Arrival in Peru: beads, beads and more beads!

Ella writes: It's taken a little longer to write my first blog post about our travels than I intended, because not surprisingly everything has been so busy over the last few days. We flew through Amsterdam and Paris and finally arrived in Lima yesterday, excited, but also very tired and slightly disorientated. We stayed over night in Paris with an amazing view of the sacre-coeur, so it felt very surreal to find ourselves in Lima later the same day!

Our first day in Lima has been really exciting: all the new sights, sounds and smells of the city! The architecture is very beautiful and the bead shops here are incredible! So so so many different colours and types of bead, elastic, thread etc. We spent the day visiting some of the many bead shops in the centre of Lima and buying a huge amount of very good value beads, so that Ellie, our new designer can work on some new jewellery prototypes for the project, as well as continuing some of our popular items. Ellie also made her first attempt at haggling. It was so successful that the shopkeeper congratulated her!

I also found myself asking the question: "have we found any llamas yet?" I think that is only a question you would ever ask in Peru. We were in fact looking for llama charms to put on bracelets, rather than the real thing, just in case you were wondering if craft aid was planning on changing its stock to something a little more agricultural.

It has been a tiring, but very satisfying first day in Lima. We have another day of bead shopping ahead before we fly off to Arequipa.

One more thing before I sign off: In Peru, I have noticed that the practical and the spiritual are not always separated in the way they might be in the UK. In the shower this morning I noticed a label, which had the slogan of the shower company in Spanish, something like "quality that endures" and underneath the phrase "Dios es amor", which means God is love. That made me smile. 😊