Way back when I was in Prague, I asked my friend there 'what she did first whenever she first visits a new town or city' and her reply was immediately go to the centre and try to see as much of it as possible right away.
This to me seemed a little bit of a rushed technique and without proper information and research you are unlikely to get the most out of each city by doing so, however I found out today ( on day three of my visit to Piura ) the logic behind her reasoning.
My friend in Piura has a small baby and also a couple of law exams on my first two days here, so instead of rushing into the city centre and wandering around on my own I chose to wait for her on the night of day two and all of day three.
The time in Piura I spend tinkering with photos, getting mundane stuff done like laundry, photo cropping, blogging, etc, etc and with the heat during the day and the blue skies high above I was sort of saving myself for Halloween day and night.
After a huge chinese from the place across the road, that was big enough for a family for only PES 25, and watching a few movies back in my hostel room in English and in Spanish to pass the time it was finally time to meet my friend.
She was unsure as to how much Spanish I could speak or understood, she arranged to meet me with one of her friends and together we took a taxi to a nearby local restaurant to try out some local food.
Piura itself doesn't seem like a huge town on the map or from walking around, and from going in all four directions I have learned that the centre of Piura has the nice flat roads and the further you go away from the centre the more the side roads become more and more wil, eventually being nothing more than a large gap between the rows of houses. The centre of Piura is very dry, with hardly any rain all year round, and this has a huge effect on the fact that once the government cleared it for building and for roads the green vegetation of the land never really seemed to be able to come back.
It is a dry and dusty place, where the locals are happy despite the conditions being basic and I am amazed at how nice certiain places are on the inside as from the outside the whole place looks it hasn't seen a lick of paint in fifty years.
The restaurant was a nice quaint place, near her house, that served local food and they give you a free drink that is called Tiger Milk, but it is actually warm fish water and so with the confusion in names, the strength and the heat of it I just couldn't manage to swallow much and had to pass. The main course was a little better, in that it was a rice and prawn sort of dish although the accompanying hot salsa sauce was enough to knock my socks off and would give a Thai Red curry a run for its money in the heat stakes.
During the meal we chatted and my friend was relieved that I could in fact speak a very little Spanish, and also understand a lot more as long as she spoke slowly and kept it simple without too many complex words of local points of reference.
After the meal she had to go back for her final exam, so I returned to my hostel to freshen up, grab a bit of sleep and prepare for a night with her and her friend.
We grabbed another taxi to her friends, after stopping by a local store to pick up a bottle of vodka and some orange, and I was midly dissapointed that Smirnoff Vodka was not that much cheaper hear than back in the UK, with a bottle costing well over PES 25, but then I guess that local produced vodka would be cheaper than imported stuff, but then I didnt want to risk my stomach with anything foreign and with a strong alcohol content.
Her friends place was a bit further out of town than I had expected and the taxi took a few minutes to get there and once we were there I was impressed by how well he had decorated the inside of his apartment that he considered small, but was easily big enough for an entire family in other places I had visited.
We chatted for a few hours past midnight, mostly a weird hybrid of them talking to me in broken English and me replying in broken Spanish, but we always seemed to understand each other and get our message across. I was glad that I had been studying some words and phrases and they were coming in handy and so although I have not got my proper text books my leaning was still continuing to progress slowly.
The taxi home was the scariest part of the day as once he dropped my friend off at her place he continued on to take me to mine but midway through the journey he spotted an obstruction in the road so swerved to avoid it, however he failed to see the side of the road and almost bumped the car right onto the high raised curb, which as you can image shocked us both and had him paranoidly looking in his mirror and at the side of his car for the remainder of the journey.
The next morning I had arranged to meet my friend at a sensible time at my hostel and we were going to go to a nice place just a few miles north out of town to an old town that had a lot of historical importance.
I was glad that I had earlier been able to pass my first solid excrement for a good week and so was feeling happy, however for some reason, be it the food, the heat, the vodka, the fact that I double dosed on my anti malaria pills after missing them for two days or a combination of a little bit of all of them, but after less than five minutes in the cab I was urgently requesting that they pull over for me to use a gas station toilet.
I have never liked throwing up, I have never liked public toilets and I hate using toilets that are neither clean, have no paper, no working flush and no toilet seat so you might be able to imagine the hell that I was in hurling into the smelliest toilet bowl that I have ever used, and getting my trousers wet from the mess on the floor in the process.
Unsure as to what caused my sudden vometting attack and further more unsure if it was just the start of something worse, I regretably chose to cancel the days planned trip and make back to my hostel post haste to curl up and try to forget the scene of that grimey toilet.
Thankfully it seemed that it was not the start of a long series of vomitting attacks but just my bodys urgent rejection of something in my stomuch as after a sleep of a few hours I felt as right as rain, all except I was more accutely aware of noise and could not really face going out again just yet.
I planned on sleeping the day away, waiting for the night when my friend would come back and together we could go out and celebrate halloween, however hunger drove me out after a few hours and I walked until I reached what seemed to be the city centre, but unwilling to risk my body with yet more strange local food I was on the search for a simple burger, fries and a coke. Unfortunately either I was not far enough int othe city centre or Piura has no American style burger bars as I saw no McDonald, Whimpey or Burger King and dejected I returned back to my hostel.
However I could not go without food so I walked a little further and stopped at a bread store, where I grabbed a bag of rolls and some ham, enough for the most basic of sandwiches but also sure that my body would not find to much objectionable to plain bread and ham, thus it was unlikely to trigger another vomitting attack.
More bad news was in store for me today though, as my friends mother decided to not return home at the agreed time and this my friend could not leave her house and her baby unatteneded, and I didnt feel like going out and celebrating on my own, so instead I just grabbed another bottle or coke and settled in for watching a horror movie and then an early bed, hoping that tomorrow would bring better luck for me.
And back to my friends logic, I wasted a couple of days waiting for my friend to arrive at my hostel, sure that together we would have a great time, but because of bad timing and as sudden desire to chuck up, our time together has been both limited and localised to only a few places, hardly the epic exploration that I have done in most other cities, but again all my own fault.
Thus I agree that you should not put off tomorrow what you can have fun doing today, as you never know what is going to happen in the future, so enjoy it while you can.
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