home again, home again, jiggety jig...

...or so that rhyme goes, the one that i think of whenever i hear the words 'home again.'

so yes, i am safely home and i realize i only posted one time during my peru trip. well, once i even typed out a HUGE post, probably like four pages double spaced with one inch margins in twelve point font, and then the demon computer i was using decided to send all the stuff i had written to shibalba, or the place of death, fear, and generally not returning. that would have made two posts, anyways.

anyways, the gist of what is now residing in a cave in guatemala is like this. we came back from huanuco on a bus (the same way we had gotten there two weeks ago), except something was wrong with this bus and it stopped working somewhere around 13,000 feet in a tiny mountain village, about a third of the way into the eight-hour journey to lima. the bus people tried to fix it by pouring dirty streamwater into it, and i don't know why that didn't help, but after three hours, they decided to call huanuco to send another bus. since we were already nearly tres horas into our journey, we waited for nearly six hours to get on another bus. there was a little cafeteria place nearby where we were able to use the bano and get things to eat, but we pretty much just waited and tried to sleep. there was some nauseatingly loud spanish music playing in the bus cabin, and we finally told her to turn it off. "no mas," said the gringos, alto y estupido. "we all just want to dormir," said andy in his spanglish dialect. thankfully she understood our attempts and the music hopefully went to shibalba forever. here are two of the things i saw from my seat on the bus:


you'd think it couldn't get worse than being six hours late to our cozy hotel in lima. but we had to get there first. not too soon after we left the village, the sun slipped behind the andes in a fiery farewell. this is pretty much my last view of the peruvian countryside:
it soon became dark, and while the new bus driver kindly wanted to get us to Lima ASAP, he did it by unkindly driving at breakneck speeds. through canyons. twisting and turning and passing on dark mountain turns. lurching forward and slamming on the brakes. we were all doped up on dramamine, and drowsily trying to sleep (we couldn't really) and most of the people upstairs (double decker bus) lost their lunches at some point on the second leg of our trip. we finally pulled into lima around 11:15 and then after our taxi driver brought us to the wrong hotel, we all were finally able to drag our woozy bodies into bed and sleep until who knows when, because no one had an alarm clock and no one was planning to get anyone else up.

so we all eventually woke up and got going out of the hotel around noon. our flight left for Houston at 11:30 that night, so our afternoon in lima consisted of seeing the ocean, shopping in an outrageously expensive mall and shopping in a market. the ocean was neat. i haven't seen it for a long time. i especially like the way it sounds. here is a picture of it:
at the mall there i ate some KFC nuggets, which were SO good! :) we walked about 30 minutes to get to the Inca Market, where they sold tons of alpaca and other really cool stuff for pretty cheap, and you are expected to bargain with them all. here is a picture of it:
i tried to bargain sometimes but my espanol wasn't too great so i paid too much for some things. oh well. i got some neat things for myself and the Fam.

our flight went pretty well, and we flew through the night and arrived in houston early saturday morning. then we flew from houston to omaha, and got back to lincoln around 1:00 p.m. i slept from 4 to 7 that evening, and then from 8 to 8 this morning. i hadn't slept at all the night before.

so. what did i learn from the trip, is the question of the hour. well, that and what did i do, how are the rosengrens, are you planning to be a missionary, did you go the jungle, did you bring me anything. the answer to the last three questions is no (if you are my family, the last one is yes). the rest i will talk about later, because i am trying to unpack now, and i have people coming over in 40 minutes. so i'll post more later. BUT...thank you all so very much for your thoughts, prayers, and financial support (if applicable). i know that God used us all in a very real way while we were there. more on that later. i look forward to giving you more insights from my trip. and hopefully i'll find time to put some cool pictures on my photoblog too. thanks so much for reading, everyone!