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.