With the holidays approaching, we made our way to southwestern Peru to the second most populated city: Arequipa. We rented an apartment for two weeks over Christmas and New Years so that we could relax and get caught up on our travel planning. The apartment was large, boasting three bedrooms, two living spaces, a small office area, two bathrooms, a kitchen, and a laundry room. As a bonus, the roof of our building gave us a view over the city from which we could see the three volcanoes that surround the area.

The main plaza in Arequipa had a huge Christmas tree in front of the church.

Our first full day in the city was spent downtown, attending a Peruvian cooking class and shopping at the store for groceries. For our next day, two days before Christmas, we visited the market stalls to look around and purchase some gifts for each other. The market was huge, taking up an entire city block and filled with stalls from chocolate and cheese to chickens and eels. We split up to take care of holiday shopping and then reunited to enjoy a freshly made juice of lucuma and oranges.

The market carried everything you can imagine, including these chickens and turkeys for Christmas dinner!

We stocked up on groceries, including a last minute trip to the store on Christmas Eve to get some fresh bread and a few additional items we had forgotten. From then on, we primarily stayed at our apartment, only venturing out every couple of days for more water or groceries.

Christmas Eve and Day were hard for me; it was the first time I had spent the holiday away from my parents and on my own. In addition, we were in an apartment rental without any decorations to make it feel Christmas-y. I had purchased one decoration – a small cardboard tree with glitter that I hung on the wall between the kitchen and dining area, where we could see it each day as we passed by. It was small, but I loved my little Peruvian Christmas tree.

A view into the kitchen of our apartment rental, along with my little Peruvian Christmas tree!

In the morning on Christmas Day, Jon made me an omelette for breakfast and then we had a small treasure hunt for our gifts. Since we were not purchasing anything large or expensive, due to the nature of our trip and our small backpacks, we had decided to make it fun and have a scavenger hunt with some small, inexpensive items. For Jon, I hid a handful of different types of chocolate, a set of 3 small candles, a card with a couple of scratch-off lottery tickets, and sent him a text with an iTunes season of a tv show he likes. For me, he hid a bag of popped corn, a bag of gooseberries, a wedge of local cheese, and a pair of earrings with pink alpacas on them.

The Christmas gifts that we bought and hid for each other for our treasure hunt! There were a lot of edibles in the mix!

During the afternoon, we watched Harry Potter, a Clark family tradition, and snacked on cheese, bread, and wine. We Skyped with Jon’s mother, grandparents, and aunt and also with my family, getting to spend a little bit of virtual time with those who we love. Since we had snacked throughout the day, we weren’t hungry for a full dinner so ended up eating some leftovers for our Christmas dinner. It was a low-key holiday, and it didn’t feel quite like a normal Christmas to me, but I was happy to be spending it with Jon on this trip.

While this was not our Christmas dinner, this was a typical scene during our time in Arequipa. A homemade meal, glass of wine, and Harry Potter marathon on the iPad.

For the next week and a half after Christmas, we spent a lot of time at the apartment. We would watch some tv (all in Spanish, but at least we could follow movies and programs that were familiar to us), work on blogs and videos, purchase tickets and make reservations for the next leg of our trip, read, and relax. We went out to dinner once, to a sushi restaurant in the same complex as the grocery store we had frequented. Otherwise, the two weeks we spent in Arequipa were quiet and relaxing.

We climbed up 7 stories to the roof of our apartment building a few times during our stay to watch the sunset – it was beautiful every time!

While the holidays this year were not exactly the same as what we have had back in Michigan, they were unique in the fact that they were spent together in a foreign country. We both commented that it did not really feel very festive for us, but we were happy to trade one holiday season at home with the opportunity to be on this trip we are taking. While this blog post is coming out about a month later, I want everyone to know that we were thinking of all our families and friends, both in the USA and around the world.

The cactus outside of our apartment building was decorated with Christmas lights, which helped us feel a bit festive whenever we would return home after an outing!