Location: Arequipa, Peru
[The internet at my homestay couldn’t connect last evening so I couldn’t upload this post until today!]
Although today’s main event was my 5-hour long Spanish classes (with breaks in between), I thought you would be more interested in reading about eating alpacas for lunch. I’ll get to school talk soon.
After class, I headed to a restaurant which my teacher recommended. The place didn’t have the Menu of the Day at 2:30pm so I chose something a la carte.
The most interesting items seemed to involve alpaca so I ordered one that was drenched in sweet pepper sauce with some ravioli.

The texture of alpaca is a bit like beef–slightly tough. However, the taste is very different from beef.
My dish of alpaca tasted a little like not-so-well prepared mutton. Or as someone on Facebook corrected me, it tasted “gamey” not “smelly”.
Alpaca is definitely not on my list of Best Meats to Eat (TM) and is probably down at the bottom somewhere with crocodile meat.
After my meal, as I walked back to my home stay, I saw two alpacas grazing casually by the roadside. That’s insane!

Back to school!
I’m taking Spanish classes again in Arequipa. Lessons and accommodation here is definitely cheaper than Buenos Aires. Plus, I get to have one-to-one lessons instead of group lessons.
I was supposed to walk to school (2 freaking miles!) today but the school coordinator and her husband picked me up from my homestay place instead. The morning traffic in Arequipa looked horrible from my view in the car.
I had two different teachers for my lessons. For the first 2 hours, I had Senorita R, the next 2 with Senor J and the last 1 hour with R again.
I think I spoke more broken Spanish in these 5 hours than the whole 1 month and a week that I’ve been in South America. Most of the time, I spoke like this: “I loves to eats Japan food.” “I have a journalist.” or something grammatically, vocabularly incorrect.
Of course it’s all about learning and I’m learning a lot. In fact, I felt like I was learning too much after 2 hours but got into the groove by the 5th hour. I hope that by the end of the week, I’ll be rather good at Spanish. Hopefully.