Mi casa es su casa.

Welcome to our Arequipan home!

We have been truly blessed to have found a "piso" - an apartment - that is very nice and in a safe part of town. We live in the district of Arequipa called "Centrado," which means center. We are very close to all of the tourist attractions, such as the Cathedral and the Monastery of Santa Catalina, but not TOO close that we actually run into tourists or have to deal with the hawkers who abound in that zone.

We are living in an apartment building that also houses two other members of the church, Favian and Patricia. Favian is Arequipan, but Patricia, his wife, is Brazillian. Together, they run a Portuguese language school called "Casa Do Brasil," which is right down the street from our house. They came over to welcome us on our first night in Arequipa and were very friendly and helpful. Our landlords are an older married couple who have retired from their original careers (as a teacher and an engineer) and are taking on apartment management as a sort of "encore career."

Here are a few pictures to give you a sense of what our place looks like.

The living room:


And the kitchen:


This is the view from our laundry porch (see below for more information):


We also have three bedrooms - way more than we know what to do with. For now, one is our sleeping room and another is our dressing room. The third, we just closed off because it's not needed.

The biggest challenge of living here (which is not so bad) will be that, like many other Arequipenos, we do not have a washing machine - and of course, a dryer would be unheard of. So this weekend, we are going to roll up our sleeves and do our first load of laundry by hand. Once its clean, we will hang it out to dry on the roof of our building, just like everyone else does. I think that I will feel very accomplished once that first load is done, although I admit that I am not 100% comfortable drying my underwear for the world to see.

The more humorous part of our living arrangement is that there is a veritable menagerie of animals living around us. And we know that only because of the unending noises that they make. At last count, there were:

1.) A hyperactive rooster who starts going at 4:30 AM (which is when the sun rises here because we are so close to the equator) and doesn't stop cock-a-doodle-dooing until, oh, 6 PM.
2.) Two small but loud dogs whose barks are set off by the rooster. I was able to snap a picture of these scoundrels yesterday morning - it was the only way I could think of to get revenge on them.
3.) One cat who generally starts meowing at 2-minute intervals at about 10 PM each night. Thankfully, we can sleep through the meowing.

We also ran into a number of extremely stinky cows on the street today (being herded by their owners through car traffic), but that wasn't so much in our neighborhood. Let me just note that the smell of those cows made me REALLY grateful that I'm living next door to the rooster and not the cows.

So that's our casa in Arequipa! We're grateful to have such a nice place to call home.