Goodbye and flight to Lima

On 16.08 it was time, at 17.16 Uhr I took my last breath of Leipzig's trade fair city air for a year. After the last few days were characterized by farewells and packing stress, I took the ICE towards Berlin. Fortunately, I was able to sleep for a few hours in another volunteer's house before we made our way to the airport around 4:00 am.

Three hours later, our first flight to Madrid took off. During these three hours, I spent the time catching up on some sleep. Once we arrived in Madrid, we met the other volunteers who had traveled from Frankfurt, Munich, and other cities. In total, we boarded the plane to Lima as a group of 24. The following 12 hours passed by, not quite as quickly as expected, but it wasn't as bad as anticipated.

After the airplane flew for a full 12 hours in the bright sun above the clouds due to the time difference, a completely different picture emerged during the landing after crossing through the clouds. We descended below the cloud cover and saw a Lima that could not have been imagined to be any grayer and gloomier. As later turned out, this gray image of Lima is typical in the current months. Due to its location between the ocean and the nearby beginning mountains, Lima is apparently always covered by clouds in the months of June to September.

At the airport, we were picked up by our organization and taken to nearby accommodation. After a 10-minute drive in the car, it was certainly clear to all of us that we are really somewhere completely different than what we are used to. Because traffic in Peru resembles a video game where the goal is to create as many "near misses" as possible. Overtaking happens from the right as well as the left, directions of travel are sometimes irrelevant, and car horns are constantly sounding.

In Lima, we had our "On Arrival Seminar". Here we received more information from our organization, met the German ambassador, and saw a little bit of Lima. Although this was very brief. Lima seems to be really dangerous, so we should not move around alone for now.