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.