even MORE about Lima

I wouldn´t want to short the people staying in the hostel some attention in my blog. But... I don´t know, there have been so many people here that it makes it really hard to give each person I´ve gotten to know a fair treatment. I guess I´ll just have to be brief, then.
The first night that I was here I hung out in the living room with two girls from Kansas, this guy named Jacques who quit his job substitute teaching in order to travel, and a guy named Matt who is a former US military man from Kentucky. Um...we just watched some TV for a couple of hours and drank Pisco sours (I like those drinks because they really shock your mouth with the SWEETNESS....SO much sugar.) The next night, we played drinking game style Jenga on the patio until it felt like time to go to the club. We went with a pair of American girls who I really liked, named Evie and Emily (they really WERE a pair) because they were really amiable and because Evie called me my love and Im a sucker for that sort of unwarranted familiarity.
There´s also a guy from Colombia who is some kind of philsophy grad student. He keeps to himself a lot, but he ocassionally joins us on the patio when we are hanging out at night. He doesn´t talk much and when he does, he thinks through every single word so carefully...and we all just make fun of the fact that he´s a philosopher. There was also a woman named Kaley who works for Europol, who loves sex jokes and talks about her hot swiss boyfriend´s bum. Then there was Jonathan, a filipino lawyer from New York, who loves talking about New York. Last night a teacher from San Antonio, who (at first) I thought was about my age, and a Finnish hippy who found some Peruvians God Knows Where in Lima and brought them back to hang out last night. It´s great fun really, especially because the people here are really different from the kind of people I usually socialize with. Almost everyone that I have hung out with here is much older than I am. Many of them are married, like Diane, the archaeology grad student who will be working at Morro at the end of the month. Lots of people in their thirties. Lots of people who teach middle school.
Anyway, that´s probably not all THAT important.
I´m trying to figure out where to go after Cusco still. Arequipa may not actually have been the best choice (I guess I´ll have to see when I get there tomorrow) because I feel obliged to visit as many archaeological SITES as possible and Arequipa seems to have a greater abundance of museums, along with some natural wonders I suppose, but that´s okay because it´s only a stopover for two nights. Cusco is obvious. I can´t wait for Inti Raymi at Sacsayhuaman. But after that? I think it would be fun to go to Bolivia, to see Tiwanaku, but I don´t actually know whether that is feasible. That is to say, I´m happy to pay for a visa, but I´m not really sure that they would give me one. If I somehow make it to La Paz it would be really fun to visit the witches´market, but like I said, I´m wondering whether that´s feasible.
Within Peru, here are some of the possibilities. I would like to visit Cajamarca because I´ve heard that it´s beautiful, and also because one of the authors on my self designed reading list is from Cajamarca, but again, I don´t know what Cajamarca has to offer in terms of archaeology. Even further out, I would like to go to Chachapoyas, because there´s this amazonian site called Kuelap that looks SO COOL, but the guidebook says that it is dangerous to get there because buses often wreck due to extremely poor roads, especially during this season. Oh...what´s a boy to do?
Finally, I think I should talk about the challenges involved in travelling alone. I can´t yet say that I´m lonely in the way that I expected to be, but what I can say is that its a real challenge to travel alone because responsibility for your safety and the success of your trip falls on your own shoulders. If, for instance, I decided that I didn´t want to see Lima or any of Peru anymore, whos to stop me? I could just lay in bed all day, and there might not actually be anyone to tell me to do otherwise. Also, when I go somewhere or do something, there often isn´t anyone around to help me be sure that I´m doing things right. How am I supposed to know if I´m forgetting some essential detail, or who can help me see that some aspect of the landscape is not right if my intuition isn´t enough? Who´s supposed to help me choose what city to see, what sites not to miss, and how can I possibly be in charge of thinking through EVERYTHING on my own?
For real. Travelling by yourself is hard.