Day 3: Saturday: Lima, Soccer & Oansa

Today we got up and headed downtown Lima to take a tour of the city center.  All the buildings downtown have a colonial style, beautiful architecture & bright colors.  We parked and headed in the drizzling rain to the cathedral & catacombs.  Peeked in the church while waiting for our English tour...only to find a memorial service going on.  Kids did a catacombs tour with Diego, might have gotten a bit lost, snuck some illegal pics....but all is good!  We headed around the corner toward the main square and the Presidential Palace.  The square is surrounded by this yellow/mustard colored buildings with beautiful wooden porches.  There's another cathedral there too and a fountain in the middle of the square.   Took some pics & off we went, heading north towards Ventanilla.
After a delicious lomo saltado lunch, we went to a soccer game.  V4P has a soccer team who just took 2nd place in the Ventanilla tournament, and qualified for the Copa Peru.  Copa Peru is a regional tournament of 16 teams. Our first game was at 4 today against a team from the Callao. It was tied 0-0 at half when we left...and found out later they ended in a tie 1-1.

We headed up the hill for Oansa.  It's like Sunday School for the 6-12 yr olds.  The start out by dividing up the kids into 4 teams, and heading out to the court to play games.  Most of the games involve them running around in a circle and racing toward the middle for the bottle.  My gringos were able to play and were divided up onto teams.  Fun to watch them participate with the Peruvians and negotiate the language.  After many many rounds and many may varieties of the game, we headed inside while the kids broke into groups for a bible study.  We then sang songs with them, listened to a short bible story, and found out the winning team.  We also invited them to come play games with us Mon-Thurs next week, so I guess we'd better be prepared!!

We headed back down the hill for another amazing meal:  Chaufa.  And, even Kayla joined the Clean Plate Club tonight!!!!!!

Back up the hill we went for Youth Group.  As part of their 'contract,' all the soccer boys must attend 2 Saturday Youth Groups to be eligible to play.  Many of them filtered in late as they were playing and freshening up, but was good to see them all there.  My gringos did pretty well with the songs - having the lyrics on the screen helped.  Was great to see a community come together as it wasn't just all soccer boys & the gringos.

Another spectacular, but long day.  Home to be to rest up for the sea lions tomorrow!!