Last night I arrived in Lima, Peru. My fourth continent in four months! (If someone had ever told me that I would be traveling this often in 2012, I would have never believed it.)

I’m here in Peru to speak at an international PR conference putting me on the same stage as professionals in my industry who I have admired for years. I speak towards the end of the last day, so I suspect most people will be gone by then and I’ll be preaching to an empty room for 30 minutes. And that’s OK by me!

The conference is at the Swissotel in Lima which is gorgeous. At check-in they gave me a warm scented towel for my hands and fresh papaya juice. You could have a dance party in the bathroom of my hotel room, and the slippers next to the bed reminds me of the excitement the kids had when they had slippers in Parma.

On my last day here I’ll have to take some photos of the breakfast buffet. I want to try so many things but would look ridiculous if I piled my plate so high. So this morning I opted for a small selection of their cheeses (mmmm manchego) and hams. A piece of cactus fruit, papaya, a Mexican omelet (which is eggs with beans on the side), a shot glass of muesli, and three types of bite sized breads: one small round one tasted like a pretzel, the second with seeds had the taste of a dense Armenian choereg, and third glazed bread bite had a danish pastry taste. I did not go for the selection of 10+ muffins or other breads. I decided not to eat the smoked salmon, blood sausage, anything from the creole table, and the majority of hot items on the buffet. There are tons of fresh squeezed juices to choose from – melon, pineapple, papaya, pineapple. Only disappointment was the bitter double espresso. Italian espresso it was not.

Two observations about traveling here:

1) in the Miami airport there were a lot of people paying to have their luggage shrink wrapped for extra security. Don’t know what country they were traveling to, but the shrink wrap people were all over terminal J which had me nervous about my unlocked luggage that I last saw at Logan. Everything arrived safely.

2) the Lima airport is crazy busy. People everywhere. And I had been warned to take only official taxis from the airport. After getting through customs, there was a room we walked through which had signs for my hotel and a dozen of people’s names on the sign. My name wasn’t listed even though I know the conference organizers were sending a car for me.
So, I ordered a taxi from there and was quickly escorted out of the room, into the main waiting area of the terminal and out a side door. Once outside I found that I was in a gated area, guarded by security, where only pre-approved town cars could enter the waiting area. In the main waiting area of the terminal, there was probably 100 people with signs waiting to escort passengers. I did not look around for my name and instead went with my driver safely to the Swissotel. Turns out my driver was in that crazy crowd and the conference organizers were worried that something happened to me when I did not use their pre-arranged car service to reach the hotel. Oh well!

Being at this conference is surreal. My picture as a marquee speaker on the big screen, in front of 400 attendees (all in black suits; I didn’t get that memo!) They are offering headsets for translating all the Spanish content into English, and vice versa for the few English speakers on the agenda. I tried to go without the headset for the first 30 minutes but couldn’t grasp enough of the dialog.

When I approached the speaker desk, I was greeted by a half dozen people who worked on the event, all excited to see and welcome me. Me? Again, totally surreal.

I found a seat in the audience and realized right as things were kicking off that all the speakers were sitting in the first two rows. Uh oh! I prefer to blend in anyway so I can get some work done over the next several days on my phone.

This week should be interesting for both the academic content and the cultural education. Looking forward to updating all of you on this adventure!