9) Friday Night in Huaraz

The day had dragged on by with data entry, so we decided to go out for tea. Oscar had left the night before to work with locals at the nearby glacier for a few days so we had some time to kill. We found a Polleria through a haze of smoke, and dashed in out of the rain. We were the only ones in there and both had chicken with chips and salad, which I avoided for the sake of my fragile bowels. It was incredibly good, and accompanied with a ridiculous gameshow on tv. Two scantily clad teams had to hurdle from one end to the other, and form a cup pyramid. A cup pyramid!! It was hilariously budget, and the main selling point was obviously the distinct lack of clothing. When one team won, their captain kept doing the licking vagina thing with his fingers. God I love Peruvian tv.
After we went back to the bar which had chess, but this time we sat at the bar and had a chinwag with the barman, Lucho, who brewed his own beers. I started on coffee, and then some Americans sat near us so I thought I'd better switch to beer before the accent grated too much. Lucho's beers were really good, and most of them had Coca in for some reason. We were thinking up ways to strike up conversation with the yanks, and luckily couldn't agree on the location of Yellowstone, so I leant over (probably looking creepy as hell) and enquired.
One thing lead to another and we got chatting away. There was Robin from Wisconsin, Brian from Idaho, and Shoshona? from California, all in the American Peace Core, which sounds epic. They could speak Spanish much better than us, and managed to wrangle many free drinks from Lucho, including Pisco... Pisco is a local drink which I think is grape brandy, and is used to clean paint from metals (or it should be). The drinks were flowing, and after a round of mighty fine tequila, we went to another bar called Bonus-track.
They were fun, and enjoyed our accents a LOT discussing various cultural differences, and I managed to convince them that Jamie was a minor celebrity in the north of England for his sheep shearing skills. Also apparently a woman with a belly that extends past her breasts is a Boobychoo. We played drinking Jenga, and that's when their lightweighted Americanness came to fruition. The shots were Pisco soaked with Coca, but weren't really that bad. Bad enough however to make Robin chunder out of the second storey window. She sat there for a while, and at one point I did feel glad that it wasn't me for a change!
It wasn't long after that we left our new amigos, and once again stumbled back through the streets of the Peruvian mountain town to our humble abode, a lot more knowledgable about Americans and having had a very enjoyable evening!
Yellowstone is across 4 states by the way!