Reflections on the city of The Peace, La Paz

So definitely the best street vendor in La Paz is the Orange Juice Seller (there are many), because fresh-squeezed OJ for a quarter is awesome, and they peel the oranges in a way that results in these piles of long, ropey orange rind. It looks really cool.

Today is Sunday, which means that most people who can afford not to don't work. But apparently it's also the day when crazy old men come out, because I've seen four so far. One I saw a few times; he was well dressed and walking the streets, stopping occasionally to talk very loudly and gesture to himself about something he saw: roofs, walls, the sky. Another I saw walking down the street, stopping to point with his cane for several seconds at anything of import: a door with no lock, piles of rubble, etc. Later I saw a guy in a rumpled grey suit walking down the street, and all of a sudden he turned to look across at these two women sitting next to their stalls and, with palm up, finger pointed and arm flexed as if executing a curl, he started SHOUTING at these two women, for only 10 seconds or so, and all I understood was Estados Unidos (United States). And then on the way into the internet place I saw a guy walking down the street with wide eyes, talking very loudly to himself. I thought this was the day of rest...

I bought some dry goods today (vittles, I like to call them), and my total was B/17, and I paid with a B/50 note. I received 27 Bolivianos back, and it took myself, the vendor, and a random woman who was walking by to figure out the right change. It was almost as if she just randomly pulled some change from her pocket, but at any rate it underscored the fact that I'm in a country where they can't afford much education. Either that or she was hoping I wouldn't notice - wouldn't someone selling stuff by weight conduct a lot of transactions involving change?

I went to a Chinese place for lunch today that is very popular locally, despite it being the same gloopy crap they serve everyplace in the Americas. I don't know why I expected Bolivians to put on better Chinese than actual Chinese people in the States, but I naively did. On the plus side, they had very good paper napkins at this place, and like most Chinese dining experiences, there were leftovers, although you have to pay for the box to take them away in.

Walking the streets here is dangerous, because drivers turn their engines off going downhill (and most driving is either up or down a hill here), and they can really sidle up on you. Combine this with the fact that drivers don't like to use their lights at night ("it saves gas" I imagine they'd claim) and you have some pretty dangerous streets. And watch out for taxis, 'cause they sure aren't watching out for you.



Man, I went out last night and had a fantastic time. It took a while to get rolling, first because I don't like going out super late, and when I first went out around 10pm nothing was even OPEN, let alone populated. And then once I found an open bar it took a while for my self-amusing personality to kick in - I was by myself at the first bar and drinking alone is not always the bang-up time one would imagine. But the bar I was in I really liked - I think it's the first non-gringo place I've been in that the owners actually put some thought into the decor, and it didn't have a cheesy theme or anything, and unlike most places in Bolivia it wasn't just lit by large banks of fluorescent tubes. No, it had delicate, subdued little orange lights; stippled, deep-red walls on the top half with dark stained wood below, and a sort of subtle, neo-classical wooden runner around the ceiling corner. The menus were on paper shaped like spigots. It was near a university, and was a nice combination of well-planned atmosphere and unpretentious place to hang with friends. Which is mostly what was going on - I watched people play cards and throw dice, and almost every table was drinking something out of shot glasses which were ladled into from a huge plastic punch bowl. I think it might have been chicha, a cheap, fermented corn drink, but I wasn't sure. All I know is that people were drinking a lot of it (punch bowls of it, in fact).

Later a kid came in trying to sell gum to people, and he was really convinced I wanted to buy some. I told him no, gracias, and no me gusta chiclet, but he was persistent. After he left I though about how degrading it must be to do something like that for money, and also how it was strange that a 14 year old could come into a bar and harass customers into buying gum. Another thing I can't believe I haven't mentioned is that yes, the Spanish word for gum is chiclet (at least in Peru and Bolivia), leading me to believe there was some sort of brilliant marketing scheme on the part of the Chiclet gum company sometime earlier this century.

Of course, I saw a group come in and one of the people was a boy that couldn't have been older than 16, and I don't know what the drinking age is here, but I saw the bartender smile to himself and then ask for his ID. It was so classic, he had the hat on, the collar up, he was hunched into his coat, glancing about nervously. But after some discussion between the bartender and his older friends he got served, so I guess another kid trying to sell gum in a bar isn't such a big deal.

The service here in some ways is of a much higher standard than in the States. For example, at the bars they will insist on bringing your drink to your table, even if you order at the bar and try and wait for it, and they don't even stay long enough to get a tip - can you imagine that happening on State street? Also, in case you're wondering, there is a local beer called Pacena, and according to a poster in the bar, "Pacena is beer." That made me laugh. Pacena also makes a pretty decent porter, which is great because I like dark beers and usually they're non-existent outside serious beer cultures like the Pacific Northwest and Germany. They make a stout in Cambodia, but it comes in a can and tastes like turpentine. I had a "craft" beer from La Paz at the second place I went to (a gringo bar back in the gringo area near my hotel) that was supposed to be a pale ale but couldn't hold a candle to anything we have back home, not even the stuff you get at Grocery Outlet. Plus it cost more and was a third the size of the porter I'd had at the first bar. Not that I'll ever go back to that gringo bar anyways: I got moved twice by the drink server to make way for bigger groups, getting pushed farther and farther into the corner; then when I went to leave this couple asked "oh, are you leaving?" and I thought maybe they wanted to talk, but they said "great, we want your seat!"

The next place I went was great: I was going to walk way back to the other side of town, where I was before, and try and go to a kareoke place I had seen (empty at the time), because I was determined to not let the night end on the sour note of La Luna y Sol (The Moon and Sun - that's right, don't go to a shitty, overpriced bar called La Luna y Sol in La Paz). But one block away I heard a band playing Metallica and saw a couple groups of Bolivians hanging around. So I walked around the building but couldn't find an entrance. I walked back around and realized the person I had mistaken for an old woman (wearing a hood and kind of hunched over with really long hair) was actually a doorman for an unmarked metal bar. I paid my cover (3 Bolivianos, or about 30 cents), went upstairs, and foundraucousous place with a pseudo-Incan decor, and a band thrashing out Metallica on an unlit, cave-like stage. I was the only one not dressed all in black, there were Slayer and Kiss shirts aplenty, and really, really cheap drinks. I bought something called rones, which came in lemon, peach or negra, and what I got was some schwiladledled out of a bucket that I think was some sort of cheap, generic lemon-lime soda and light rum, served in a plastic, liter-sized pitcher with yellow daisies on it. It was $1.50. I ended up staying until 4am, talking about Bolivia and Alaska and arguing over who had better pot and who rocked more, AC/DC or Metallica (I'm a die-hard Angus fan). Also, everyone kept wanting to know if I was married. I don't know if that's because they were suprised I wasn't, or if they had a potential spouse in mind. No one spoke any English, sodefinitelyely call this cultural exchange and language practice. For example, I learned from a girl tending bar that the women in Santa Cruz are beautiful, but not very smart.

p.s. I just noticed that I'm typing on a Turbo-Xwing keyboard, enough to excite any Star Wars fan.

My Wife is Crazy!!!

Not much happened today, partly because it took way longer to wander around the city than I thought it would. I was going to go to some museums the first half of the day, and then to the Cultural Center in the afternoon, but by the time I actually found the museums they had closed for lunch (they close for two and a half hours), so I went and had lunch and decided to head for the cultural center, since it isn't open on the weekends (the museums are, but only for 2 and a half hours. I guess they're making up for their lunch breaks). But let me explain something: maps are drawn on paper. Paper is flat. The maps are flat. It makes the ground look flat. The ground in La Paz is not flat. On my map, I could take a left, the first right, then go straight, and I should be there. After I took the right I was facing a huge ridge where I could see some interesting-looking buildings up on the top. "Man, it would suck if that was where I was going," I thought. Of course I double-check my map and can't escape the fact that that is indeed where I'm trying to go. So I haul my way through what is either an under-construction or never-finished fitness park (It's so hard to tell here), where there was always a six foot wall I had to scale before the next set of stairs. At one point I saw some people playing music on a landing, so I went over to check it out, but what I found was five people with instruments pretending to play while a boombox played a CD and a guy videotaped. I came up from behind and inadvertently got in the video, and got some dirty looks. It was kind of strange. So I finally got to the top to find a closed cultural center and an open kids playground area. I might have gone to play but I had to pay to get so I decided to try and call home instead.

This proved more difficult than I imagined, though, because I couldn't find an internet cafe with Skype. An hour and 45 minutes and 19 internet cafes later, I finally found a place that had both a microphone and would let me use Skype - many of the places that have microphones are also call centers, and they won't let you put Skype on the computer because they want you to pay them ten times as much to use their phones; most places didn't have microphones at all. One place would let me download Skype and had a microphone, but the download speed was so slow I would have had to sit for an hour just to install it; another place would let me download Skype, but when I asked where the microphone was after sitting down they said "What microphone?" (the first thing I did was ask if they had a microphone, to which they said "yes, sit down please") So that was a frustrating experience. I mean it's not like I'm someplace without electricity or computers and I can just accept that I can't call home. In this case I can see the computer and the microphone, but they won't let me use Skype. I kept figuring the next place would be the one, just from a matter of odds, so I kept going.

Today on the street I saw a man with leprosy and one hand playing the trumpet. It was really cool - and he was quite good. He seemed to be getting a lot of money, which is nice to see. There aren't that many street performers in this part of SA it seems, and a lot of them are lame. Like one guy was just beating a big plastic drum and had some sign around his neck that amounted to "give me money." He could keep a beat though, I'll give him that.

The only other thing I have to say about today is that the Borat movie will be "here soon" at the theater, and it would be funny to see how Bolivians react to that. Would that movie translate at all? I saw a movie tonight which had a scene where a woman showed her ultrasound to her boyfriend (this was the first time the audience finds out she's pregnant). The whole audience gasped at once.

Also, Bolivian men have no qualms about peeing off the curb into the street. And check the previous two posts; one I updated and another was post-posted. And I don't know why Blogger is doing this weird formatting thing with all the space at the top. Sorry.

Hi Mom, I'm Alive

Hi everyone. I'm safe and sound in La Paz. By now I'm feeling just paranoid about the dangers of travel in SA, but I can't help it since my book and my traveling companions are regularly frightening me with scary stories of strangle-muggings and taxi hold-ups.

So after a frigid bus ride complete with crappy Peruvian music videos playing on a bus that was NOT like the one in the picture they showed me (actually, I'm convinced I saw the same picture of plush reclining leather seats at several bus companies), I arrived in Puno, Peru, where I knew I had to change buses but did not know I had to change bus companies and get a whole new ticket. Anyways, after paying many different station taxes I had no soles for (I had changed them all out and had to borrow from others), I eventually made it to Copacabana, a pleasant little town on the lake of Titicaca, the highest navigable lake in the world. My room was spacious, with hard-wood floors and a view of said lake, and had the greatest shower I have experienced on this continent - very hot and very strong. At first I thought I could have stayed forever, but things soured somewhat once I started wandering about town. Almost all of the stores were closed with their metal shutters pulled down, even though it was the middle of a Wednesday afternoon. It gave the town this strange, Trouble a Brewin' vibe. I think that perhaps this is because there is no electricity during the day, and it goes out a lot at night - the night I was there we had electricity for about 20 minutes before the rain knocked it out (this is also why I didn't post in Copa). So I went to bed at 8pm. But this leaves me wondering when the citizens of Copa do business.

The Copacabanans displayed a range of attitudes from indifference to hostility towards me, which was interesting seeing as how it's low season and I would have thought hotel owners would WANT me to see their rooms and possibly stay in them, but I guess I was wrong. After getting the "*sigh*... whaddya want?" attitude in the market (where I did buy some good figs at least), I was beginning to wonder if the people who say Bolivians aren't friendly were right. At any rate, I had to cut my visit to one day because I had a $20 and a $50, and the $50 had a rip about half a centimeter on it - which apparently makes it toilet paper in Bolivia, because no one would change it, not even the one bank in town. And when I tried to go into that bank, I got detained by the police officer outside. "What's your business here?" he asked in Spanish. "I want to change money?" "Well, it's a $50 minimum. How much money do you have?" "$50? Is that OK?" Man, I didn't realize I would backpacker the place up so much if I went inside. I can't imagine the people in Copa have $50 to change very often. I wonder what they do? Anyways, I was going to take a trip to Isla del Sol, the site of the main Incan creation myth (there are others), but that would require two more nights in a place with no ATM and finicky money changers, and I couldn't afford it.

Another thing that made Copa not-so-great was the fact that there was no electricity during the day, so most of the stores had

So instead I took a beautiful bus ride to La Paz, Bolivia. The ride was so nice, it reminded me a lot of a more rugged version of the Sierras in Central California, only with views of the lake on both sides. At one point we all had to get off the bus so they could load it onto a rickety wooden platform which acted as a ferry across Titicaca (hoping our stuff didn't go in the drink). The passengers purchased tickets for the crossing at the aptly named boleteria (ticket shop; boleta is Spanish for "ticket") and boarded small motorboats powered by angry, two-stroke engines. The swells were small, but the boats were smaller, and we heaved along as the engine spat exhaust and I thought how lucky I was to be sitting towards the fore of the boat. Special features of our boat: a rock that I thought was ballast but realized was an anchor, and a lack of life jackets.
After the crossing we made our way through the flat expanse of Altiplano and various villages, which were much like Peruvian villages: construction was either of brick or mud/straw brick, buildings were mostly uncompleted and unfinished, political slogans (although much more basic in Bolivia) adorned many walls.

La Paz is amazing on first sight - high above in the city of El Alto (fringe slums perched on the rim above the city proper, reputed to be the fastest growing "city" in South America) you look down on the red-slate roofs and occasional skyscraper of La Paz. The city is like a living, evaporated fishbowl: if you want to find the center, just walk downhill. After hauling my stuff to four different hotels, I finally found one that both had rooms and was reasonably priced (although I realized today that I always start by looking for rooms in my travel book, but always end up in other places; I think once you're in Footprint or Lonely Planet you raise your prices and fill up faster). But before I did that, I spent probably half an hour looking for a place a guy I met in Arequipa recommended to me that was also in my book. It was number 12, and I kept walking back and forth by where the number 12 was in the book, not seeing the hostal. I asked four different people for help before I realized I was looking at the black number 12 - black is for restaurants - when what I wanted was the red number 12. And then I got there and the place was full anyways.

So here I am, in La Paz, where I will probably spend a few days seeing sights, and then I'm not sure. I know that tonight I'm going to a Lebanese restaurant for dinner. So that's a plan.

Fast cars, loose women

So the chicken made me sick (told you you'd hear about it). Fortunately it was only 12 hours of sickness (albeit a long 12 hours), followed by a day of... we'll call it fasting, since it makes me sound devout. Anyways, I had a solid meal today, which was nice.

But that's not the point. The point is that since I got so sick, I couldn't go anywhere, so I didn't get to take a tour of the Sacred Valley like I wanted, which is a shame since I was looking forward to it and had already spent the money on the multi-entry boleta turistica. And since I already have a ticket to Bolivia tonight, I'm forgoing the ruins. Instead I spend my day in poorly-lit museums (also on the tourist ticket), most of which featured 15th and 16th century Christian Baroque art. And I left with this question: was anyone happy in the 15th and 16th century? I mean I think we practice enough self-repression in the 21st century, but back then anything that felt good was evil, time was spent 'repressing the flesh,' and on top of that you had to deal with stuff like plague, famine, war, lack of hygiene, barely any medicine (leaches anyone?), and if you were a woman or non-white (God forbid BOTH), neither God, Jesus, nor any of the saints look like you (I thought the Catholic church had matron saints, but I guess they don't get painted. Just hall after hall of dudes). In the paintings I saw today, God really is the Old Bearded White Guy in the Clouds, and Jesus wears a posh sweater and is from Oxford. All I could really think of today in the Christian museums was David Cross and George Carlin skewering Christianity (which must have looked funny, some guy laughing at paintings of crucifixions and demons eating people alive): there's a list of 7 things you can't do, and if you do any one of those things, God will send you to a place of terrible, horrible, unimaginable agony - but he loves you. And that place is a billion miles below the earth, it's way below us, somewhere; I think it takes like a million years to get to either Heaven or Hell from earth, but they didn't have science when they wrote the Bible so they're morons anyways.

I mean I think the stupidity is obvious when you look at the painting of Jesus: a guy from Judea who's white as a fish-belly? I mean, if you can't trust the Church to understand basic human... well I don't want to say 'genetics,' because that'd a big word... let's say characteristics. If they can't understand that people from Mesopotamia aren't blond and blue eyed, can you really trust them to understand morality and talk to God for you (don't forget, that's what the Catholic Church does and why there was a Reformation)? I'm not just trying to say the 16th century church was ignorant. The feeling I got today looking at Baroque art was that their whole morality, philosophy and religion was wrong. And has much changed today? See many depictions of a non-white Jesus? Ever hear the term 'sins of the flesh'? I mean this is pretty much the same group of men who sat around and decided what would be in the bible at the Council of Rome and all the various other councils where it was decided what was the word of God and what was not. And people trust this? To me it's unbelievable.

I did see one painting of a non-white guy, a Quechuan guy by the name of Thupa Amaro, the 'precursor, producer, and martyr of the emancipation of the Americas.' He worked for autonomy from the the Spanish and was martyred when he was drawn and quartered in the central square of Cusco. That was in an Incan museum, which also included examples of Incan metalwork, pottery, medicine and burial methods. But what I thought was interesting was what was absent, namely the wheel and writing. The Incans had neither. Or more accurately, they used circular shapes for their calendars, and they had tops as toys, but they never used the wheel as a tool. I find it funny actually, because the Incans were expert masons who built an intricate series of paved roads throughout their empire in order to hasten communication, but then I picture a guy just running down them, as fast as he can, and it seems like an oxymoron. I mean humans aren't exactly the swiftest of animals. And the fact that their terraced irrigation systems are still in use today all over South America, but they never developed writing, well it's kind of mind-boggling.

There was another really great museum I went to, the Museum of Regional History. It's in the middle of being remodeled in a very modern feel, with good lighting and bi-lingual signs (which was nice because I could actually figure out what they were talking about, whereas in the Incan museum all I had to go on was my own intuition). Anyways, this museum was highlighting the ancient civilization of Caral-Supe (the two main cities of the civilization), something I had never heard of but found fascinating. How ancient were they? Caral-Supe developed almost in tandem with the civilization of the ancient Egyptians, circa 3000 b.c. And they were only discovered in 1994! So now, along with Mesoamerica, Egypt, Mesopotamia, India and China, Caral-Supe is considered one of the six cradles of civilization by anthropologists.

The cities of Caral-Supe built enormous, stepped pyramids, rivaling those in Egypt, in order to perform complex religious rites, most of which involved the burning of offerings. The pyramids had intricate, underground ventilation systems to facilitate massive, indoor fires. The people of Caral-Supe had a dualistic worldview, which was evidenced throughout their religion, politics, and civil society. For example, the civilization was built around a river in what is now northern Peru, and each side of the river had 9 cities on it; each city was divided in half, resulting in a political half and a religious half (in terms of which buildings occupied which part). There was a central government based in Caral, and there existed what we might call an independent Feudal system in the other cities. Citizens were organized into Ayllu, groups of family relations of about 100 people each; these were grouped into Pachacas, or settlements. Each Pachaca was governed by Curaca (civil servants), which were divided into various specialties, such as astronomy, agriculture, medicine, music, public works, or trading (other specialists in the society included artisans and hairdressers). The Pachaca was ruled by the Icho Huari and Allauca Huari, or First and Second Man. These rulers were the feudal lords who directed development of the settlement, collected taxes, and paid tribute to the Huno, or Lord in Caral who had his own set of experts, artisans, and workers.

The economy was based on trade, and there is evidence of extensive trade within all of the cities, as well as with minor groups of people outside Caral-Supe. Some of the trade goods found within Caral (approximately in the middle of the river valley surrounded by harsh desert) include fish and whales from the ocean, plants that grow only high in the Andes, and plant and animal products from deep within the Amazon. There is no evidence of weapons, or that the people of Caral-Supe made war with their neighbors. Caral itself specialized in cotton and textile products, which it traded for the various goods I mentioned.

Included among artifacts found in Caral are huge sundials - the city of Caral itself is suspected to be based on an astronomical calendar, with each building representing a deity. Each building appears to have a specific yearly ceremony associated with it. Other tools which were found include bolos, axes, slings, digging sticks, baskets and bags made from plant fiber, plus whole orchestras of wind instruments - flutes, horns, and antares (this word translated into antares in English, and I have no idea what they are aside from that only four were found and that they are wind instruments of some sort).

The people of Caral built petroglyphs like the ones from a later date in Nasca, had a sophisticated knowledge of natural medicine (including using willow extract for pain relief - the willow tree is where we today get aspirin). They made gods-eyes for offerings and employed mescaline and jirca coca (a type which grows above 3500 meters, high in the Andes) in their rituals inside large, sunken, circular plazas - these plazas are found in every city in fact. They also had a dedicated social hierarchy, with high priests at the top, followed by the civil servants, below which were the artisans, laborers and farmers. Each of these three groups occupied a strata of housing within each city, grouped into islands. The more important the person, the closer they were to the central religious chambers of the pyramids. Housing for the elite priests was palatial, measuring nearly 24,000 square feet, and including living areas, altars, servant areas, etc. Civil servants resided in slightly more modest abodes at about 6,500 square feet; the houses of commoners measured between 500 and 850 square feet, while the poorest people on the edge of the city made do with only about 200 square feet.

Anyways, I just thought the whole thing was pretty amazing - pretty much a whole new civilization, with advanced concepts of trade, agriculture, civil society, music, and religion. So if you're ever in Peru, make the journey North of Lima to Caral-Supe. Maybe someone from the Peruvian tourism ministry will read this and I'll get some free stuff.

The City has shut down...

It's election day in Peru, and everything is shut. Everything was shut yesterday too; particularly important is that the sale of alcohol is illegal the day of and two days prior to election day, because otherwise Election Day turns into Drunken Brawl Day according to my Spanish teacher. Also, while Peru stops short of declaring election day a holiday, it is on a day when most people don't work anyways, Sunday. Plus, since voting is compulsory in Peru, most stuff ends up shutting in a de facto holiday, and you see people roaming about eating street food with purple fingers (indicating that they have voted already). If you don't vote, you are fined, and you can't get official documents like car titles or passports, and you can't conduct legal business like getting a loan from a bank. From what I've been told, the fine for not voting ranges from $3 to $22, depending on where you live - since polling is done in the cities, if you live there you have little excuse, so the fine is bigger. But for people that live in remote rural areas, it's cheaper to not vote than it is to make your way to the city to do so, so many rural people don't vote. What kind of democray this makes is up to debate I suppose, but the turn-out here is in the 90th percentile.

I'm heading to Copacabana, Bolivia on Tuesday. Before I went to the terminal to buy my ticket, I read in my book that they had 'received numerous reports of robbery on night trains on the Cusco-Puno-La Paz route, take a day bus if possible,' which of course implies that there are day buses to take, but I asked at 6 different companies (there are probably 50 companies, although most of them ply the main routes of Lima-Arequipa-Cusco) and none of them had daytime service. So maybe say a little prayer to the diety or higher power of your choice for me!

Especially after my close call the other night, I fear my luck might be running out: I awoke the other morning to find a young man creeping across my floor. I sat up and gave an extremely groggy 'hola?' I was sleeping pretty hard, and it was light out so I didn't know what time it was, and I knew that a girl in my house was leaving for the Inca Trail that morning, and that the sons of my host mom were about this guys age, and they and their friends were always coming over... in other words, I was still half asleep and thought that there had been some mistake. But in hindsight, this guy acted totally caught, and started explaining that he lived in the other square (there is a square of apartments coming into my house, and then an internal square to my house itself with rooms off of it), and that this square was unfamiliar to him, and I wasn't catching everything he was saying but he seemed really concerned that I was convinced, and I just told him to get out. Then when he left I noticed the lock pop on the door - he had come in and locked the door behind him. And after that I noticed my videocamera sitting on the nightstand next to me. I got out of bed and followed him out of the house and saw him prattling around in the kitchen of the outer square; upon later inquisitions I found out that he was dating one of the gringo girls in the outer apartments. I have no idea how he got in my house, or why he came into my room, but the thought occured to me that he didn't know there were any men in my house (I being the first and only recently), so I figure he was definately after me (until he saw my beard) or after my camera. So I learned, very painlessly, another lesson I knew but didn't follow: always, always lock your door.

If you ever come to Peru and wonder why there's electrical tape on the shower handle, it's because without it you would receive an electrical current of unspecified strength through your body without it. Most places in Peru have hot showers, but the electricity to heat the water is feed in just before the point of use (which is useful for determening the functionability of the system, since the lights dim if the juice is there). Usually this means you face a relationship of inverse proportions between water pressure and temperature - you can rinse your shampoo in frigid water, or you can stay warm under a slight trickle, but you can't do both. And try not to touch the handle in the meantime. Fortunately the currents I have experienced have been pretty mild.

I've been trying to find 3X5 cards to make myself flashcards of Spanish words, a task that has once again highlighted how easily things function back home, at least for me (maybe Peruvians don't have the problems I do, but based on my experience with the buses I have my doubts). If you want to buy paper, you can't just go to the store, because they don't have just generic stores here. If you want paper, you have to go to the paper store, or escritoria (escribir is Spanish for 'to write'), which sells pens, pencils, paper, notebooks, and other various tools of recording your thoughts. But the only escritoria I could find didn't seem to have what I wanted (although I admit I am lacking the proper Spanish words to describe 3X5 cards. What's 3 inches in millimeters?). When I asked where I should go to find what I want, the clerk said out on the street to the right. When I asked 'out to the street, to the right, and...?' she replied 'si, en la calle y derecha' which translates to 'get out of my store and quit bothering me.' In short, I am still without flashcards, which means I am still confusing pensar (to think) and poder (to be able to).

Since meals here don't really include much in the way of fresh anything, I've been walking up to a juice stand on the edge of town, way up on a hill, each day to have fresh orange juice and watch the sun set. It's a beautiful walk, and fresh orange juice is nice too. I realized on the way back from that walk today that I enjoy settling into little routines in new places a lot more than I enjoy rushing around to tourist sites; I enjoy sitting in the plaza all day to see when the light is best on the cathedral more than I enjoy being in the cathedral itself. If you doubt the importance of routine, read the essay "On Habit" by either William James or Leon Dumont. Both are good, although of course I prefer James as an American philosopher and the father of the philosophy we today call pragmatism.

Three weeks later and I'm finally beginning to enjoy Cusco. I guess I'm starting to get used to the touts and be able to appreciate the city some; the perfect Incan stonework that meets colonial architecture meets modern day Peru, starting to have favorite restaurants, etc. For dinner tonight I went to a thouroughly family place: bland, non-offensive pop music playing, checkered tablecloths, and, yes, families. It was a pollo a la brasa place (basically bar-b-q chicken), a Peruvian favorite although this was the first time I've been to one. I ordered the 1/4 chicken (1/2 chickens are also available), which includes super-size papas fritas (french fries, although not finger food here) and unlimited access to the salad bar (I did say 'family restaurant,' didn't I?). This place also had normal tasting ketchup and garlic mayo, which was nice.

There's a documentary playing in the internet cafe of Peter Hyams, a name I'm sure you recognize as director of such film milestones as Timecop (starring my hero, Jean-Claude Van Damme) and End of Days (Arnold Schwarzenegger). They've used the phrase 'tender age' three times in the past 10 minutes; if there's any question, this is a red flag for poor writing. Maybe it was produced by Hyams himself.

The air in Cusco the past few nights has had a warmth and stillness to it that, when combined with the close quarters of the narrow streets, gives the impression that you're in a large, outdoor room, especially when you're in one of the pedestrian-only streets of the center. It's nice.

p.s. I just lost a bunch of writing due to the stupid pop-up blocker, so this entry isn't spell checked.

Just Pictures... Hopefully

Holy crap, it worked. I don't want to mess with it too much in case something happens. These are pictures of the Tipon ruins.

So I was looking more closely at my sitemeter stats and I guess the service tracks visitors, not unique visitors. On average, five people read my blog each day, which I guess puts me back in heated competition with XM Radio. Damn. Well, hats off to the five of you who are reading this I guess.

If you still weren't convinced that the War on Terror has gone too far...

I don't mean for this to become a political blog, but this is something that really outraged me and I don't think it got much media attention: the Animal Enterprise Terrorism Act. This bill cleared the House on November 14, and basically says that if you or any other citizen engages in a non-violent protest, boycott, media campaign or leafletting against an "animal enterprise" and cause that enterprise to be deprived of potential profit, you are a terrorist and can be charged as one. The bill defines "animal enterprise" as: "a commercial or academic enterprise that uses or sells animals or animal products for profit, food or fiber production, agriculture, education, research, or testing."

I mean, are you hearing this? That the justice department now considers you a terrorist if you cause a corporation to forgo profits due to your non-violent protest? Granted, I'm no fan of ALF, but I don't care if the business makes AIDS vaccine - citizens should be able to engage in ANY of the above activities against a corporation if they choose to exercise their constitutional right to do so! I just wish I had heard about this sooner so I could have told my reps. not to vote for it.

Also on November 14 we have this piece of news on American jurisprudence run amok from Democracy Now:

Supreme Court Refuses to Hear Muhammad Munaf Case
In other news on Iraq, the U.S. Supreme Court has refused to intervene in the case of Muhammad Munaf – the U.S. citizen who is facing a death sentence in Iraq. He was sentenced on charges of kidnapping three Romanian journalists. Munaf was unable to hear or challenge the evidence against him. His lawyers say the judge had been prepared to dismiss the case until two US military officials intervened and told the judge to hand him the death penalty. The Supreme Court gave no explanation for its order Monday denying Munaf's request.

Way to make me feel like I'm living pre-Magna Carta, Supreme Court. I'd like to emphasize that Munaf is a CITIZEN of the US, which to me says it's only because they think they can't that the GOP hasn't suspended Habeas Corpus for us all.

Sometimes I go to ruins

Lenke and I had been planning this visit to the Tipon ruins for a couple of days, and we started our afternoon right with some ice cream and a walk under what was an uncommonly-clear sky for the rainy season of Cusco, Peru. After asking three different people, we stood at what we felt certain was the correct bus stop. A half-hour and several buses later, we weren't so sure. Our doubts were confirmed when we saw the bus labeled 'Tipon' blow by the cross-street near where we were standing. Not only did we have the wrong stop, but we had done the exact same thing our friend Amy had done only the day before after asking some locals where to wait. Apparently even the Peruvians have a hard time figuring out the unlabeled bus system.

Not long after we found the right (unmarked) stop, another bus for Tipon came by, belching diesel while the driver hung precariously out the door as he shouted out the stops. The bus was already at capacity as we got on, and only got more crowded as we made our way through the city: business men in pinstripe suits, old women with rainbow-canvas bags of fruit, schoolchildren in uniforms of grey sweaters and navy pants or skirt, campesino women from the valley in their bright, knitted clothes and broad, felt hats that always look too small. I didn't have a seat, but I did have a coveted spot with my head right next to the speaker, which was playing the 'demo' function from a Casio keyboard with Peruvian singers overlaid; in traditional Peruvian style it was much too loud, regardless of where you were in the bus.

We careened through the city for perhaps 20 minutes, while I winced as the fare-taker hopped out of the bus as it was moving around corners with paperwork to drop who-knows-where. Eventually we made it out into the valley, where we were greeted by a backdrop of sage-green mountains that in places resembled overstuffed furniture or rumpled crushed velvet; above were motionless fluffy white clouds that looked as if they had been painted onto canvas. We passed fields of crops I couldn't identify - you forget how little you know about your food when you live in the city - and half-finished houses, hotels, and mud-brick walls. I don't imagine that the walls knew they were destined to be billboards when they were built, but now every square inch was covered with logos: Inca Cola, Pepsi Cola, Firestone, but mostly a multitude of political banners. The banners are most easily remembered not by the name on them, but by the logo the voter is to X out to indicate their choice: will you vote for the Broom or the Clay Jar?

The bus slows down just enough for use to safely disembark in a small pueblo. We negotiate a taxi fare and head towards the ruins, which are tucked into a valley between two pillowy mountain folds 15 minutes from town. When we arrive, all we can really see is a stone wall of perhaps 10 feet in front of us, with a small cut to one side producing a steady stream of water that disappears into a subterranean drainage. As we climb the adjoining steps, however, we see that there is a series of such walls, with long, flat expanses of terraced earth inbetween. Looking down on the entrance to the ruins, they look like a wide, ceremonial staircase for giants. The canal system provides water from an unseen source to the terraces, some of which are still cultivated. As we continue to ascend, we see a series of building remains. Unfortunately, without a guide or any signs posted, there was little context to place the functions of the buildings. All I knew about the site was that it was built for the father of one of the Incas, so what we were seeing must have been the remnants of royal residences.

But we had a grand time regardless, as Lenke and I enjoyed the perfect day high in the mountains. The sun gave the perfectly carved rocks the look of mottled bronze, and the sound of running water provided an ideal soundtrack. We had the ruins almost to ourselves as we climbed steep steps and admired the Inca's impressive stone work. But, like most ruins in the Sacred Valley, Tipon is an active archeological site, so we were greeted with whistles by small groups of laborers in dusty boots and blue hard hats (I say 'we' as if they might have been whistling with me, not the blond Dutch girl I was with. I guess construction workers are the same worldwide).

We walked the road back to the town, enjoying the view of the valley while herds of sheep and cattle were maneuvered around us. When Lenke stopped to take a picture of a farm, the parents sent their little girl up to ask for money for the picture. Twice on our descent we were greeted by little girls who would say in a sweet, young voice 'plataquita?' They were asking for 'a little money.' I am amazed at the shamelessness Peruvians seem to display in asking for money. I've been to some pretty poor areas of the world, like rural India and Cambodia, but in those places I experienced the opposite of what I see here. Sure, some Indians will scam you out your money any way they can, but this is a way to earn the money - there is too much pride involved to simply demand cash. In Cusco there are groups of women who dress in traditional clothes with llamas in tow, just waiting for someone to take their picture so they can demand a cash remission. Garrett, from my Spanish class, even told me that he took a picture of his girlfriend at some ruins and a Peruvian ran up, explaining that he was in the background of the picture and thus deserved a sole for his trouble.

Brushing off the dollar signs above our heads, we passed signs tempting us with offers of cuy (guinea pig) and cerveza as Lenke and I made our way through the final village before the highway. It was probably my best day in Cusco, perhaps because I wasn't actually in the city.

¿Que?

So according to my sitemeter I now have 46 unique readers, which officially leaves XM Radio in the dust. Take THAT Clear Channel! I guess being free helps.

I'm staying with a new host family now, which is the total opposite of my old family. Whereas my last family had a really nice house and I never saw them, I interacted more with my new host mother on the first day than I did my old host mother the whole week. She's obviously excited to teach Spanish and will gently correct your mistakes. The downside is that there is running water only in the mornings and the evenings, that the meals feature prominently fried eggs and bright-pink hot dogs, and that the TV is on a lot. Oh well. I'm here to learn Spanish, not eat gourmet, right?

I've been going dancing with the folks in my Spanish class, because after learning the language, learning to salsa is priority number 2 if you're going to be in South America for 10 months and want to have any friends. So there's a club in town that advertises free lessons, which is true if you're a girl. It's pretty much four or five Peruvian guys who can salsa really well who dance with gringo girls, which I'm convinced is due to a conspiracy to keep white guys awkward and rhythm-less on the dance floor. In my case it's working well. It's really a shame, too, because salsa is such a fun, beautiful, sexy dance - nothing like the pent-up lockstep of most European dances, and not fascist like square dancing. Watching a couple who can really salsa gives the impression that they've been choreographing together for weeks, but if you watch you'll notice that people continually switch partners and one will occasionally stop in the middle of the dance to walk the other through something new. I might break down and ask a girl to teach me although my problem with this plan is that I'm shy plus I'm expected to lead. Can a dancer who follows teach someone to lead? I danced with one girl who was immediately annoyed that I didn't know how to salsa, despite my having told her it was my first time, which tempers my appetite to try again.

So a few days ago I started sneezing a lot, and since it's spring here I went to the pharmacy to get some antihistamines. Pharmacy systems seem to supplant prescription systems in a lot of places, so you go into the pharmacy, describe your symptoms, and they give you drugs (I have experienced this in Peru and Thailand). The problem with this system is that the pharmacists aren't particularly clever at their jobs. In Thailand, I went to the pharmacy after coughing for several weeks, and they gave me antibiotics. This didn't clear up the cough, so I bought some Benadryl, which did the job - after I'd taken a round of antibiotics for no reason. In Peru, they gave me antihistamines, and a few days later I figured out I was developing a cold, not allergy symptoms. So I had to go back to the pharmacy and tell them what was wrong with me, and then they gave me some packets of drugs with no labels or information and told me to take one every six hours. I had a sore throat, so I asked about a pack of Halls (throat lozenges - I dunno, the Dutch and the Australians don't know what they are) behind the counter and the pharmacist looked at me and said 'you don't need those.' And I asked 'not for my sore throat?' and he replied 'no, those are Halls,' and gave me a funny little smile. That seemed to be the end of the discussion, and as I had a couple of Halls left, I didn't push it any further. But I wish I would have asked him what he thought Halls were for, since I can't think of anything they might be used for besides sore throat.

I noticed today that the folks who hand out flyers use a primitive mind-control technique to get you to come into the bar/restaurant/massage parlor they're hawking: they hand you the flyer and say something like 'you'll come back later. You won't forget.' One guy even slowly passed his hand in front of my face as he said it.

I don't know if I've mentioned it, but people in Cusco are just as into 80's music as the people in Arequipa, which I love because you can wander into a little general store and find a 50 year old woman listening to Devo or INXS.

I noticed today that I still get pretty winded going up all the hills in Cusco (altitude 10,000 ft.), but I go up them a lot faster. And my calves are getting really big.

Hey, speaking of random things I've thought of, did you ever notice that none of the characters in Seinfeld have any siblings? Isn't that weird?

JUST a political rant, I won't feel bad if you don't want to read it

I wanted to add a couple addendums to my last post: first, I should have said the dems screwed up the economy 35 years ago, not 25. I said 25 because that's when the screwyness ended when Reagan got elected. One of the things Reagan did besides waste billions of dollars of public money on the Star Wars pipedream and commit impeachable offenses via the Iran-Contra scandal was to lift the price controls on gasoline, which were a bad idea since they caused shortages and lines for gas. Price controls on gasoline came from the Democratic Carter administration, as did Keynesian economic policies that resulted in the debilitating stagflation of the 1970's. While Keynesian economic theories were widely accepted in both parties, stagflation was occurring in the Keynes-based UK economy in the 60's, which should have tipped off US economic authorities that something was amiss. In short, I'd have been pissed off at Dems too if I'd lived through the 70's. Not because "I Heart Growth and Gas" but because inflation and slow growth hurts the poor the most and because waiting in line all day to fill the tank will make anyone cranky. So I was reading somewhere once about this guy defending his voting Republican, and he said something like 'you have to remember that the Democrats made a real mess of the economy in the 70's.' That they did, but like I said in the last post, that is hardly relevant in an election today, because both parties are part of the same corporatocracy, and hence they both obey the same rules of the game when it comes to economics.

I guess American voters couldn't find many reasons to not vote Democrat either, since the GOP is finally out of office and Bush is already trying to force last-minute legislature in the lame-duck congress. In other news, the USA continues to support Israel carte blanche:

U.S. Vetoes UN Resolution on Israeli Attack on Gaza
At the United Nations, the United States vetoed a UN Security Council resolution condemning Israel's recent attack on the Gaza town of Beit Hanoun that killed at least 19 Palestinian civilians and left dozens wounded. One family lost 16 members when Israeli tanks opened fire on their house. Seven children died, the youngest was just a year old. The UN resolution called on Israel to abide by its obligations and responsibilities under the Geneva Convention. It also called on the Palestinian Authority to stop rocket attacks on Israel. The US delegation criticized the resolution for being one-sided.

One-sided?! The whole fucking conflict is one-sided, i.e. Israel blows the crap out of an entire family because the Palestinians continue to lob rockets of 19th-century technology into their territory - not their cities or their people, just their land (OK, rockets have killed 1 Israeli citizen since July 2005, and that was today). Not that the US cares about international law or the Geneva Conventions (Guantanamo, anyone?). Someday the United States government and the ultra-Zionist Jewish voting block will have to face the fact that a War on Terror is going to mean at the very least chastising Israel when they blow up entire apartment blocks because they had an oopsie with their radar. I mean it drives me crazy that about three-quarters of the US sympathizes more with Israel than with Palestinians, when the situation basically amounts to 'Israel has all the guns and money and the Palestinians have nothing.' Let's be clear, this is the only country that has LEGALIZED TORTURE (for most of the 1990's, a point which is not contended by former Israeli Foreign Minister Shlomo Ben-Ami in this interview), and the US is going to criticize a resolution that asks them to quit killing children? Anyways, I'm no pundit, which is why I put this stuff at the end of my post. In fact, this will get moved to an entirely separate post.

Good Luck, lesser of two evils

So elections are today. It looks like the Dems will handily take the house, but the senate will be close. But what's on my mind is how can they NOT win? I'm not sure if I should blame the decisively superior organization and fundraising abilities of the GOP or the stupidity of the American voter, but either way, people sure keep going back to the Republicans. The last good argument I heard against voting for Dems was that they screwed up the economy, which is true - at least, it was true 30 years ago! I mean come on, pretty much every serious candidate is a pro-free-trade, mostly laissez-faire monetarist these days - and regardless of you feel about those types of policies, the point is that both parties are on vitrually the same page economically. I mean Clinton was the guy who pushed through NAFTA and expanded the War on Drugs, which the GOP is usually all about, but the GOP decided that the real focus of the country should be a blow-job (hey, at least he wasn't writing 'naughty emails' to underage boys, or looking the other way while 'a few bad apples' stripped away the humanity - and sometimes lives - of citizens in a country we're supposedly trying to help). I mean combine that with the ordeal they made over Terry Schiavo, and one wonders whose business the GOP won't mind. I thought this was the party of small government, yet they have made a renaissance over telling people what they can do in the bedroom, and what they can put in and do with their bodies. Combine that with their zeal for putting people of a certain ethnicity into special camps without access to any of the protections of law that our country was founded on, and I don't think responsible government, I think fascist. And you know what, my Grandfather helped fight a war to defeat assholes like that, and I don't appreciate them running our country.

Anyways, go not-Republicans. I mean Democrats.

Nothing much happened today, unless you count what happened in the bank and what happened on the street afterwads:

I was in the bank today trying to get change for my 100 sole notes, because that's what you get out of ATM's here, but go anyplace in the country and they balk at having to change anything bigger than a 10. I even had an English guy tell me that he tried to pay with a S/50 note at a restaurant, and they took it (he assumed to change it) and they brought it back torn almost in half and said 'we can't take this, it's ripped.' Anyways, lacking small bills is inviting annoyance, so I went to change my S/100 notes. The bank I went into today requires that you take a number, and there's a screen with four different numbers on it showing which number is up next (four numbers because there's 20 tellers). So I look at my number, which is 994. Which number is currently being served? 860. Que? That's right, 860. It's one of those funny little things that just totally blows the rational circuits of your mind, because there is obviously not 134 people in front of me, but nonetheless it took 45 minutes for me to get up to the counter - despite, as I said, 20 tellers. I have no idea how it took that long, but I did see a couple gringo girls that looked on the verge of tears they had been in there so long. The funny thing is, I'd gone into a couple banks to get change in the past few days, and the wait was always like that, so I'd kept putting it off until all I had was S/400 in S/100 notes and a S/2 coin. So hear-hear for apparently efficient first-world banking services. Bigots say that Jews control the banks in America, but I say they're doing a fantastic job, because let me tell you, our supply of small bills is ample and our banks are efficient. We should count ourselves lucky. Speaking of bigots, I hope everyone goes to see the 'Borat' movie, because I can't and I think that Sacha Cohen has perhaps created the most brilliant - and hilarious - satire of Western bigotry and ignorance we've seen in a while.

You know a lot of left-leaning folk think that all business cares about is cheap labor and low environmental standards, but that's just not true. Case in point with banks, there's a lot businesses care about besides wages and regulations. The fact is that the developed world has a much stronger rule of law, less corruption, better developed infrastructure and more efficient information and money-management technologies, which is why 4 out of 5 foreign investment dollars flow from one rich country to another, instead of flowing to poor countries as rich-country corporations 'outsource' jobs. I mean there's a reason that so few businesses invest in most any African country, a region of the world that isn't exactly a hot-bed of labor unions and environmental organization.

Of course, a lot of right-leaning folks think that monetary profit equals social good, which is wrong for a whole other host of reasons, but I wasn't reminded of any of those as I waited to complete a seemingly simple transaction such as changing bills while I was tortured by a television with the volume too high showing movie previews that were too stupid ('My Super Ex-Girlfriend'? Are you serious?).

Then, as I left the bank, it was raining, so I stopped to pull my raincoat out of my bag. Unfortunately, stopping in the street to do something means it's pretty tough to just walk by touts, and they know it, so naturally one approached me and played friendly, which is a pretty common ploy. And it's a ploy that is lose-lose for the potential customer, because it means if you ignore them you're a jerk and if you don't you're trapped into being pressured to go on a tour of alpaca-clothing factories or buy drugs or 4-wheel through the jungle or who knows what else. I opted for a combination of the two - trying to act completely non-interested while at the same time not ignoring him completely. But as my friend Kerry says, a hybrid of two options gives you the worst of both, because as I donned my coat the tout said 'here, this is for you. It's tourist information.' So I took it and put it in my bag, and went to leave and he said 'hey, look at that' and I replied that I was on my way home and would look at it when I get there, and I hadn't taken two steps when he started cursing at me in Spanish. So I turned around and asked him if he wanted his brochure back, and he said 'what's your problem, man?' and I said I didn't have a problem, but It's raining and I'm going home, and I'll look at the brochure later. That seemed to placate him some. But I think we were both pretty mad.

I know I shouldn't let him bait me like that, but it's tough because this stuff happens so often every single day. I took 5 steps from the pamphlet guy and I was swarmed and my path literally blocked buy two guys selling cigarettes, who I had to tell - in Spanish - that I don't smoke 3 times before they decided I wasn't going to buy anything. I mean every time this happens and I get mad, I feel three things: I'm a jerk for getting angry, because there's really no point and these guys are just trying to make a living; that these guys still should have some boundaries, because everyone in Peru is trying to make a living, and I never had cigarette vendors hassle me like this anywhere else in the country; and lastly, I laugh at the absurdity of the whole thing and think that maybe being in Cusco for low season isn't so hot, because I stick out a lot more.

My home-stay situation I continue to define as 'strange'; I ate a lovely dinner alone tonight of white rice and the most under-cooked burger I think I have perhaps ever seen. Fortunately I figured out the microwave (last time the door was closed, but the microwave didn't think it was closed, so it wouldn't run) so that situation was simple to remedy. I left the house today to be startled by a parrot in the bushes, which I watched for a while before one of the kids came out and I asked if the parrot lived in the house. He said it did, which made it a lot less exciting to watch, plus reinforced the fact that I know almost nothing about my host family. Pets, number of children (ostensibly three, but I don't know which ones they are as there are multiple families living in our courtyard and I've never actually had a meal with the whole family), etc.

In more upbeat news, my Spanish classes are going well. I can feel my comprehension and confidence building and it's only been two days. I have a teacher named Valerie that is really great and funny, and was teaching us listening comprehension today by having us listen to Manu Chao. And I have two other people in my class that are pretty fun and nice, and we're going out for salsa lessons tonight. So that should be fun.

I also saw a cool group of Mardi Gras-esque dancers perform a dance complimented by stilt-walkers and a tower of fireworks, although the event was tarnished somewhat when I realized it was being done for the benefit of a VIP group of wealthy gringo tourists. I videotaped it, and it's funny because I got the end, which was when target audience had been ushered inside the museum for some sort of fancy wine-and-dine and the performers IMMEDIATELY dropped out of character, stripped of their masks, and walked off. The band quit out as quickly as the performers. Some lit up cigarettes. They were over it so fast, I mean the very second the last gringo had stepped over the threshold, it surprised me. Such is Cusco, I guess.

I'm contemplating wandering through the Sacred Valley for a week to check out ruins and small towns if the weather improves a bit. It's been raining a lot, but then again it is rainy season, so I might just do it anyways. Or I might not. It might depend on how Spanish lessons go and how long I want to do those. I guess if you want to find out you'll have to keep reading.

So who knew that a home-stay would be more lonely than hostel-stays?

So I'm into my third day of homestay right now, and it's kind of strange. I didn't see my family really at all the entire weekend - I would either come home or get up to find a meal set for me on the huge, empty table. Being in this second house is unnerving, because It's so quiet in there and I'm all alone, and I almost don't want to make any noise. Upstairs is a hallway with four identical doors, none giving any indication as to what might be behind them, and I'm scared to open them. I know there's a second bathroom up there, because I've heard someone using it, although I've never actually seen anyone up there. There's a lovely new microwave if I need to reheat any of my food, which was the case the first night. I couldn't figure out how to work it, but it did make a lovely fade-in, fade-out dinging when you pressed the buttons. There is one upside to this house: my bed is a dangerously comfortable queen-sized mattress with a heavy down comforter and high-quality pillows. The last time I can remember being in a bed I enjoyed so much was when our flight was delayed leaving Seoul, and we got put up in the shwankiest 5-star hotel I'd ever been in, where I ate a gratis $30 sandwich and fries for lunch and spent the rest of the day absolutely loving the down comforter and pillows in the room. Perhaps both beds have the advantage of coming after a long period of sleeping on straw with pillows stuffed with old socks, but they were two memorable beds nonetheless.

The only interaction I had with my family last weekend was my jamming the lock to the courtyard - turn the key one way and the door opens, turn it the other way and the lock jams. You turn that lock to the left, and the lock on the front of the house to the right, and I got confused. And so later I got a lecture from my host mom about how simple the lock is while she showed me again how to do it and kept saying 'simple, simple', and I got the feeling she thought I was a little slow. I just smiled and said 'entiendo,' but was thinking 'look, I know it's simple, but it was a simple mistake too. It's not my fault you have this jenky lock that can only be opened from the inside with a different key if you twist right instead of left.'

I started Spanish school today, which was pretty fun. There are two other people in my class, an Irish guy named Garrett and a Dutch girl (of course), Lenca. We learned the difference between Ser and Estar, did some vocabulary work, and practiced identifying words listening to some Spanish songs. You know you're speaking at a 1st-grade level when they pull out songs like 'The Sand and the Sun.' But it was good because we're all at the same level, which is nice. When I took Spanish in college, almost all the other kids had taken at least some Spanish in high school; most of them had taken 4 years. The only one who hadn't had any Spanish other than me was a guy who was fluent in French, and pretty much what I remember of him is that he was always saying 'Oh, that's just like French!' So pretty much I hated him and felt like a dunce all the time.

I was walking along the streets of Cusco in an area I hadn't been in before on the edge of town, and I happened by a stream full of garbage. It's a lesson I'm constantly being reminded of when I travel, that the environmental ethic we take for granted in the rich world is non-existent in the other 85% of it. I remember once when I was in Thailand we were being shown a fish-farm; our guide explained that normally the fish only reproduce at certain times of the year, but they inject the fish with a cocktail of hormones to get them to spawn year-round. A girl in my group asked if that was safe for the the environment, for the fish, and for the people who ate the fish and our guide gave her a look that bordered on incomprehension and replied 'of course, because we use the hormone according to the instructions.' Of course. The way we used to use asbestos and DDT according to the instructions.

Of course education isn't the only, nor do I suspect it is the primary culprit for a stream full of trash on the edge of Cusco. I'm definitely not the first one to say it, but poverty is the biggest threat the environment faces. When you're desperately poor, it doesn't matter how much it costs to have garbage service - as long as there is any sort of charge, it will always be cheaper just to dump it in the stream.

I didn't realize how bad they were until now, but below are some picture of my host-family's house. I habitually keep my flash turned off and I forgot to turn it back on. My apologies.

OK, maybe I'm not mean

So I saw two boys that sell watercolors playing with their cell phones tonight. Can you really be that hard up if you have a cell phone?

More fun with translations
So I got this flyer handed to me tonight. It's triangle-shaped, and at the top is a female insignia. Below it says 'great party for girls' and under that 'cafeta club.' At first I figured someone mistook me for a woman again. But then I flipped it over, and there's a scale with the female logo outweighing the male logo, and it says 'all girls free pass and drinks.' Ah, a great party for girls, now I get it. It also says 'Enjoy the best party this Friday. Come and find out anything you want! Note: Crazy Meeting in the terrace (sic).' How can I not pass up a Crazy Meeting? Plus, I can find out all sorts of stuff, like why the Catholic Church is so lame, and what's the question that answers 42. If anyone has any pressing questions, email me quick and I'll find out for you!

I think perhaps I jumped the gun on calling my host family middle-class. What was keeping me from calling them something higher on the income scale was the fact that the man is a schoolteacher, and when he told me his wife worked for the Peruvian tourist ministry, he made a typing motion with his hands, so I thought 'teacher+typist=not super rich.' But I think now that what I thought was a neighbors house is also their house (plus they have a car), and actually I have a whole 800 sq. ft. house to myself. I came home tonight, and they told me they don't really eat dinner, but they had a lite supper prepared for me, which I ate alone at a table that can seat 8 people in a large empty house. It was kind of uncomfortable, actually. I didn't want to make any noise in there! But the city is busy tonight, many political rallies in the square, lots of people out. I tried to talk to some people about the rallies, but all I got was a Bolivian guy who wanted to sell me some stuff that would make my eyes go squinty for 6 hours, according to him. Friggin' fantastic. I was going to post y'all some pictures from my host family's house, but once again Blogger isn't cooperating.

OK, I'm mean

So after I wrote my last post, I was walking through the plaza and saw one of those guys that sells watercolors sleeping in the nooks of one of the buildings. And I felt like a huge jerk. And then I got real embarrassed that I'd written what I wrote, and thought that I would delete it. But I decided that I really can't be that hard on myself for that, because I think a natural reaction to a world of poverty when you have material plenty is to suspect that the poor aren't really that poor (I read a thing online saying that Bolivian women can't be poor, they're too fat! Of course, the irony, as we demonstrate in the US, is that there are overweight poor people, and they're often malnourished). Or maybe we tell ourselves that the poor are happy being poor. And there's enough truth to these things to make them workable excuses for those who are well-off. Just ask a Buddhist about the dangers of material possessions, or refer to my story about the wealthy scammer-beggars in Dharamsala (or if it's not complete enough, ask me about it and I'll give you the complete low-down). So at any rate, I have now revised my ideas on the wandering vendors of Cusco: it's true that they aren't being honest - the sad-eyes, the story about being an art student, about if they make this one sale they can eat that day, are all falsehoods, a mask worn to help make the sale. Spending a couple days in the plaza reveals that. But these people are definitely pretty desperately poor. In fact, it says more about us that it works better to lie about being an art student, because just being dirt-poor isn't enough to inspire sympathy in Westerners. I guess it's just a huge can of worms that most of us don't want to open.

So I moved in with my host family today, and I start Spanish classes on Monday. For reasons of both language difficulties and social sensitivities, I didn't ask, but I'd say I'm with a solidly middle-class Peruvian family. The father is a schoolteacher for 10-12 year olds, and the mother worked for the Peruvian tourism ministry until she got pregnant ('embarazado' in Spanish, which I think is kind of funny, but it makes it easy for me to remember). They have two daughters and a son, and live in what I would call a pretty nice house for Peru. There's two bathrooms and hot water, a pretty nice kitchen with a microwave, stainless-steel fridge, blender, etc. They don't have a TV, but they do have a kareoke machine I think, or at least two stereos and a microphone, which sounds suspiciously like kareoke to me! All we've really done was have lunch, which was kind of strange: the daughters cooked, and then served myself and the father, and then one girl ate in the kitchen, and the other didn't eat at all. Unless I'm totally misreading the situation and one girl was a servant or something (say, is that your daughter?), it was a little strange for me, since us American's like to maintain a pretense of egalitarianism. There's definitely a language barrier, but I feel like we communicated pretty well given my level of Spanish. Sometimes he had to dumb things down, or use different words, but we were able to talk about food, and work, and family, and everything got across OK.

Not that this is always the case. I've been hankering for a swim, and I though for certain a 5-star hotel would have a pool (Isn't that like one of the things that makes a hotel 5-star?). So I went inside one to ask, or at least I tried. The doorman wouldn't actually let me in, so I tried to ask him, but he didn't speak English, and I ended up asking 'tiene un piscado?' or 'do you have a fish?' He took that in stride, and after making swimming motions with my arms, I was reminded that Spanish for pool is 'piscina.' Still, this took almost 10 minutes, after which I found out that there was no pool. Man, no pool and the doorman doesn't speak English? I don't hold this against him, but I sure hold it against the hotel owners. When you pay $250 a night for a room (which is what this hotel costs) you're basically paying for service, because pillows can only get so fluffy. But can you really get that much service if you can't ask the doorman a question like 'do you have a pool?' or 'how do I get to the market?' So revising my idea from my previous post, the scammers and crooks aren't the people in the street, they're the hoteliers. I mean it makes sense to me for them to at least teach their staff English, which not only reflects the price of their hotel but would be a huge asset to the staff, since speaking English opens so many doors in the hospitality sector.

So my Spanish isn't perfect. I can't say 'looking for,' so I have to say 'I see.' I can't speak in past or future tense, so I have to hope that my use of context gets the point across. The list goes on. Which is why I'm going back to school on Monday. Got my lunch packed and everything.

Updates on food, tabloids, markets, rooms, etc.

Let us start with food: among the trendy boutiques and overpriced yuppie restaurants, there are some good eats to be had in Cusco. Last night I went to the cutest little pizza restaurant, run by the cutest little Peruvian couple. The whole restaurant was maybe 12X10 feet, so you pretty much watch this guy make your pizza a few feet away. I had a garlic and pepperoni pizza, which was the best pizza I've had over here. The pepperoni was a really thick cut, probably from the market in town, not that paper-thin stuff they serve in the states. My pie was complemented by a glass of vino tinto and really damn good garlic bread, along with a sweet, white garlic sauce and muy, muy picante (but very tasty) yellow spicy sauce for condiments. The restaurant featured a little wood-fired oven, although I did catch him supplementing the wood with old cardboard! Later an Australian couple walked by, and the couple tried to get them in, and I managed to coax them inside for something a little more Peruvian than most places in the center of Cusco (like I said before, Peruvians seem mad for pizza, and I've seen this place packed to the gills with locals, although It's not hard in a 120sq. ft. restaurant). Most of the touristy places in Cusco, like I said, are yuppie and expensive. $6 for a hemp-seed salad with organic greens (I don't know, but chances are a lot of the greens here are organic), $16 for an alpaca steak, fancy $4 blended drinks, $5 granola and yogurt... to contrast, I almost always eat in local spots and am running $3-$6 a day for food. But the money isn't what's lame about those yuppie spots - what's lame is you don't learn anything about the culture you're in going to those places. Peruvians don't eat at those places, they're way too expensive. Somehow I don't understand going to another country just to live the way you did at home, around many of the same types of people, only slightly cheaper. But it seems like for a lot of people travel is just about getting drunk and having sex in another time zone. Not that I don't enjoy those things too, but it's really just the teeniest tip of the travel iceberg. But I guess I'm not into tourist attractions much either, which seems to be what most people center around ('what have you done for a week in Arequipa if you havn't been touring?' a Dutch man asked me). I decided not to go to Maccu Picchu (remembering my time in Ankor Wat, which is way cooler, and I had a good time but I get ruined-out pretty quick), I have little interest in museums (actually I really like local art museums, of which I've been to a couple), and I have zero interest in the Cusco city tour, which mostly consists of riding a bus around looking at the Inca ruins in the city. And let me explain, 'Inca Ruins' means 'there used to be a really cool, important Inca temple here, then the Spaniards came through and knocked it down and built a church on the foundation.' Not quite a scorched-earth policy, since the Spanish did utilize the foundations, but more of a 'look and see who came out on top' strategy. Somehow sitting on a hot bus for 4 hours doing that just doesn't sound fun to me.

More good news on the food front: I finally found some good street food. Street food is my favorite part of traveling, because it's convenient, quick, cheap, local, and I get a kick out of impulse buying. There are slim pickings for Peruvian street food, and most of it looks not-so-hot at best, and like days of sickness at the worst. But I found a guy that's out each day selling tamales, both sweet and salty. The salty ones are the best by far, being stuffed with meat and olives, while the sweet ones have raisins and are, well, kind of sweet for my taste. And man, is this guy popular. The first time I went I got one of each tamale, and liked them so much I went back for two more con sal to make it an early lunch. So all three times I've been there I see people trucking away bagloads of these things, like one person walking off with 30 or 40 tamales. Now like I said, after 4 I was stuffed, and this guy is here every day, so what gives? All I can imagine is that these people are picking up lunch for the office, except that cubicle life is negligible in Peru. So it's a mystery I guess.

I also found a great little vegetarian restaurant that has a 'menu del dia' for $1, and always has the same old Peruvian guy there eating dinner. I sit at the table next to his, and we have a Single Guy Eating Alone sort of solidarity, I think. The food is good, healthy grub - the other night I had like a leek soup, rice and curried cauliflower, some whole-wheat bread, and tea. I ate there twice, then went back the third night (that's what I love about menu del dia, you can go to one place several days in a row and get totally different food each time) and there was some sort of closure sign from the Peruvian government. So then I started to worry. I hadn't gotten sick yet, but what did the sign mean? I could make out '...for the second time...' '...closed for two days...' and there was a bunch of other stuff I couldn't understand. It was sounding like a health-code violation, since that's pretty much what happens in the states, you get shut for a couple days after multiple gross infractions. I saw another sign like it on another restaurant, and was fearing there was a crackdown and I'd been eating dirty food. But I went back today with my dictionary, and all the sign amounted to was the restaurant wasn't keeping receipts. So the government couldn't collect proper taxes. So that's good. They re-open tomorrow.

So I'm staying in the sweetest hostel room ever. It has three beds, like a dorm, but the owner is letting me have it to myself for 8 soles ($2.50) a night, which means I can double up on blankets (which is nice at 10,000 ft.) and spread my stuff out on the other beds. It's on the third floor, so the room gets lots of light, and has a nice view. It also has a fairly interesting navy/cream paint scheme, and some art on the walls (usually all you get in the cheap places is bleak whitewash and a 3X4 newspaper cutout of Jesus or Mary. Although once I got a porcelain Jesus coming out of the wall. Friggin' sweet). And it has a private bathroom. That stinks of piss. Like really reeks. 'Catbox' was my first thought. It didn't stink when I checked in, in fact the toilet had that blue, auto-cleaner stuff in it, and it smelled faintly of urinal puck. But sometime between my leaving for the day and coming home for the night, the place started to stink, and it hasn't let up. It's coming from the bathroom, so I shut the door, open the windows, and it helps. The bathroom window opens into the stairwell, so who knows what my fellow hostel guests think of me. Last night I had to change beds, because the noxious cloud seems to have a maximum radius of three feet from the bathroom door. Another funny thing about my room: at first I had no trash can for my TP (plumbing in most of the world is just not rigged for TP), so I was using a plastic bag. But I came back today to find the bag replaced with a small plastic trash can. Now the reason this is strange is because a) my door was locked, and b) I had a small padlock on the bathroom door (like I said, the bathroom window opened onto the stairwell, and I didn't want people getting into my room. In my experience you should worry more about fellow travelers than locals). So for the trashcan to be placed there, someone would have had to either a) key into my room and circumnavigate the small padlock on the bathroom door, carefully relocking it when finished, or b) shimmy through the 3X1 ft. bathroom window opening to get the can inside. Either way, a little strange. For Chrissakes, they could have stolen my liquid soap! Actually, I've looked at several hostels in Cusco now, and they all kind of stink, which I blame on the prevalence of carpet. I don't have a problem with carpet, as long as you maintain it, but let me tell you places charging $4 a night for a room aren't maintaining their carpet.

Other happenings roaming the street today: I was eating ice cream for lunch (what, I also had a chocolate covered croissant) at a place my guidebook described as 'a delicious must for ice-cream lovers.' So I've been there several times. Anyways, right after I got my double-scoop of ice cream, I turn around and there's this sad little pair, a mother and little girl, wanting to sell me finger puppets. Now I have no idea what I'd do with a condor or monkey finger-puppet, but they seem to be the rage because a million people sell them, so someone must be buying. But I looked at my double-scoop, looked at these sad little faces (even the woman was a foot shorter than I), and I asked the little girl, in hesitant Spanish: do you like ice cream? So I ended up buying them each some ice cream, which totaled $1.25 for the three of us, and they seemed really happy. Like I said before, I'm not solving any problems, but who doesn't appreciate the gift of ice cream? 10 minutes later I was walking on a street I'd never visited before, and I noticed it was called 'heladeros st.' For those of you who don't habla Espanol, ice cream in Spanish is helado, and an ice-cream parlor is a heladoria (remember the 'ria' rule for shops?). And since 'heladeros' wasn't in my dictionary, I decided that this was Ice Cream St. Which, it goes without saying, totally kicks ass. p.s. I don't want any Spanish speakers telling me 'heladeros' means 'pigs feet' or anything, OK? Let me live my dream!

Speaking of people selling knick-knacks, I wonder sometimes how hard up these people are and how much is an act. There seems to be a huge multitude of people selling everything: watercolors, fingerpuppets, bracelets, necklaces, little dolls, postcards, cigarettes, etc. So how many people think that these people are so desperate, they think 'sure, there's 40 other people selling watercolors in the plaza, and no one seems to be buying, but I bet I could do pretty well...' and how many people think that these people do pretty well charging $10 for a watercolor, and everyone sees how good they're doing, and the thundering herds of imitators come rolling in. Honestly, I have no idea. Knowing what I know about tourists traps in poor countries, it really could be either.

Further down Heladeros street I walked by a news stand, where I saw a paper with a big headline with multiple exclamation points!!! about some Bad Guy. The headline ran along the left side of the page, and next to it, on the right, was a girl with big fake boobs in a zebra-stripe swimsuit. Below, peeking over the edge of the page, was barely visible the head of the man the article was ostensibly about. It made me laugh out loud.

I went to the market today, which in what is becoming classic Cusco style, was way lamer than the market in Arequipa. The fruit wasn't stacked as high, the potatoes not as varied, the meat less exotic, no olives to be seen. Plus everyone saw me as a guy with money. I mean I'm sure that the people in Arequipa aren't so dense that they don't realize I have a lot of money compared to them, but it wasn't like every shopkeeper was shouting at me, just holding up random things, trying to get me to buy. Tea! Coca leaves! Some sort of meat! Bread with a face in it! How could I resist! Just like the rest of Cusco, I can't just be there and look and shop. I have to be Gringo with Cash. I did see one interesting thing though: someone selling live frogs in a bucket, and at the bottom of the bucket was the knife she used to kill the frogs for sale. There was something delightfully twisted about that.

Let's see, other good stuff on the street today... I saw a little girl singing to herself, playing with a piece of broken glass and an old rusty bolt. She seemed so pleasantly entertained, serene even. It made me smile. Myself and a middle-aged American guy almost got run down by a cab. We looked at each other, and he said 'I just don't get it. Are they fucking stupid, or is it inbreeding, or what?' I smiled and said I don't know, and then I thought about the latent racism loaded into that statement. Stupid fucking dark people that can't drive... unlike in America, where we're all great drivers, especially young men (the majority of Peruvian cab drivers in Cusco). Why do people like that travel? Oh yeah, sex and booze. A woman stopped and asked me about my beard. She didn't speak English, but I got most of it. She wanted to know how long it took to grow my beard. One year, two years? I think most Peruvian men with beards spend most of their lives cultivating the sparse little goat-scruff that we in America associate with desperate adolescents. Anyways, it was nice because she didn't try and sell me anything. Speaking of beards, you would think a beard would place me solidly in the world of masculino, but I've had people trying to sell me things say 'hola senorita' a couple times. Que?

I start Spanish classes on Monday, and I move in with a host family tomorrow. So that should be exciting. I had to take an entry exam so they could see what level I'm at, and it was designed for all levels of speakers, so I felt pretty dumb. It was 6 pages long, and I left like 2/3 of it blank, and I probably messed up a lot of the other 1/3. Sometimes I could understand what they were asking me so I would know what it was I didn't know: 'complete the sentence using the correct imperfect predicate verb.' OK. Check. Easy.

So one more short diatribe against the Catholic Church. I saw some Sikhs the other day, and let me tell you what's great about Sikhs: first, they tithe 10% of their income, and not to the church, but to a charity of their choice. Second, any person, at any time, can receive food and shelter from any Sikh temple, anywhere in the world. In Amritsar, the Sikh holy city, they run a huge hostel. At night, the grounds are packed with cots and blankets, where the homeless of the city come every night to sleep. And next door there is a huge cafeteria, where all day long you hear what sounds like heavy machinery but is really scores of Sikhs washing dishes from the never-ending parade of pilgrims, tourists and homeless coming to eat. So where the fuck is the Catholic Church for the homeless in Peru? Praying for their souls, they'd no doubt tell you. Yeah right. I thought there was something called the Reformation that laid that dubious theological thinking to rest. Seeing Sikhs in action makes me want to convert. Seeing Catholics in action makes me want to hate the Pope.

Why being in touristy places is a huge frustrating mess

I was hanging out in the central plaza here in Cusco, and it's not nearly as much fun because you are constantly being asked to buy something, which makes enjoyable people-watching nearly impossible. The other reason this is frustrating is that instead of actually interacting with the local population - as in 'we had a conversation' - the tone is a constant opposing dichotomy of them trying to sell me something, and me trying to tell them no. So instead of learning about the places you're in, you instead learn to dread interaction with people, because all anyone wants is to shine my hiking boots. It's a tragic combination of terribly annoying and horribly saddening: an 8-year-old selling postcards, and inside the flap are Power Ranger stickers and in 8-year-old scrawl I read 'King Arthur'. It breaks my heart, but then he wants $5 for three postcards, and I remember Dharamsala, and all the elaborate beggar scams, especially involving kids, and I decline and my heart grows cold... what the hell is my responsibility in a place like this? I give money to the beggars, like I did to the lepers in Dharamsala, the people who so obviously live on the street and don't really have anything but mangy hair and the hope to eat that day. I guess I feel like if we all gave a little, there would be plenty, so if I give a little I'm doing my part. I mean I could empty my bank account and give it all away, and that wouldn't solve the problem; I can't solve the problem. Somewhere between giving everything and nothing lies the best answer I guess. The best answer, but not the right one.

But so many of the people here don't seem so desperate, and they just put me into that unwanted dichotomy I was talking about: last night I was in the plaza, and this guy approached me with a jimbay drum, a younger guy with a piercing in that area below your lower lip (I'm sure there's a name for it, and I'm sure I don't know it), looked kind of hippyish for Peru. He said hello, we did a little hand-slap, he asked me where I was from, and I figured 'in about 45 seconds he's going to either try and sell me that drum, or try and get me to play it and then try and sell it to me' (this happened in India). But he really fooled me. Instead of trying to sell me the drum, he tried to sell me a tour of the Inca Trail. He pulled out a map, and some pictures, and got really excited and began elucidating them for me with his half-inch-long cokehead pinky fingernail. The more he showed me, the more the finger was grossing me out. When he finished, he asked if I wanted to buy a tour (for $220). When I declined, he asked 'why not?' Now, I realize these people aren't MBA's, but it seems to me the first common-sense rule of business is not to alienate your customer. What, is there something wrong with you? How could you not want to give some guy on the street that keeps sniffing and rubbing his nose several hundred dollars? I just told him I wasn't interested, and then, sure enough, he offered to sell me drugs. I had a nearly identical experience 20 minutes later, albeit with a more mellow and likeable guy. But when he asked if I smoked pot and I said 'no' (see, I've learned!), he said 'oh. Well that's OK.' Thanks for the permission. And like I said above, the worst part about all this is that these could be cool guys. After they hit me up, I saw them with their friends, drumming and juggling and laughing, and I thought 'why not? It could be a great time.' But another, more conservative and sensible side said 'no way we're giving that coker $220.'

When I was in India volunteering at the rickshaw widow's community, there was no expectations that I would be constantly forking over money. My friends and I spent a day in the hot sun helping with manual labor alongside the Indians, and that was that. We had an understanding of the roles each would take, and we respected that. At the end of the day we all hugged and parted ways friends, each with a little better understanding of what it's like in the other persons shoes (although I guess we obviously got that more than they did). We chipped in our time, labor, and a cash donation to the community, and that was respected and welcomed. And that was great, it was one of the best days I spent in India. I would happily go back and give more time, effort and money. But you can't get a feeling like that when it feels like everyone just wants to score off of you. It's like a battle anytime anyone approaches you. I know that this is partially the inevitable result of being so rich compared to the rest of the world, but that doesn't mean it's not totally un-fun. I had the idea to try and turn a sale into a conversation, by asking non-product-related questions, and hopefully it will be evident that I'm not buying but I'm still interested. I imagine that at some point there will be a palpable drop of a facade will drop. The salesman, or the poor kid, or whatever mask is being worn comes off, and we can just relate as people. Who knows, I might even want my shoes shined after that. I witnessed this in Dharamsala via several hours of people-watching. I spent maybe three hours on one corner, and the beggar-women kept coming to me, and coming to me, and then they realized I wasn't giving, and they were just next to me, laughing and talking (according to the Tibetans these women are total scam artists). Unfortunately I didn't think of that until later when I was pondering the situation, but I don't doubt I'll have a chance to try it out.

I had another, more fun experience in the plaza too: I don't know if it's because of All Saints Day and school is out, or if the plaza is just always full of high school girls at night, but last night it sure was, and about 50 of them wanted to take their picture with me. Alone, in groups, in different groups, me in the front, me in the back... it was 'fun with the gringo' night, and now somewhere in Peru there are a bunch of pictures of me floating around. And while that was a lot more fun than Mr. Pinkie, I would still like to have some interaction with Peruvians that didn't involve sex, drugs, or money. I did get to have that at my hostel in Pisco, where our hosts made Pisco Sours for myself and two couples (Dutch... so many Dutch), and we chatted about our homes, and life, and shared pictures. And sure people visit Pisco, that's why there's hostels, but a lot of them are from Peru, and the vibe is just totally different.

It's the beginning of rainy season, and the storm clouds roll in and out of the valley like unhappy drifters, grumbling with thunder and looking for some out-of-the-way place to dispose of their rain. I like it more during the rainy 'low' season I think. Fewer tourists, and more dynamism to the weather - alternating hot sun and wet clouds. It gives the valley more of a pulse than the 7-days-a-week 70 degree sun of Arequipa. I'm seriously considering not hiking the Inca Trail or seeing Maccu Picchu, because it just feels so overblown and overhyped. Would that be totally crazy, to be mere miles from one of the greatest physical achievements of humanity and not go see it? People seem to enjoy the trail... at any rate, I've found a place that gives Spanish lessons and arranges homestays that seems quite good (they snagged me by telling me that we'll read fairy tales in class. Sounds a lot more fun than what we did in college!), so I think I'll do that for a couple weeks - learning Spanish is a major goal of mine while I'm here, and this seems like the best way to jump-start my learning.