

I’ve made it to Lima and have found that I’ll be by no means “roughing it.” My room is beautiful, the people seem nice, and I can now verify that the world is bigger than North America. That being said, electricity and water supposedly aren’t reliable, taxi and bus drivers are crazy and infatuated with their horns (and green cards), and I’m not sure what I can say for their school system if I’m going to be a teacher. Fortunately, I'm loaded with Dead Poet’s Society.

Carpe Diem.