Keeping it Real, or Did I Just Get Thrown Under the Bus?

After a pretty slow morning, Bruce and his boss, Maria Esther picked me up at the hostel and took me to Rustica for lunch. The buffet has a ton of delicious food, but I noticed that most food is either exceptionally sweet or exceptionally salty. We had chicha morada, Peru's equivalent to grape juice, but it's made with purple corn. It's exceptionally sweet, but Bruce and Maria Esther insist that it's not. Of course, the Minuta soup was overly salty, so everything kind of balanced out. The funniest thing happened when two men dressed in absurd drag appeared outside the terrace window (did I mention the restaurant is right on the ocean?) selling Boogie Ice Gum. Again, I was a little late on the draw and didn't get a closeup photo of them, but this is what I could get.

These guys were wearing dresses, wigs, and makeup. They had balloons for breasts and buttocks, and were hilarious. It seems a hard way to make a sale, especially since we only bought one pack of Boogie Ice for 2 soles.
This evening's plans included attending a meeting at the private school where Bruce works. Bruce is UNA's recruiting agent in Lima, and is genuinely a nice guy. Maria Esther is the director of the school, and she is also very nice. Traffic slowed us down tremendously, and we arrived at the school at 6:45 for a meeting that began at 6:00. Ooops.
Bruce explained that the plan was to have the parents' meeting, show them the UNA recruiting DVD, and then talk about it. Right. I should have seen this one coming a mile away. Nobody actually tried the DVD to make sure it worked on their system. Windows Media Player doesn't read DVDs. Twenty minutes of technical difficulties were filled by yours truly because Bruce thought it would be a good idea to invite "our good friend Scott" to stand and tell everyone all about UNA. Ummm, yeah, I didn't come prepared to talk about how much UNA costs, the ins and outs of the ESL program, and so on. I am very accustomed to speaking in front of large and small groups of people, but I don't really enjoy having to shoot straight from the hip. After it was all over, everyone looked at me and said the equivalent of, "that went well..." OK. Sure.