Tonight I am toasting my brother, who died five years ago on August 21st of complications to Addison's disease, and who had never been out of the country. He was sixteen, and will remain so in my memory for the rest of my life, however long that might turn out to be.
Outside, the pavement is still crackling the last droplets of moisture away. The bloodsucking militia are roaming the thick air tonight, and I am all alone in my boyfriend's parents' house with Servapan, Molotov and Bonnie, their old and majestic collie. The family is in Florida. It is so quiet on this suburban street that I can hear my thoughts rattling in their chains of self-doubt. Trapped by the heat and humidity, and by my own need to sit still, I will briefly describe Chile, in the short impression we were allowed.
Piscola, jars of it. A soccor game under frigid cloudbursts with Pancha and Joaco, which we heard later on the news ended in, what else, a riot with people from the opposing teams (well, men) pulling up the benches and throwing them at each other.
Being around Joaquin during what is probably his most mature and happy period to date, I was filled with slightly depressing questions, such as "Was I ever that young?" "Did the four months of our close friendship happen at all? What was that international studies house?" Nonetheless, it is always hopeful to see someone you care about so happy.
The results of a terrible motorcycle accident in the lobby of Pancha's apartment. Icy rain and ice cream, strange but amiable companions--lecuma fruit, sweet and with the texture of an avocado, and green tea with mango. More delicious than anything I have tasted in the world.
Listening to Pancha and Joaco extol the virtues of Chilean wine, the intoxicating dream, filling ourselves in Vacas Grandes on lomo vetado and choclo a la crema, nothing compared to the delicious, fresh choclo that elderly women offered wrapped in its husk with a hunk of goat cheese on the side in Peru.
John and I took a nervous promendade through La Moneda, feeling guilt emenating from every pore as we surveyed government headquarters and the site of Allende's assassination, now open for large herds of schoolchildren to gawk through and snap pictures.
Pablo Neruda's house. The one built for his third and final wife, named "La Chascona" (both the house and the woman), for her crazy wild mane of red hair.
Neruda, as might be evident from his passionate poems, was obsessed with el mar, and designed every house to look and feel like a ship, with incredibly low ceilings, portholes for windows, and using his extensive collections to decorate the place. Bottles, shells, objects one would expect to wash up on shore, that remind me of the old woman in one of my favorite childhood stories--the one about the woman who unleashed a bad genie and then tricked into turning himself into a mouse, which her brave cat then eats.
In Neruda's study, humbly shining in its case, is his Nobel Prize, awarded in 1971, two years before Pinochet and bad health (the two being synonymous) would finish him off two weeks after the "first September 11th." His study, designed as the lighthouse, brims with Diego Rivera and Picasso gifts, hung casually along the walls.
Neruda's home is so completely his own, it was almost like meeting the charismatic icon himself. Little cut outs of eyes dangling from the staircase. More bars than bedrooms.
Out guide was like one of the kookier roles that Johnny Depp might have, his goatee and owlish eyeglasses and sarcastic grin, as he noted ironically that Pinochet loved the UK because "they respect the rules," exactly why he couldn't live there. Lamenting the cold Chilean personality, versus the boisterous, ceaselessly patriotic Argentinians, their rivals.
Santiago was very much like many European cities I have been to, more prosperous than other South American cities, and full of very white looking people.
We headed to Vina del Mar, where Pancha and Joaquin grew up, a neighboring city to the carnival-esque Valparaiso, relatively calm due to the freezing temperatures. Valparaiso is that strange international fusion so often seen in port towns, with its colorful houses speckling the hillside, its miniature Big Ben, its German district. The oldest newspaper still running in Latin America, El Mercurio, littering the sidewalks.
Joaquin's parents were lovely, gracious, extremely well-educated. His little nephews snuck upstairs the next morning, whispering and cackling and trying to glimpse us as we slept, the strangers always.
John and I caught an exhibit in the museum Bellas Artes that really struck a chord. Called "Cautivas," by Sergio Rojas, giant photos of female convicts lined the wall, all staring without moving. A spectacular range of emotion--proud, defiant, scared, inquisitive, imploring, defeated. The exhibit seemed to suggest both a captivity in their portraits and a captivity of those who were in the room, nailed down by these prisoners' stares.
It is hard to tell what expression will be on my face over the next few weeks, but it is now a mixture of happiness to be back, fortifying myself with comfort food and sleep, and the impatience to see what's next.
"There is a land of the living and a land of the dead and the bridge is love, the only survival, the only meaning."
- Thornton Wilder
Tuesday, August 21, 2007
Saturday, August 18, 2007
Like a Snake Eating its Tail, Blog On...
As the taxi carried us to Santiago airport, where we still have two and a half hours to wait out the inevitable departure, I could see the red, white and blue kites flying high above the tin rooves of the city's outskirts, shadowing along the highway the path of the condor.
I will end this blog the same way that it began, in Atlanta, with uncertainty and an insatiable appetite for movement.
The visit with Joaquin was a good way to finalize our time in South America, for now. I will muse on it further while crammed into the Boeing, and finish up when we get back to humid, sweltering Atlanta concrete.
Chile will take a little time to organize.
I will end this blog the same way that it began, in Atlanta, with uncertainty and an insatiable appetite for movement.
The visit with Joaquin was a good way to finalize our time in South America, for now. I will muse on it further while crammed into the Boeing, and finish up when we get back to humid, sweltering Atlanta concrete.
Chile will take a little time to organize.
Thursday, August 16, 2007
A somber day
In light of the recent 8.0 earthquake in Lima and the surrounding area, that has left hundreds dead. It is eerie to see pictures of the devastation now. LAN has cancelled all flights for the day, unsurprisingly, and suddenly anything I could write about now seems inappropriate, having neglected my blog due to rather dramatic personal circumstances that now seem dwarfed by natural disaster...
But we are okay. I will write more soon, giving a long enough time stamp to maintain some respect for the situation.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/6949984.stm
But we are okay. I will write more soon, giving a long enough time stamp to maintain some respect for the situation.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/6949984.stm
Tuesday, August 14, 2007
Hiram Bingham Has Nothing on Us
Prelude
I am sitting in an apartment in Santiago, Chile now, listening to El Condor Pasa, covered by one of the many traditional pipes and all bands that John and I saw on one of our obnoxious tour groups. We’re not entirely sure if Paul Simon wrote a song in the vein of Peruvian music and it has now become a popular and familiar tourist lure, or if Paul Simon in fact stole a traditional tune and put some 1960s chic lyrics to it.
August is the first month of the Andean year, a time for planting, for new life. And at the end of this week, we will have reentered American time, settling back into routine that can be both comforting and stilting.
Reunited with Joaquin, one of my best friends from spring semester sophomore year, and met his lovely fiancé Pancha. It was fairly evident from gaps in the conversation that three years had passed, but I look forward to a week of human interaction outside of John and myself, outside of asking for directions or buying things, the tourist place we have relegated ourselves to.
Pancha’s apartment is full of flowers and candles, is sparse, clean, spacious, inviting, and well-appointed, as creative an tasteful as she seems to be in person. We have come a long way since our days in the Arequipan hostels, choking one night on smoke eminating from drunk men burning trash outside.
Pancha has relinquished the entire place this week so that John and I can feel at home in a space to ourselves.
Santiago made us pay a $100 tariff to enter the country, which is equivalent to the visa fee Chileans have to pay for entering America, so I suppose it’s fair. The city from our night ride here gave off the aura of many other cities, American, European. There’s even a Starbucks on the corner. We really have no idea what the city holds yet, except the probable vague historical residue from dictatorships that we helped to instate.
Recently another, perhaps more adventurous, friend implored me to stay in Peru, to get to know and love Lima the way that she did. I am still certainly full of wanderlust, and I do love Peru, despite the last month’s rockiness. But we are weighted with six months’ worth of luggage, and not a whole lot of time to plan. Spontaneaity and mountains of crap hardly go together.
I made John put away his “lucky” elephant hair bracelet, because so far it has seemingly given us, if not bad luck, certainly no fortunate advantage.
When we got back to Cuzco, we spent the afternoon watching “Amores Perros” in a delectable Danish and Peruvian owned café/theater where you can order soup and project whatever DVD you want.
We took a bus ride through the little town of Ollantaytambo, hiking up through the ruins of the Temple of the Sun. Somehow the Incas moved rocks from just south of Cuco all the way to the top of the mountain, because the kind of rocks used in construction were not native to the mountain itself. The town below these majestic and baffling ruins has a colorful market and canals running through the city. A little girl trying to sell dolls follows me, imploring, “Miss America!” The Urubamba valley is filled with pastoral villages, soccer matches, and diligent brick masons.
Playing Apus* Little Game
*a popular Simpsons character famous for saying, "Silly customer! You cannot hurt a twinkie!", Apu is different from Apus, which are mountain Gods.
When we returned, we booked our highly anticipated trip to Machu Picchu with a travel agent whose name, coincidentally, was Alexis, something I mistook as being a good sign.
Turns out, when you meet someone who shares your name, you should run in the other direction.
Our first warning sign should have been the change in method of transportation and time of departure, a mere twelve hours before this was all supposed to take place. At 6am Saturday morning, a frantic woman whose broken English was only slightly worse than my broken "Spitalian," took us to a shady garage rental place where a wily driver sped us through bumpy roads at a breakneck and careless pace that was to serve as ominous foreshadowing for the next 48 hours.
We descended into the smokey haze of the outskirts of Cuzco, our driver honking at everything, including the potholes, as we passed a truck with immortalized Che mudflaps and screeched to a halt at the train station, walking past little puppies being carried in cardboard boxes, told to wait by the "Servicios de Seguridad," or as the emblem on their cuffs said, "S.S."
I spent the morning trying to read up on Machu Picchu. Hiram Bingham, the Yale professor and archaeologist who served as the real life basis for Indiana Jones, is still credited for "discovering" the city, even though the local people are the ones who lead him up there in the first place. He mistakenly believed Machu Picchu to be the lost city of Vilcabamba, the final refuge of the Incas during the Spanish conquest. At any rate, no one knows to this day what exactly Machu Picchu´s story is, though apparently every guide leading groups around makes crap up. "And here is where the king sat, and his shadow went down through the valley making a signal..." It is all bullshit.
Hence, one of the wonders of the world, which the emblematic Che himself called "a place that drives any dreamer to ecstasy."
We arrived at 11am in Aguas Calientes, a tiny town comprised of 90% tourists, a fact that makes it feel a bit like Peruvian Disneyland, with almost nothing but Pisco sour happy hours, and then a hot springs at the top of the hill that overlooks the river. The hot springs are overpriced and with all the crusty backpackers arriving for muscle relief, the water is a rather disheartening smelly green-brown water.
A drizzle brought us to our hostel, a noisy, confusing upstairs section to a pizzeria, complete with taped holes in every nook and cranny, and a groundfloor window that would neither shut all the way and certain not lock.
We had been told that a guide would meet us that evening, after enjoying all that the fabulous Aguas Calientes had to offer (which was mainly John beating me at chess and us passing the time by spending money on knicknacks to take home--oh the adventure!)
When the guide came, however, he was unable to provide us with train tickets for the next day, and said that some other woman in some other hostel, whose name he didn´t know, was "working on it." He did, however, tell us to wake up bright and early (430am) the next day so that we could see the sun rise over the mountain and Machu Picchu.
Our alarm clock, as neither of us own any timepiece, was our sheer nervousness, and that useful quality woke us up at 445 on the dot. We packed up our things, John taking a generous portion of the weight so that my back wouldn´t need to be reconstructed by any Hiram Binghams any time in the near future. We walked outside to the bus station and, just as a precaution, called our agency...
The conversation turned ugly, as I added sol after sol into the little payphone, hardly believing the burning sensation in my ears, that we would either have to leave our passports, basically the only thing of worth that we had in our posesssion, with the sleeping attendant at the desk of our indifferent hostel, or there would be no ticket back. "It´s not my problem if you don´t leave your passport (with a complete stranger while you go to Machu Picchu)," the horrible woman said in her forced sunshine.
I came stumbling back to John with the usual water flood that accompanies bitter moments. He had kept our place in line and everyone was finally starting to move into the buses that would take us into breathtaking dawn on the mountain.
"Uh, excuse me," said a sour faced woman with frizzy hair behind us who could have only been a Roald Dahl character come to life. "Uh, we´re kind of waiting here." I turned to her with as much patience as I could muster, "Yeah, well, we´ve been waiting a lot longer than you and anyway we´re probably going to leave the line in a couple minutes."
She rolls her eyes and says in that obnoxious "I´m going to pretend to say this under my breath but loud enough so you can hear" voice, "well you don´t have to be a BITCH about it." I turn to her and look into her eyes, wishing that I could slap her, "Excuse me?" John immediately returned, "Lady, you really don´t know what you´re getting into." I should have thrown water on her. While I tearfully and hysterically explained to John that we would need to try and get out of Aguas Calientes this morning, and now, I could hear the self-important complaints continue from her entitled little mouth.
We did leave the line, and watched the sunrise from the back of a line that took almost two hours to get through. When we finally had our turn at the window, with about ten people "translating" behind us, we ascertained that there were no available tickets back to Cuzco until Thursday. Our flight to Santiago was on Monday.
Feeling trapped and betrayed, we crossed the bridge back to our hostel in a daze. Handling it with as much grace as possible, I screamed expletives at the top of my lungs for about twenty minutes as John patted me on the back, and we moved on.
I sat down, not wanting to move or think, incapable of envisioning a week of being stranded and anonymous. And at just that moment, like something out of a movie that I would scoff at, a stray mutt came over to me and began licking my face, placing his head on his paws right next to me. He then curled up at my feet as I began to laugh, and just like that, the heaviness had been lifted. The dog walked us back to our hostel, looked back once, and then disappeared into the crowd.
And it was then that we discovered an alternate route out of Aguas Calientes, cheaper, if not on your body and mind then certainly on your pocketbook.
A young man at our hostel who spoke no English (again, I emphasize how poor both of our Spanish is, especially when fatigued and upset) outlined a Sound of Music esque escape route that would involve us taking an hour long train ride to the Hydro electric plant, climbing for two hours up to Santa Theresa and then taking a bus. It leaves at noon every day.
Elated, we jumped onto the first bus going to Machu Picchu not caring what the rest of the day would hold, and got a taste of how massive and awe-inspiring the site is as it capped the tops of the trees about half way up.
It knocked the wind out of me. Rows and rows of fastidious craftsmanship perfectly preserved, llamas grazing in the central "plaza," and history seeping up through our shoes at every step. Panting tourists and all, it made us forget everything for just the two hours that we had to explore.
The train to the hydro plant was crowded, not with tourists as we had been used to, but with Peruvians. We were told that it might behoove us more to take a Cambi, a little van in which unthinkable amounts of people are "smashed inside," as John put it, to Santa Maria, where we were assured there would be a "ton" of buses to take us to Cuzco.
The Cambi saw us squished in the back next to an elderly man and a woman and her baby, dust flying in our faces, stomachs churning at every little bump in the road, twisting and turning on unpaved roads with no guard railing, with the kind of drop that instantly fills you with a graphic image of your own mortality.
Halfway through the two hours of terror that we would plummett all together and make little more than a thud as we landed, we arrived in a tiny outcropping of shanties where, despite the protests of everyone inside the vehicle, two screaming kids were pulled up by their father to sit on the roof for the whole way to Quillabamba, a jungle town lying in wait at the end of the route.
When the Cambi sped away, we could fully take in the nature of Santa Maria. It reminded me of descriptions in Graham Greene´s "The Power and the Glory," the kind of desolate remoteness that I had never experienced before. One bus comes through the town every day, at 9pm. Our escape plan had just narrowed by 99%.
Across the dusty plaza, we spied a group of obvious foreigners like us. Three Brazilian twenty somethings with a Cusqueñan guide, all looking exasperated. Their story was worse than ours. The night before, their bus had broken down for five hours before they arrived in Ollantaytambo to take the train into Aguas Calientes. Then the agency had screwed them as well, but at least they still had their guide.
They convinced a local guy to give us all a ride to Cuzco, five hours away, for the hefty sum of fifty soles per person. He would have made a killing that night, if it weren´t for the smoke and hissing that began eminating from his engine an hour into the trip.
I made John take off his "lucky" elephant hair bracelet.
We walked up the road, feeling cursed and forbidden from ever reaching Cuzco again, arriving at a town called Huayopata, with population of not more than 200 people with all the phone lines dead, and one bar blasting top 40 dance music across from where we bought our bus ticket, a bus that would not wind up departing until 11pm that night, over six hours past when we arrived in town.
People walked by with passing curiousity at the spectacle of stranded foreigners sitting indefinitely on a wooden bench, but we hardly felt threatened. The woman who sold us our tickets also made delicious warm cake, one sol for a slice, and her son, not more than ten years old, showed us the tricks he had trained his earless dog to do, and wrestled with his younger brother in the ditch where one truck driver publically relieved himself at least five times in front of us.
We considered leaving in a produce truck, but there was no room, and no guarantee of that, too, not breaking down. It was humbling to learn that no matter how much money you can potentially throw around, sometimes you are just stuck. And in a country where over 50% of the people live below the poverty line, that is a good experience to have as a bigshot American.
The most gregarious of the Brazilians bought two bottles of wine and drank them both astoundingly fast, crying out for his "girl," his bed, and a Big Mac, as the little boy in the shop played a pan flute and told us of his aspiration to buy a saxaphone someday.
Boarding the bus was surreal, almost like the wrong ending to a play (say, Waiting for Godot). A creepy man with a few screws loose had been talking to John (who unlike me has too amiable a nature to just ignore people he doesn´t know), offering us a place to stay for the night. Shivers.
Moments before it showed up, John was beginning to break down, believing the entire deal to be just an illusive phantom.
At about 1am, our bus stopped without any explanation next to a police car. It was pitch dark but you could still see all the way down the mountain as the engine cut off. Someone explained that the road was only one way. They would have to let everyone from the other direction go first, and then we would get a turn.
Finally, it was our turn to ascend, the side of the road crumbling and the bus tilting so far, I clutched John´s hand with the knowledge that this was the end. Three or four times, the bus started and then backed down the hill, unable to get up the momentum for several attempts.
I thought of my favorite people, even sang a few verses of "Maria and the children"... when the bus tilts, when the car breaks, when I´m feeling sad... I simply remember my favorite things and then I don´t feel so...
We got into the enchanting city of Cuzco at 530am, and said a stunned farewell as we sped back to our hostel, the orange cast cobblestone streets quietly ushering us back into normalcy.
I am sitting in an apartment in Santiago, Chile now, listening to El Condor Pasa, covered by one of the many traditional pipes and all bands that John and I saw on one of our obnoxious tour groups. We’re not entirely sure if Paul Simon wrote a song in the vein of Peruvian music and it has now become a popular and familiar tourist lure, or if Paul Simon in fact stole a traditional tune and put some 1960s chic lyrics to it.
August is the first month of the Andean year, a time for planting, for new life. And at the end of this week, we will have reentered American time, settling back into routine that can be both comforting and stilting.
Reunited with Joaquin, one of my best friends from spring semester sophomore year, and met his lovely fiancé Pancha. It was fairly evident from gaps in the conversation that three years had passed, but I look forward to a week of human interaction outside of John and myself, outside of asking for directions or buying things, the tourist place we have relegated ourselves to.
Pancha’s apartment is full of flowers and candles, is sparse, clean, spacious, inviting, and well-appointed, as creative an tasteful as she seems to be in person. We have come a long way since our days in the Arequipan hostels, choking one night on smoke eminating from drunk men burning trash outside.
Pancha has relinquished the entire place this week so that John and I can feel at home in a space to ourselves.
Santiago made us pay a $100 tariff to enter the country, which is equivalent to the visa fee Chileans have to pay for entering America, so I suppose it’s fair. The city from our night ride here gave off the aura of many other cities, American, European. There’s even a Starbucks on the corner. We really have no idea what the city holds yet, except the probable vague historical residue from dictatorships that we helped to instate.
Recently another, perhaps more adventurous, friend implored me to stay in Peru, to get to know and love Lima the way that she did. I am still certainly full of wanderlust, and I do love Peru, despite the last month’s rockiness. But we are weighted with six months’ worth of luggage, and not a whole lot of time to plan. Spontaneaity and mountains of crap hardly go together.
I made John put away his “lucky” elephant hair bracelet, because so far it has seemingly given us, if not bad luck, certainly no fortunate advantage.
When we got back to Cuzco, we spent the afternoon watching “Amores Perros” in a delectable Danish and Peruvian owned café/theater where you can order soup and project whatever DVD you want.
We took a bus ride through the little town of Ollantaytambo, hiking up through the ruins of the Temple of the Sun. Somehow the Incas moved rocks from just south of Cuco all the way to the top of the mountain, because the kind of rocks used in construction were not native to the mountain itself. The town below these majestic and baffling ruins has a colorful market and canals running through the city. A little girl trying to sell dolls follows me, imploring, “Miss America!” The Urubamba valley is filled with pastoral villages, soccer matches, and diligent brick masons.
Playing Apus* Little Game
*a popular Simpsons character famous for saying, "Silly customer! You cannot hurt a twinkie!", Apu is different from Apus, which are mountain Gods.
When we returned, we booked our highly anticipated trip to Machu Picchu with a travel agent whose name, coincidentally, was Alexis, something I mistook as being a good sign.
Turns out, when you meet someone who shares your name, you should run in the other direction.
Our first warning sign should have been the change in method of transportation and time of departure, a mere twelve hours before this was all supposed to take place. At 6am Saturday morning, a frantic woman whose broken English was only slightly worse than my broken "Spitalian," took us to a shady garage rental place where a wily driver sped us through bumpy roads at a breakneck and careless pace that was to serve as ominous foreshadowing for the next 48 hours.
We descended into the smokey haze of the outskirts of Cuzco, our driver honking at everything, including the potholes, as we passed a truck with immortalized Che mudflaps and screeched to a halt at the train station, walking past little puppies being carried in cardboard boxes, told to wait by the "Servicios de Seguridad," or as the emblem on their cuffs said, "S.S."
I spent the morning trying to read up on Machu Picchu. Hiram Bingham, the Yale professor and archaeologist who served as the real life basis for Indiana Jones, is still credited for "discovering" the city, even though the local people are the ones who lead him up there in the first place. He mistakenly believed Machu Picchu to be the lost city of Vilcabamba, the final refuge of the Incas during the Spanish conquest. At any rate, no one knows to this day what exactly Machu Picchu´s story is, though apparently every guide leading groups around makes crap up. "And here is where the king sat, and his shadow went down through the valley making a signal..." It is all bullshit.
Hence, one of the wonders of the world, which the emblematic Che himself called "a place that drives any dreamer to ecstasy."
We arrived at 11am in Aguas Calientes, a tiny town comprised of 90% tourists, a fact that makes it feel a bit like Peruvian Disneyland, with almost nothing but Pisco sour happy hours, and then a hot springs at the top of the hill that overlooks the river. The hot springs are overpriced and with all the crusty backpackers arriving for muscle relief, the water is a rather disheartening smelly green-brown water.
A drizzle brought us to our hostel, a noisy, confusing upstairs section to a pizzeria, complete with taped holes in every nook and cranny, and a groundfloor window that would neither shut all the way and certain not lock.
We had been told that a guide would meet us that evening, after enjoying all that the fabulous Aguas Calientes had to offer (which was mainly John beating me at chess and us passing the time by spending money on knicknacks to take home--oh the adventure!)
When the guide came, however, he was unable to provide us with train tickets for the next day, and said that some other woman in some other hostel, whose name he didn´t know, was "working on it." He did, however, tell us to wake up bright and early (430am) the next day so that we could see the sun rise over the mountain and Machu Picchu.
Our alarm clock, as neither of us own any timepiece, was our sheer nervousness, and that useful quality woke us up at 445 on the dot. We packed up our things, John taking a generous portion of the weight so that my back wouldn´t need to be reconstructed by any Hiram Binghams any time in the near future. We walked outside to the bus station and, just as a precaution, called our agency...
The conversation turned ugly, as I added sol after sol into the little payphone, hardly believing the burning sensation in my ears, that we would either have to leave our passports, basically the only thing of worth that we had in our posesssion, with the sleeping attendant at the desk of our indifferent hostel, or there would be no ticket back. "It´s not my problem if you don´t leave your passport (with a complete stranger while you go to Machu Picchu)," the horrible woman said in her forced sunshine.
I came stumbling back to John with the usual water flood that accompanies bitter moments. He had kept our place in line and everyone was finally starting to move into the buses that would take us into breathtaking dawn on the mountain.
"Uh, excuse me," said a sour faced woman with frizzy hair behind us who could have only been a Roald Dahl character come to life. "Uh, we´re kind of waiting here." I turned to her with as much patience as I could muster, "Yeah, well, we´ve been waiting a lot longer than you and anyway we´re probably going to leave the line in a couple minutes."
She rolls her eyes and says in that obnoxious "I´m going to pretend to say this under my breath but loud enough so you can hear" voice, "well you don´t have to be a BITCH about it." I turn to her and look into her eyes, wishing that I could slap her, "Excuse me?" John immediately returned, "Lady, you really don´t know what you´re getting into." I should have thrown water on her. While I tearfully and hysterically explained to John that we would need to try and get out of Aguas Calientes this morning, and now, I could hear the self-important complaints continue from her entitled little mouth.
We did leave the line, and watched the sunrise from the back of a line that took almost two hours to get through. When we finally had our turn at the window, with about ten people "translating" behind us, we ascertained that there were no available tickets back to Cuzco until Thursday. Our flight to Santiago was on Monday.
Feeling trapped and betrayed, we crossed the bridge back to our hostel in a daze. Handling it with as much grace as possible, I screamed expletives at the top of my lungs for about twenty minutes as John patted me on the back, and we moved on.
I sat down, not wanting to move or think, incapable of envisioning a week of being stranded and anonymous. And at just that moment, like something out of a movie that I would scoff at, a stray mutt came over to me and began licking my face, placing his head on his paws right next to me. He then curled up at my feet as I began to laugh, and just like that, the heaviness had been lifted. The dog walked us back to our hostel, looked back once, and then disappeared into the crowd.
And it was then that we discovered an alternate route out of Aguas Calientes, cheaper, if not on your body and mind then certainly on your pocketbook.
A young man at our hostel who spoke no English (again, I emphasize how poor both of our Spanish is, especially when fatigued and upset) outlined a Sound of Music esque escape route that would involve us taking an hour long train ride to the Hydro electric plant, climbing for two hours up to Santa Theresa and then taking a bus. It leaves at noon every day.
Elated, we jumped onto the first bus going to Machu Picchu not caring what the rest of the day would hold, and got a taste of how massive and awe-inspiring the site is as it capped the tops of the trees about half way up.
It knocked the wind out of me. Rows and rows of fastidious craftsmanship perfectly preserved, llamas grazing in the central "plaza," and history seeping up through our shoes at every step. Panting tourists and all, it made us forget everything for just the two hours that we had to explore.
The train to the hydro plant was crowded, not with tourists as we had been used to, but with Peruvians. We were told that it might behoove us more to take a Cambi, a little van in which unthinkable amounts of people are "smashed inside," as John put it, to Santa Maria, where we were assured there would be a "ton" of buses to take us to Cuzco.
The Cambi saw us squished in the back next to an elderly man and a woman and her baby, dust flying in our faces, stomachs churning at every little bump in the road, twisting and turning on unpaved roads with no guard railing, with the kind of drop that instantly fills you with a graphic image of your own mortality.
Halfway through the two hours of terror that we would plummett all together and make little more than a thud as we landed, we arrived in a tiny outcropping of shanties where, despite the protests of everyone inside the vehicle, two screaming kids were pulled up by their father to sit on the roof for the whole way to Quillabamba, a jungle town lying in wait at the end of the route.
When the Cambi sped away, we could fully take in the nature of Santa Maria. It reminded me of descriptions in Graham Greene´s "The Power and the Glory," the kind of desolate remoteness that I had never experienced before. One bus comes through the town every day, at 9pm. Our escape plan had just narrowed by 99%.
Across the dusty plaza, we spied a group of obvious foreigners like us. Three Brazilian twenty somethings with a Cusqueñan guide, all looking exasperated. Their story was worse than ours. The night before, their bus had broken down for five hours before they arrived in Ollantaytambo to take the train into Aguas Calientes. Then the agency had screwed them as well, but at least they still had their guide.
They convinced a local guy to give us all a ride to Cuzco, five hours away, for the hefty sum of fifty soles per person. He would have made a killing that night, if it weren´t for the smoke and hissing that began eminating from his engine an hour into the trip.
I made John take off his "lucky" elephant hair bracelet.
We walked up the road, feeling cursed and forbidden from ever reaching Cuzco again, arriving at a town called Huayopata, with population of not more than 200 people with all the phone lines dead, and one bar blasting top 40 dance music across from where we bought our bus ticket, a bus that would not wind up departing until 11pm that night, over six hours past when we arrived in town.
People walked by with passing curiousity at the spectacle of stranded foreigners sitting indefinitely on a wooden bench, but we hardly felt threatened. The woman who sold us our tickets also made delicious warm cake, one sol for a slice, and her son, not more than ten years old, showed us the tricks he had trained his earless dog to do, and wrestled with his younger brother in the ditch where one truck driver publically relieved himself at least five times in front of us.
We considered leaving in a produce truck, but there was no room, and no guarantee of that, too, not breaking down. It was humbling to learn that no matter how much money you can potentially throw around, sometimes you are just stuck. And in a country where over 50% of the people live below the poverty line, that is a good experience to have as a bigshot American.
The most gregarious of the Brazilians bought two bottles of wine and drank them both astoundingly fast, crying out for his "girl," his bed, and a Big Mac, as the little boy in the shop played a pan flute and told us of his aspiration to buy a saxaphone someday.
Boarding the bus was surreal, almost like the wrong ending to a play (say, Waiting for Godot). A creepy man with a few screws loose had been talking to John (who unlike me has too amiable a nature to just ignore people he doesn´t know), offering us a place to stay for the night. Shivers.
Moments before it showed up, John was beginning to break down, believing the entire deal to be just an illusive phantom.
At about 1am, our bus stopped without any explanation next to a police car. It was pitch dark but you could still see all the way down the mountain as the engine cut off. Someone explained that the road was only one way. They would have to let everyone from the other direction go first, and then we would get a turn.
Finally, it was our turn to ascend, the side of the road crumbling and the bus tilting so far, I clutched John´s hand with the knowledge that this was the end. Three or four times, the bus started and then backed down the hill, unable to get up the momentum for several attempts.
I thought of my favorite people, even sang a few verses of "Maria and the children"... when the bus tilts, when the car breaks, when I´m feeling sad... I simply remember my favorite things and then I don´t feel so...
We got into the enchanting city of Cuzco at 530am, and said a stunned farewell as we sped back to our hostel, the orange cast cobblestone streets quietly ushering us back into normalcy.
Thursday, August 9, 2007
Dante´s Infernal Auto
We have abandoned the buildings of porous sillar, drawn from the dusty Añashuayco quarry beneath Mt. Chachani. We have left Brian*, our racist Midwestern bleached blonde former boss, and Kelly*, his perpetually fatigued, backstabbing Canadian sidekick who has a Peruvian fiance but cannot pronounce the word "pueblo."
Do I sound angry? I do not want to write too much publically of what happened. I will highlight, though, that John and I were essentially fired after four days at The School That Shall Not Be Named. Their reasoning for expelling us without a second thought after having never seen us teach, never having consulted us about the fragility of our status as employees, was essentially that John was homesick and I had E. Coli.
Brian rather broodingly remarked, "So--you have an official diagnosis?" Yes. I went to the doctor. He tested my blood. Both drawn from the arm and from my limitless sessions in the baño.
"But--don´t we all naturally have E. Coli in our bodies?" Yes, I said, "We also have Herpes naturally dormant in our bodies, but I don´t have a raging case of that."
The violation of trust is enormous, but I do not want to dwell on it.
After passing into a deep and blank slumber, we decided to take a two day tour of Colca Canyon and the surrounding countryside, to brush off the sense of betrayal and failure and to mute the memories of Brian´s abhorrent personality, a complicated mix of disdain for Peruvians, rejection of his own half Native American heritage, and do gooder misanthropy that gave me the heebie jeebies from the beginning.
We went to see Juanita, the frozen Inca maiden who was sacrified on the frozen peak of Ampato hundreds of years ago and has stayed almost perfectly preserved with a pinched, eerie expression of fear on her face. Young girls, it seems, never get it easy round these parts. In Santa Catalina convent, rich families would pay huge sums to have their preteen daughters locked away in order to atone for the sins of the entire family.
Apparently the Incas were the first to tap into the benefits of stem cell research, as our guide pointed out. They believed that umbelicle cords had restorative powers and would feed them back to their sick kids.
But anyway, we were driven by a Quechuan speaking driver named Dante, who, like the literary figure, guided us in ascending and (oh my) descending circles, veering so close to the edge of infinity sometimes that I tore a hole in the seat in front of me.
We passed through the Vicuña territory, through the incredible biodiversity of Peru. Bright green orange blobs of moss, a sharp contrast to the black stones and the icy marshes.
We hiked through the mountains in Coporaque all the way up to some pre-Incan tombs, skulls and bones scattered with Coca leaves, homage by the locals after looters practically destroyed the site. The skulls were elongated by ritualistically placing sticks on each side since birth.
When the Franciscans came around and saw this, they disapproved and would water torture anyone perpetuating the tradition. According to our guide, Oliver, his mouth full of coca leaves and ash, talking slower and slower, going around in circles. "I think he´s had too much Coca," said Murray, the Irish half of a wonderful gay couple living in Milan with whom John and I bonded.
A nice Greek woman suffering migraines, some obnoxious French women, a loud and egotistical New Zealander. A motley crew.
After the hike we went to some hot outdoor springs, a bubbling stew of French and Italian tourists getting borracho on Pisco. The water a mix of salt, calcium, zinc and wealth.
In the middle of beautiful Chivay square, they were having a bonfire when we returned. The plaza was nowhere near the grandiosity of Arequipa´s, but with a marching band playing its collective heart out, and people dancing wildly, I found it much more inviting. Actually, I have begun to loosen my hypochondria at eating, allowing myself to enjoy the sweet taste of alpaca meat, and then carried off my feet to whirl and shuffle with one of the traditional Peruvian dance exhibitionists at our restaurant. The Andean pipes playing a "Let it Be" cover.
The next day we rose at 5am and drove by the virtually dried up Colca river, the powerful force that once carved out the second deepest canyon in the world reduced to a geriatric trickle because of Arequipa's LA-like irrigation needs.
We ran through Pinchollo, which our guide told us is Quechuan for "short penis," which then woke up about 90% of the bus.
In the condor´s swooping haunt, we could see them gliding, surfing the wind, seemingly for the sheer enjoyment of it. Perhaps hunting, but perhaps, like most predators in the world, participating in ritual for reasons that we will never know. One particularly large brown female came so close overhead that we could hear her wings striking the frozen air.
On our way back, I stared at the stacks and stacks of rocks by the side of the road, in the middle of nowhere, each representing a wish.
Having not bathed in almost a week, peeing in a deserted building filled with broken glass on the side of the road, John and I feel free. The shock has given way to gratitude for the strange, roundabout message that we are supposed to do something else.
We are back in Cuzco after several days of regrouping and trying to catch up on sleep and sanity.
I remember that Brian went on and on about how great it was that Arequipa had a mall with a multiplex in it. "Cuzco doesn´t have movie theaters." Well, they do. We just wandered up one of the many cobblestone 45 degree angle calles and found the hidden treasure of a place that screens old movies for the price of lunch.
We had a final dinner last night with our one friend here Ronald, an Arequipan and the only employee who spoke up in our defense at a meeting held when we left.
We´re looking for ways to work while we´re here, before heading back, and at times we can feel frustrated having packed for six months. But I can tell you that it feels good. We are lucky.
*names have been changed for obvious reasons
Do I sound angry? I do not want to write too much publically of what happened. I will highlight, though, that John and I were essentially fired after four days at The School That Shall Not Be Named. Their reasoning for expelling us without a second thought after having never seen us teach, never having consulted us about the fragility of our status as employees, was essentially that John was homesick and I had E. Coli.
Brian rather broodingly remarked, "So--you have an official diagnosis?" Yes. I went to the doctor. He tested my blood. Both drawn from the arm and from my limitless sessions in the baño.
"But--don´t we all naturally have E. Coli in our bodies?" Yes, I said, "We also have Herpes naturally dormant in our bodies, but I don´t have a raging case of that."
The violation of trust is enormous, but I do not want to dwell on it.
After passing into a deep and blank slumber, we decided to take a two day tour of Colca Canyon and the surrounding countryside, to brush off the sense of betrayal and failure and to mute the memories of Brian´s abhorrent personality, a complicated mix of disdain for Peruvians, rejection of his own half Native American heritage, and do gooder misanthropy that gave me the heebie jeebies from the beginning.
We went to see Juanita, the frozen Inca maiden who was sacrified on the frozen peak of Ampato hundreds of years ago and has stayed almost perfectly preserved with a pinched, eerie expression of fear on her face. Young girls, it seems, never get it easy round these parts. In Santa Catalina convent, rich families would pay huge sums to have their preteen daughters locked away in order to atone for the sins of the entire family.
Apparently the Incas were the first to tap into the benefits of stem cell research, as our guide pointed out. They believed that umbelicle cords had restorative powers and would feed them back to their sick kids.
But anyway, we were driven by a Quechuan speaking driver named Dante, who, like the literary figure, guided us in ascending and (oh my) descending circles, veering so close to the edge of infinity sometimes that I tore a hole in the seat in front of me.
We passed through the Vicuña territory, through the incredible biodiversity of Peru. Bright green orange blobs of moss, a sharp contrast to the black stones and the icy marshes.
We hiked through the mountains in Coporaque all the way up to some pre-Incan tombs, skulls and bones scattered with Coca leaves, homage by the locals after looters practically destroyed the site. The skulls were elongated by ritualistically placing sticks on each side since birth.
When the Franciscans came around and saw this, they disapproved and would water torture anyone perpetuating the tradition. According to our guide, Oliver, his mouth full of coca leaves and ash, talking slower and slower, going around in circles. "I think he´s had too much Coca," said Murray, the Irish half of a wonderful gay couple living in Milan with whom John and I bonded.
A nice Greek woman suffering migraines, some obnoxious French women, a loud and egotistical New Zealander. A motley crew.
After the hike we went to some hot outdoor springs, a bubbling stew of French and Italian tourists getting borracho on Pisco. The water a mix of salt, calcium, zinc and wealth.
In the middle of beautiful Chivay square, they were having a bonfire when we returned. The plaza was nowhere near the grandiosity of Arequipa´s, but with a marching band playing its collective heart out, and people dancing wildly, I found it much more inviting. Actually, I have begun to loosen my hypochondria at eating, allowing myself to enjoy the sweet taste of alpaca meat, and then carried off my feet to whirl and shuffle with one of the traditional Peruvian dance exhibitionists at our restaurant. The Andean pipes playing a "Let it Be" cover.
The next day we rose at 5am and drove by the virtually dried up Colca river, the powerful force that once carved out the second deepest canyon in the world reduced to a geriatric trickle because of Arequipa's LA-like irrigation needs.
We ran through Pinchollo, which our guide told us is Quechuan for "short penis," which then woke up about 90% of the bus.
In the condor´s swooping haunt, we could see them gliding, surfing the wind, seemingly for the sheer enjoyment of it. Perhaps hunting, but perhaps, like most predators in the world, participating in ritual for reasons that we will never know. One particularly large brown female came so close overhead that we could hear her wings striking the frozen air.
On our way back, I stared at the stacks and stacks of rocks by the side of the road, in the middle of nowhere, each representing a wish.
Having not bathed in almost a week, peeing in a deserted building filled with broken glass on the side of the road, John and I feel free. The shock has given way to gratitude for the strange, roundabout message that we are supposed to do something else.
We are back in Cuzco after several days of regrouping and trying to catch up on sleep and sanity.
I remember that Brian went on and on about how great it was that Arequipa had a mall with a multiplex in it. "Cuzco doesn´t have movie theaters." Well, they do. We just wandered up one of the many cobblestone 45 degree angle calles and found the hidden treasure of a place that screens old movies for the price of lunch.
We had a final dinner last night with our one friend here Ronald, an Arequipan and the only employee who spoke up in our defense at a meeting held when we left.
We´re looking for ways to work while we´re here, before heading back, and at times we can feel frustrated having packed for six months. But I can tell you that it feels good. We are lucky.
*names have been changed for obvious reasons
Monday, August 6, 2007
A Surrealist´s Pen
... is what I must use for this entry.
I will write more soon, trying to recapture the rage with which my last four hours have been spent.
The job is over, through no fault of mine or John´s.
We are reinventing this trip.
I will write more soon, trying to recapture the rage with which my last four hours have been spent.
The job is over, through no fault of mine or John´s.
We are reinventing this trip.
Saturday, August 4, 2007
Honing my Kraft
Since I last wrote, dear readers, I paid another visit to the medico. And let me tell you: watching a trained professional´s eyes bug out of his skull like he has just seen Jessica Rabbit while in fact he is surveying the results of your fluids test is surely a primary experience to be checked off by those who plan on making a career out of scooping up rare and beastly pathogens. However, for me, the sight was a bit alarming.
So the ultimate plan for my "eecolee" is that I start taking Cipro, drinking Pepto Bismol after every "meal"--though I´m not sure what you would call my diet lately. I am forbidden any meat, fruit or vegetables, and was told not to trust any food not prepared by my own hand. Which means, since we´re still living in the Bates Hospedaje without a kitchen, that we must come up with more creative means of packing the life in.
John, of course, has rather stoically eaten the same things I have the last few days, which has made me unfairly snappy, as someone who would much rather enjoy the savory flavors of Peruvian cooking without crawling home after--"You don´t have to do this! I do! I DO!" Relishing my own self pity at having to down a steady regimine of saltines, gatorade, noodles, instant soups, and yogurt.
We bought an instant water boiler, which racked up 120 Soles at the haven for Rich Peruvians, the Mall Saga. So far we had only tried instant soups in it, cleaning it out with coffee filters, whatever we had onhand, soap, and several boilings of bottled water.
Yesterday I worked through my classes with one dream in my head: delectable Kraft Macaroni and Cheese.
Which apparently a laughing Jah did not want us to have last night.
After an hour long process of cleaning out the water heater, the grimy bowls that we had bought, and then buying the last water available from the hostel, we began licking our chops.
After popping the loveable noodles in, however, I began to smell the thin crackle of smoke eminating from the plug. John lept to my aid, reaching down and jiggling the outlet around, as it sparked and hissed, like some gallant knight battling a dragon into submission, while keeping his finger on the boil button.
We tried to boil the macaroni so many times in vain that it forced us out of the room and up and down stairs trying furiously to move couches, find other plugs, but apparently the only outlet that would fit our particular plug was in the room. The angry plug.
Finally, when we resigned ourselves to eating partially cooked noodles, we opened the container and realized that the steam inside had cooked the noodles into a lumpy gruel that would have made Oliver turn his nose up in disdain.
Disheartened, we tried to add the cheese, which may have seemed wise at the time but only made the resemblence to bile far too uncanny to support.
We dined on pecans, gatorade, and The Simpsons.
It has been so far a wake up call to the advantages that I enjoyed at home, and the simplicity of a full, peaceful stomach.
So the ultimate plan for my "eecolee" is that I start taking Cipro, drinking Pepto Bismol after every "meal"--though I´m not sure what you would call my diet lately. I am forbidden any meat, fruit or vegetables, and was told not to trust any food not prepared by my own hand. Which means, since we´re still living in the Bates Hospedaje without a kitchen, that we must come up with more creative means of packing the life in.
John, of course, has rather stoically eaten the same things I have the last few days, which has made me unfairly snappy, as someone who would much rather enjoy the savory flavors of Peruvian cooking without crawling home after--"You don´t have to do this! I do! I DO!" Relishing my own self pity at having to down a steady regimine of saltines, gatorade, noodles, instant soups, and yogurt.
We bought an instant water boiler, which racked up 120 Soles at the haven for Rich Peruvians, the Mall Saga. So far we had only tried instant soups in it, cleaning it out with coffee filters, whatever we had onhand, soap, and several boilings of bottled water.
Yesterday I worked through my classes with one dream in my head: delectable Kraft Macaroni and Cheese.
Which apparently a laughing Jah did not want us to have last night.
After an hour long process of cleaning out the water heater, the grimy bowls that we had bought, and then buying the last water available from the hostel, we began licking our chops.
After popping the loveable noodles in, however, I began to smell the thin crackle of smoke eminating from the plug. John lept to my aid, reaching down and jiggling the outlet around, as it sparked and hissed, like some gallant knight battling a dragon into submission, while keeping his finger on the boil button.
We tried to boil the macaroni so many times in vain that it forced us out of the room and up and down stairs trying furiously to move couches, find other plugs, but apparently the only outlet that would fit our particular plug was in the room. The angry plug.
Finally, when we resigned ourselves to eating partially cooked noodles, we opened the container and realized that the steam inside had cooked the noodles into a lumpy gruel that would have made Oliver turn his nose up in disdain.
Disheartened, we tried to add the cheese, which may have seemed wise at the time but only made the resemblence to bile far too uncanny to support.
We dined on pecans, gatorade, and The Simpsons.
It has been so far a wake up call to the advantages that I enjoyed at home, and the simplicity of a full, peaceful stomach.
Thursday, August 2, 2007
Eco Lye
It has been a rough twenty four hours. They took me to the doctor today when I woke up again with a fever and intense stomach pain. The diagnosis for now is e. coli, but I have to return tomorrow at 7am for more guinea pig poking and prodding.
Through all of this, we had to change hostels, because someone else had booked our room. Out of the frying pan, into the fire. Our current hostel is run by a Spanish speaking Norman Bates, has a moving ceiling, and doesn't provide toilet paper for its guests.
All of this moving around, and we still haven't fully unpacked. And we're still expected to work through whatever befalls us. Through the insomnia, bacterial infestations...
Really makes you ponder what you came here for.
Through all of this, we had to change hostels, because someone else had booked our room. Out of the frying pan, into the fire. Our current hostel is run by a Spanish speaking Norman Bates, has a moving ceiling, and doesn't provide toilet paper for its guests.
All of this moving around, and we still haven't fully unpacked. And we're still expected to work through whatever befalls us. Through the insomnia, bacterial infestations...
Really makes you ponder what you came here for.
Wednesday, August 1, 2007
A good place to get sick
So, when I couldn´t even finish a bowl of Chicken Noodle Soup this afternoon without having to run to the bathroom, John and I set forth for the pharmacy. Just as we were walking out, with antibiotics and fever medication in hand, I realized with a sickening splash that I was projectile vomiting all over the shampo aisle and ice cream freezer.
Of course, one can only imagine what would have happened at CVS--people would have rushed to get me out and save face.
As I crouched down feeling humliated and disemboweled, I felt on my neck and forehead the cool, nurturing hand of one of the pharmacists, a kind round-faced woman who kept saying, "Pobrecita, pobrecita--what have you eaten?"
She hled up a cotton wad with alcohol up to my nose as the security guarded, looking concerned, pulled a stool up for me to sit down. The guy cleaning up my mess didn´t even seem annoyed, but laughed as the pharmacist yelled at a woman leaving, "It was your sandwiches that did this, wasn´t it?"
An elderly woman dolled up in finery with large sunglasses and quite the bouffant came in, took a look. "Excuse me," she said, "are you Americans?" I weakly nodded, feeling highly disrespectful.
However, the old woman just wanted to help. "You know," she said to a pallid John, "sometimes you come and have problems so high up."
I am taking meds now for what most people seem to think is a bacterial infection from the food. Am about to teach my last class for the day after having missed my afternoon.
However, the pain I suffered was purely physical. I was completely taken care of in that pharmacy; the cultural difference is astounding. Instead of making me feel bad for making a terrible scene, they dealt with what I needed in the moment.
Of course, one can only imagine what would have happened at CVS--people would have rushed to get me out and save face.
As I crouched down feeling humliated and disemboweled, I felt on my neck and forehead the cool, nurturing hand of one of the pharmacists, a kind round-faced woman who kept saying, "Pobrecita, pobrecita--what have you eaten?"
She hled up a cotton wad with alcohol up to my nose as the security guarded, looking concerned, pulled a stool up for me to sit down. The guy cleaning up my mess didn´t even seem annoyed, but laughed as the pharmacist yelled at a woman leaving, "It was your sandwiches that did this, wasn´t it?"
An elderly woman dolled up in finery with large sunglasses and quite the bouffant came in, took a look. "Excuse me," she said, "are you Americans?" I weakly nodded, feeling highly disrespectful.
However, the old woman just wanted to help. "You know," she said to a pallid John, "sometimes you come and have problems so high up."
I am taking meds now for what most people seem to think is a bacterial infection from the food. Am about to teach my last class for the day after having missed my afternoon.
However, the pain I suffered was purely physical. I was completely taken care of in that pharmacy; the cultural difference is astounding. Instead of making me feel bad for making a terrible scene, they dealt with what I needed in the moment.
Illin´
So, I´m sick. Wouldn´t you know, on the first day of work. Just had my first class... actually managed to get some laughs out of the students despite that fact that my whole lesson plan went assunder when I realized I had been working with the wrong book. Kind of winged it for two hours. Finally all that improv of my youth comes in handy.
Flulike symptoms are plaguing me, with a fever, chills, general body ache... I went to sleep at 9pm last night after having slept most of the day anyway. I have more classes to teach, from 4-9, so I´m not sure if I´ll make it.
But yes, we are plodding ahead. Indeed.
Flulike symptoms are plaguing me, with a fever, chills, general body ache... I went to sleep at 9pm last night after having slept most of the day anyway. I have more classes to teach, from 4-9, so I´m not sure if I´ll make it.
But yes, we are plodding ahead. Indeed.
Monday, July 30, 2007
El Sombrero De Fofo
In less than two days, John and I will begin what we came here to do. And yet, here, Monday, I found myself in bed until almost noon munching delicious little galletas with sesame seeds on top, reading Gabriel Garcia Marquez in an "hospedaje" still reverberating with revving engines, dog barks, people shouting, slamming doors.
We tried to buy some kind of a sedative that would knock me out like a heavyweight punch and drown out any yips or crashes during the night. But you need a prescription for anything even mildly sleep-inducive. So I bought Valerian root and somewhere in the process managed to convince the pharmacist that I needed ear tampons.
It is as if for the last couple days we have been floating, suspended in some kind of limbo where we become increasingly distanced from work.
It turns out, also, that I will be teaching a group of 10-13 year olds. WHOOP!
In half an hour we will begin the search for housing, which apparently entails starting from square one, looking at classifieds. I have felt frustrated for the past twenty four hours because of my boss´s somewhat jovial bigotry--like celebrating Miller´s acquisition of Cusquena, the Peruvian beer, or lamenting not having enough places to play golf, or that African Americans´"accents" aren´t audible in dubbed films.
This plus my lack of sleep make for a sense of inutility or perhaps regret.
We passed by a woman swiming in a hammock next to a llama, looking over into the flowing current that runs through Arequipa. If only all suspension could be relaxing.
We tried to buy some kind of a sedative that would knock me out like a heavyweight punch and drown out any yips or crashes during the night. But you need a prescription for anything even mildly sleep-inducive. So I bought Valerian root and somewhere in the process managed to convince the pharmacist that I needed ear tampons.
It is as if for the last couple days we have been floating, suspended in some kind of limbo where we become increasingly distanced from work.
It turns out, also, that I will be teaching a group of 10-13 year olds. WHOOP!
In half an hour we will begin the search for housing, which apparently entails starting from square one, looking at classifieds. I have felt frustrated for the past twenty four hours because of my boss´s somewhat jovial bigotry--like celebrating Miller´s acquisition of Cusquena, the Peruvian beer, or lamenting not having enough places to play golf, or that African Americans´"accents" aren´t audible in dubbed films.
This plus my lack of sleep make for a sense of inutility or perhaps regret.
We passed by a woman swiming in a hammock next to a llama, looking over into the flowing current that runs through Arequipa. If only all suspension could be relaxing.
Sunday, July 29, 2007
El Condor Pasa
I miss Cuzco. Our last day taking in the green central fountain with white swans and lacy patterns, the huge flags, the bright red brass and boom marching bands for Independence Day...
We huffed and puffed to a playground perched halfway between the "Cristo Blanco" and the intermittent blasts of celebratory rifle fire below. Found some giggling kids who joked with us and sold us ornamented necklaces and then ran off as if we might take back the one sole we had given them...
Went to a museum of Pre-Columbian art and learned that Georges Braque actually claimed to have "been inspired by" (ie courteously stolen)a "primitive Peruvian cubism." Indeed, one of the sculptures dated between the years 1-800 AD was of a potato portrayed from every different angle.
At the door read: "Greatness of a people is not ascertained by conquests or rides but by development of social systems and relation to the natural environment."
Our bus ride yesterday took twelve hours. The bus had toilet paper for one hour. I was not nauseated for the same period of time. To comfort me as I staggered back up to the double deck after having paid homage to the toilet downstairs, John began telling me about the stories he would make up for Craig as a kid, going through the alphabet animals with replacing the adjectives to things like "Mass murdering moose."
"And one time, the vomiting vulture..."
I glared and turned to the arrid yellow of the hills stretching before us, scattered with stone houses, cemetaries with flowered crosses sticking up out of the dirt, sheep following blindly. People washing clothes in snakelike streams, towns that looked like military barracks.
Through Puno, where Lake Titicaca stretched and reclined. Over the Altiplano, which made John remember Clint Eastwood.
We stopped, too, in a rather desolate town that apparently produces the most counterfeit currency. As we left, we could see everyone in town running toward a building that was in the throws of a giant fire, flames shooting everywhere, engulfing a bus parked behind it.
As the sun set over cold, waving grass and far off mountains, we rather jarringly realized that we had been stopped for thirty minutes on the side of the road. No explanation, we just started moving again, eventually, as the impending darkness and isolation tightened.
One more stop at the Puestro de Control Cuarentenario, part of the Minesterio de Agricultura, and we could only make out shapes for the last three hours, which was comforting considering the long drop on either side of the winding highway.
Finally, I have started feeling homesick, helped only by blips of Cajamarca, a music resembling Appalacchian bluegrass, on the 70-year-old Radio Peru. I know that it has only been one full week, but the transition to this very dry and very Spanish-looking city has been a little sticky.
I was so enraptured by Cusco´s culture, that now I find myself bubbling over with negativity toward our new home which has a McDonalds and Radioshack and a mall.
Still, the week has just begun. And our real work starts in a few days. I will be working from 730-930am, then 5-9pm. I will let you know how to reach me as soon as I get my phone off of the black market, as reccomended by our boss.
I miss you all.
Lex
We huffed and puffed to a playground perched halfway between the "Cristo Blanco" and the intermittent blasts of celebratory rifle fire below. Found some giggling kids who joked with us and sold us ornamented necklaces and then ran off as if we might take back the one sole we had given them...
Went to a museum of Pre-Columbian art and learned that Georges Braque actually claimed to have "been inspired by" (ie courteously stolen)a "primitive Peruvian cubism." Indeed, one of the sculptures dated between the years 1-800 AD was of a potato portrayed from every different angle.
At the door read: "Greatness of a people is not ascertained by conquests or rides but by development of social systems and relation to the natural environment."
Our bus ride yesterday took twelve hours. The bus had toilet paper for one hour. I was not nauseated for the same period of time. To comfort me as I staggered back up to the double deck after having paid homage to the toilet downstairs, John began telling me about the stories he would make up for Craig as a kid, going through the alphabet animals with replacing the adjectives to things like "Mass murdering moose."
"And one time, the vomiting vulture..."
I glared and turned to the arrid yellow of the hills stretching before us, scattered with stone houses, cemetaries with flowered crosses sticking up out of the dirt, sheep following blindly. People washing clothes in snakelike streams, towns that looked like military barracks.
Through Puno, where Lake Titicaca stretched and reclined. Over the Altiplano, which made John remember Clint Eastwood.
We stopped, too, in a rather desolate town that apparently produces the most counterfeit currency. As we left, we could see everyone in town running toward a building that was in the throws of a giant fire, flames shooting everywhere, engulfing a bus parked behind it.
As the sun set over cold, waving grass and far off mountains, we rather jarringly realized that we had been stopped for thirty minutes on the side of the road. No explanation, we just started moving again, eventually, as the impending darkness and isolation tightened.
One more stop at the Puestro de Control Cuarentenario, part of the Minesterio de Agricultura, and we could only make out shapes for the last three hours, which was comforting considering the long drop on either side of the winding highway.
Finally, I have started feeling homesick, helped only by blips of Cajamarca, a music resembling Appalacchian bluegrass, on the 70-year-old Radio Peru. I know that it has only been one full week, but the transition to this very dry and very Spanish-looking city has been a little sticky.
I was so enraptured by Cusco´s culture, that now I find myself bubbling over with negativity toward our new home which has a McDonalds and Radioshack and a mall.
Still, the week has just begun. And our real work starts in a few days. I will be working from 730-930am, then 5-9pm. I will let you know how to reach me as soon as I get my phone off of the black market, as reccomended by our boss.
I miss you all.
Lex
Thursday, July 26, 2007
the seeds of history
1) Ate guinea pig yesterday, and made some less than tactful jibes when a girl mentioned that she had one for a pet. It was tough but flavorful.
2) Last night John and I wandered out of our "family´s" home cooking haven and ate some of the most wonderful food I have tasted in awhile. Peruvian food is bueno.
3) We wandered into the self-proclaimed "highest Irish pub in the world," called Paddy O´Flaherty´s, where they had broadcast the first David Beckham in LA match earlier in the afternoon. Place was crawling with Irish, and with ESPN in the background, we might really have been anywhere.
That is what I am hoping to avoid as much as possible, the feeling of being a little ex-patriot in a bubble. I became impatient this morning when I realized that we don´t have anything to do at the school until 3 this afternoon, and what to do with myself? Stay in the chilly room? Wander around?
And wander around I did, self-consciously taking some pictures with my boyfriend´s dad´s manual camera that I borrowed in February and have yet to give back.
Some of the girls staying at Residencia Perez shocked us today by revealing that they did not, in fact, know from WHICH country the colonists won its "independence" back in 1775. They also, unapologetically, bemoaned the fact that one time at a bar someone had asked "all the girls" in their group how many states are in the United States, and they guessed 52.
It is independence weekend in Peru, mainly Lima, this weekend. I was asking which independence they were celebrating--rather sarcastically.
I was reading about Andean coca leaf rituals before rousting myself out of bed.
A ritual of blowing on "k´intu", or three of the best coca leaves in the bag, is called "phukuy." As you blow on the leaves in your hand, you make an invocation, mentioning Earth (Pacha, Pacha Mama, Santa Tira, and so on), Sacred Places, and your ayllu, or neighborhood.
Hallpakusunchis means "Let´s chew coca together."
The United States has launched a mission of trying to get rid of all Peruvian coca plants, because when you add lime to the coca plant and refine it, it produces, you guessed it, cocaine. This is not the first time that the US completely negated the value of all other cultures due to its short-sighted self interest.
As for me, the earthy tasting coca leaves in my tea have aided this outsider already.
2) Last night John and I wandered out of our "family´s" home cooking haven and ate some of the most wonderful food I have tasted in awhile. Peruvian food is bueno.
3) We wandered into the self-proclaimed "highest Irish pub in the world," called Paddy O´Flaherty´s, where they had broadcast the first David Beckham in LA match earlier in the afternoon. Place was crawling with Irish, and with ESPN in the background, we might really have been anywhere.
That is what I am hoping to avoid as much as possible, the feeling of being a little ex-patriot in a bubble. I became impatient this morning when I realized that we don´t have anything to do at the school until 3 this afternoon, and what to do with myself? Stay in the chilly room? Wander around?
And wander around I did, self-consciously taking some pictures with my boyfriend´s dad´s manual camera that I borrowed in February and have yet to give back.
Some of the girls staying at Residencia Perez shocked us today by revealing that they did not, in fact, know from WHICH country the colonists won its "independence" back in 1775. They also, unapologetically, bemoaned the fact that one time at a bar someone had asked "all the girls" in their group how many states are in the United States, and they guessed 52.
It is independence weekend in Peru, mainly Lima, this weekend. I was asking which independence they were celebrating--rather sarcastically.
I was reading about Andean coca leaf rituals before rousting myself out of bed.
A ritual of blowing on "k´intu", or three of the best coca leaves in the bag, is called "phukuy." As you blow on the leaves in your hand, you make an invocation, mentioning Earth (Pacha, Pacha Mama, Santa Tira, and so on), Sacred Places, and your ayllu, or neighborhood.
Hallpakusunchis means "Let´s chew coca together."
The United States has launched a mission of trying to get rid of all Peruvian coca plants, because when you add lime to the coca plant and refine it, it produces, you guessed it, cocaine. This is not the first time that the US completely negated the value of all other cultures due to its short-sighted self interest.
As for me, the earthy tasting coca leaves in my tea have aided this outsider already.
Wednesday, July 25, 2007
Chocolate Caliente para el alma...
We made an exciting discovery in a used book stand in an alley today. Chicken Soup for the Soul--more like patronizing drugery for the gullible--is translated here as Hot Chocolate for the soul. Which already makes it sound ten times more appealing to read!
I´m in the computer lab and as usual everyone is giving me the evil eye because I have already been typing away for forty five minutes. But while John and I are still free of work, class, and anything else, and it is dark outside, I might as well get in as much as I can.
We enjoyed the UV rays--the most intense in the world, apparently--today in Plaza de las armas, which is very touristy. Feels colonial with a looming cathedral in the middle, and gives an eery echo of BAVARIA, in GERMANY. And yet the red and brown rooftops, stacked shingles made of, I suppose, clay, are unique.
We climbed up a side road, stumbling on cobbled stones, marvelling at the houses built on top of the Inca stone walls that surround and web through the city. And looked down to where the blue and white uniforms and shouts of kids filled a basketball and soccor court at a colegio established in the early 17th century. The courts themselves were spraypainted with jarring advertisments for Kola Real, as if they´re training the young sport superstars for corporate soul-selling.
The tops of the houses stretched out below us, almost touching, forming a canopy that draped over its busy inhabitants, the Cusqueno flag, a horizontal rainbow, flying.
We were accosted as we sat reading until the wind began blowing cold again, by armies of little kids trying to sell finger puppets and postcards. John got quite offended when one kid, after he was rejected, pointed at John´s belly and said something about "there´s a baby in there." They were pretty hilarious. A kid who came up to my knee leaned on my shoulder as I sat on the bench, regretting that I couldn´t or wouldn´t buy everything... ¨"Why? Why don´t you want?"
We tried to give a taxi driver a one Sol piece today and he informed us that it was fake. When I asked one of these little boys how I knew it was fake, he pointed out that it was too amarilla and too light. Then he asked me to give it to him, presumably to hustle some more. I bought a postcard from him and gave away the faulty coin with a sigh.
These kids are hardly entrepreneurs out of ambition or desire, and it is a grim reminder of my random position in the whirlwind of fat, as opposed to others, and I feel the overwhelming sadness--like when I saw a young girl in the Milan subway licking a trash can.
Of course, there would be more visible reminders of poverty in the U.S. if there weren´t laws ostrecizing and confining every seemingly negative aspect of capitalism to the outskirts, almost as if--as certain laws in Atlanta´s Piedmont Park will demonstrate--it is offensive for rich people to be reminded how rich they are.
I´m reading "Love in the Time of Cholera." Sadly, in translation. Actually, the most claustrophobic part of coming here is that I have realized my knowledge of Italian has only made me more inept at learning the Spanish quickly. But I´ll hopefully break out of my shell eventually.
Anyway, as we walked back to the school through clouds of exhaust and vendors, I was thinking of Marquez,
"the uproar of oil and motors from the bay whose exhaust fumes fluttered through the house on hot afternoons like an angel condemned to putrefication."
This time of day, dusk, is the same everywhere. I see shadows slipping down the mountain and don´t want to leave on Saturday, on the ten hour bus ride.
- Lex
I´m in the computer lab and as usual everyone is giving me the evil eye because I have already been typing away for forty five minutes. But while John and I are still free of work, class, and anything else, and it is dark outside, I might as well get in as much as I can.
We enjoyed the UV rays--the most intense in the world, apparently--today in Plaza de las armas, which is very touristy. Feels colonial with a looming cathedral in the middle, and gives an eery echo of BAVARIA, in GERMANY. And yet the red and brown rooftops, stacked shingles made of, I suppose, clay, are unique.
We climbed up a side road, stumbling on cobbled stones, marvelling at the houses built on top of the Inca stone walls that surround and web through the city. And looked down to where the blue and white uniforms and shouts of kids filled a basketball and soccor court at a colegio established in the early 17th century. The courts themselves were spraypainted with jarring advertisments for Kola Real, as if they´re training the young sport superstars for corporate soul-selling.
The tops of the houses stretched out below us, almost touching, forming a canopy that draped over its busy inhabitants, the Cusqueno flag, a horizontal rainbow, flying.
We were accosted as we sat reading until the wind began blowing cold again, by armies of little kids trying to sell finger puppets and postcards. John got quite offended when one kid, after he was rejected, pointed at John´s belly and said something about "there´s a baby in there." They were pretty hilarious. A kid who came up to my knee leaned on my shoulder as I sat on the bench, regretting that I couldn´t or wouldn´t buy everything... ¨"Why? Why don´t you want?"
We tried to give a taxi driver a one Sol piece today and he informed us that it was fake. When I asked one of these little boys how I knew it was fake, he pointed out that it was too amarilla and too light. Then he asked me to give it to him, presumably to hustle some more. I bought a postcard from him and gave away the faulty coin with a sigh.
These kids are hardly entrepreneurs out of ambition or desire, and it is a grim reminder of my random position in the whirlwind of fat, as opposed to others, and I feel the overwhelming sadness--like when I saw a young girl in the Milan subway licking a trash can.
Of course, there would be more visible reminders of poverty in the U.S. if there weren´t laws ostrecizing and confining every seemingly negative aspect of capitalism to the outskirts, almost as if--as certain laws in Atlanta´s Piedmont Park will demonstrate--it is offensive for rich people to be reminded how rich they are.
I´m reading "Love in the Time of Cholera." Sadly, in translation. Actually, the most claustrophobic part of coming here is that I have realized my knowledge of Italian has only made me more inept at learning the Spanish quickly. But I´ll hopefully break out of my shell eventually.
Anyway, as we walked back to the school through clouds of exhaust and vendors, I was thinking of Marquez,
"the uproar of oil and motors from the bay whose exhaust fumes fluttered through the house on hot afternoons like an angel condemned to putrefication."
This time of day, dusk, is the same everywhere. I see shadows slipping down the mountain and don´t want to leave on Saturday, on the ten hour bus ride.
- Lex
Tuesday, July 24, 2007
Habitando en el Mayu
Well, my grandma thinks that the picture I have attached to my writing makes me look like a gremlin. Considering how immersed I have been in Harry Potter lately, perhaps I am one. Once I´m done, and free of jetlag and altitude sickness--mainly hitting me in the form of wanting to pass out every five minutes--I will have the vim and vigor to explore my new surroundings a bit more thoroughly. But I keep telling myself, I have time.
It is sad that we are leaving for Arequipa, "La tierra del Condor", in a few days--on Friday. Not only will we have to semi-relearn our workplace, though Oscar keeps assuring us that every Maximo Nivel is the same... but John and I have really become enamoured of Cuzco.
Orientation takes two hours a day, and we mainly go over the curriculum that we will be thrown into on Monday. The majority of our time so far has been curled up at the Perez Residencia, home of Marco and Yoko (!) Perez and their parents and adorable son, Toni, who just turned three last night. The whole compound habitates an entire family, and I am reminded of what seems to be missing in a lot of American culture--this sense of staying intact with the family structure, of spending grand amounts of time together.
Of course, the Dukes blow this out of the water.
But the Perez place has been warm and beautiful. Smells of cooking and a fireplace wafting upstairs. I have met some of the other volunteers, all of whom are here for much shorter stints. But then, they´re not getting paid. Mainly well-intentioned if somewhat juvenile at times young women. Who recount with giggles tales of tequila and tattoos in a manner that I am familiar with having studied abroad. Still, they´re very nice, and I have no complaint.
I´m hoping to volunteer some myself in between our working hours. Once I can stand on my own two feet without panting.
It took a little red-faced explanation in my broken spanish to explain to Marco´s father that John is not, infact, my husband, with the shared knowledge that we are sharing a bedroom.
A strange calendar with a picture of Fujimori, the fallen ruler, and his endorsement of a 2006 candidate distracts me as I eat my meat, rice and boiled water.
On the side of the mountain plares a manmade message, ¨Viva el Peru Glorioso", as vans filled to the brim zoom by, honking with eagerness at anyone who looks like they might step into the calle, the colorful houses on the hill growing invisible with the pink, then orange, then dimming sky. It gets dark around six, which took some adjusting.
My camera has inexplicably decided to stop turning on... again. So pictures are forthcoming. The capricious piece of crap, however, is the least of my concerns at this point.
The dogs around here really are a sad thing to see... Mangy, deserted, unapprochable and overabundant, lifting up their sorrowful eyes from a mound of dirt as if you might be the one to throw them some food. But I don´t dare touch; I have already been warned plenty.
John and I went to a former Inca Temple called, in Quechuan, Qorikancha, which then became El Convento de Santo Domingo del Cusco when Pizarro´s brother Juan donated it to the Domincan order. Ole Pizzarro himself was so kind to take all the gold out before, so that those monks wouldn´t have to bother with it, in 1532. So nice of him!
Rumors have it that some treasures escaped Spanish plunder and remain undiscovered, but it´s hard to believe as Japanese and German tourist march through the halls and the great central garden. The architecture is by Tawantinsa stone workers, and the halls are decorated with Spanish art, including an anonymus 1569 sculpture of a very pregnant Virgin Mary.
John was captured by the exhibit on regional instruments, like trumpets made of shells. I was fascinated by a drawing of the Incan astronomy. They worshipped deities that were heavenly bodies and meteorological phenomenons.
"Mayu" is the term for celestial river--the milky way. And all the dark spots in the Milky Way are thought to be animals coming to drink from Mayu. Snakes here are not villainized. The star of the snake is called "Macha Cuay," and I notice that many instruments are in the shape of a divine water snake.
This city feels less full of tension and hostility than, say, Atlanta. Perhaps that´s my sunny illusion based on my being foreign.
But anyway, it will be nice to have finally settled into a space that is fully our own. But for now, I miss you all, but I´m so glad we came.
- Lex
It is sad that we are leaving for Arequipa, "La tierra del Condor", in a few days--on Friday. Not only will we have to semi-relearn our workplace, though Oscar keeps assuring us that every Maximo Nivel is the same... but John and I have really become enamoured of Cuzco.
Orientation takes two hours a day, and we mainly go over the curriculum that we will be thrown into on Monday. The majority of our time so far has been curled up at the Perez Residencia, home of Marco and Yoko (!) Perez and their parents and adorable son, Toni, who just turned three last night. The whole compound habitates an entire family, and I am reminded of what seems to be missing in a lot of American culture--this sense of staying intact with the family structure, of spending grand amounts of time together.
Of course, the Dukes blow this out of the water.
But the Perez place has been warm and beautiful. Smells of cooking and a fireplace wafting upstairs. I have met some of the other volunteers, all of whom are here for much shorter stints. But then, they´re not getting paid. Mainly well-intentioned if somewhat juvenile at times young women. Who recount with giggles tales of tequila and tattoos in a manner that I am familiar with having studied abroad. Still, they´re very nice, and I have no complaint.
I´m hoping to volunteer some myself in between our working hours. Once I can stand on my own two feet without panting.
It took a little red-faced explanation in my broken spanish to explain to Marco´s father that John is not, infact, my husband, with the shared knowledge that we are sharing a bedroom.
A strange calendar with a picture of Fujimori, the fallen ruler, and his endorsement of a 2006 candidate distracts me as I eat my meat, rice and boiled water.
On the side of the mountain plares a manmade message, ¨Viva el Peru Glorioso", as vans filled to the brim zoom by, honking with eagerness at anyone who looks like they might step into the calle, the colorful houses on the hill growing invisible with the pink, then orange, then dimming sky. It gets dark around six, which took some adjusting.
My camera has inexplicably decided to stop turning on... again. So pictures are forthcoming. The capricious piece of crap, however, is the least of my concerns at this point.
The dogs around here really are a sad thing to see... Mangy, deserted, unapprochable and overabundant, lifting up their sorrowful eyes from a mound of dirt as if you might be the one to throw them some food. But I don´t dare touch; I have already been warned plenty.
John and I went to a former Inca Temple called, in Quechuan, Qorikancha, which then became El Convento de Santo Domingo del Cusco when Pizarro´s brother Juan donated it to the Domincan order. Ole Pizzarro himself was so kind to take all the gold out before, so that those monks wouldn´t have to bother with it, in 1532. So nice of him!
Rumors have it that some treasures escaped Spanish plunder and remain undiscovered, but it´s hard to believe as Japanese and German tourist march through the halls and the great central garden. The architecture is by Tawantinsa stone workers, and the halls are decorated with Spanish art, including an anonymus 1569 sculpture of a very pregnant Virgin Mary.
John was captured by the exhibit on regional instruments, like trumpets made of shells. I was fascinated by a drawing of the Incan astronomy. They worshipped deities that were heavenly bodies and meteorological phenomenons.
"Mayu" is the term for celestial river--the milky way. And all the dark spots in the Milky Way are thought to be animals coming to drink from Mayu. Snakes here are not villainized. The star of the snake is called "Macha Cuay," and I notice that many instruments are in the shape of a divine water snake.
This city feels less full of tension and hostility than, say, Atlanta. Perhaps that´s my sunny illusion based on my being foreign.
But anyway, it will be nice to have finally settled into a space that is fully our own. But for now, I miss you all, but I´m so glad we came.
- Lex
Monday, July 23, 2007
Bags
Under my eyes. In my hand.
I started out calm, which should count for something. Through the inefficient and discourteous check-in at Hartsfield International, and a detainment at random security check points, I remained tranquil as a butterly drunk on some particularly virile flower´s nectar.
But then came the four hour delay at the grimy, freezing Ft. Lauderdale ¨Hollywood¨ airport, our particular jet delayed for no apparent reason in clear, sunny Orlando. Seats then that would not go back because we were in the emergency lane. So we moved. And the seats were broken. A cacophonous chorus of screeching armrests filling the next six hours, and having to pay--with credit card--for every beverage and paltry snack that we were desperate enough to crave.
Spirit airlines. The best way to make sure you´re sullen and sickly when you meet your new employers!
Lack of water, food, sleep all made me want to curse every aspect of the trip, recant my desire to travel anywhere ever. I wish that this kind of pessimissm didn´t rear its head so easily in me.
I remember feeling a sense of familiarity when I read V.S. Naipaul´s¨"An Area of Darkness" three years ago. His first few chapters center around arrival in a sweltering, inefficient and uncaring Mumbai, and his narrative holds nothing back of the frustration and desperation that shake his whole countenance.
Even with a deep love of travelling, we are still imperfect journey makers, and thus fall prey to loneliness and fear in the moment we cease basking in what is easy, practiced.
When we finally got into Lima, I somehow managed to lose my record of vaccinations. Check.
Then a well-dressed older man named Francisco picked us up, threw our things into a van and wisked us for half an hour to the center of town to a lovely hotel that we could enjoy for an hour and a half only, our plane having gotten in too late for such a luxury as rest.
Francisco spent some time in Sardegna, and so he and I spent the whole carride chiacchiando in Italian while sleepy John watched the scenery. Cloked in early morning shadow, the industrial and military buildings, the deserted streets, reminded me somehow of Milan. The water tower that read "Ahorra agua cierra el cano¨"
I took a shivery shower as an attempt to sooth my tired bones, but wound up wasting more energy chattering the teeth. Then we got on a LAN plane to Cuzco, had to pay some kind of tariff just to go through security, and soared over the Andes in a stupor.
But arriving in Cuzco, our bellies momentarily sated by the generous breakfast that the Peruvian airline offered, I could smell wood burning. We descended stairs onto the tarmac and felt crisp, chilly air, saw colorful blankets draped to keep their owners warm, heard pipes playing as we picked up our luggage. The place felt like every wonderful fall memory I have ever had--from the Lake Eden Arts Festival in Asheville, to the Olde English Festival when I was little, and mountains all around us.
Cuzco is gorgeous. I am ready to collapse. John and I are scared that we won´t know the first thing about teaching English. But we have arrived for the moment with excitement intact.
I started out calm, which should count for something. Through the inefficient and discourteous check-in at Hartsfield International, and a detainment at random security check points, I remained tranquil as a butterly drunk on some particularly virile flower´s nectar.
But then came the four hour delay at the grimy, freezing Ft. Lauderdale ¨Hollywood¨ airport, our particular jet delayed for no apparent reason in clear, sunny Orlando. Seats then that would not go back because we were in the emergency lane. So we moved. And the seats were broken. A cacophonous chorus of screeching armrests filling the next six hours, and having to pay--with credit card--for every beverage and paltry snack that we were desperate enough to crave.
Spirit airlines. The best way to make sure you´re sullen and sickly when you meet your new employers!
Lack of water, food, sleep all made me want to curse every aspect of the trip, recant my desire to travel anywhere ever. I wish that this kind of pessimissm didn´t rear its head so easily in me.
I remember feeling a sense of familiarity when I read V.S. Naipaul´s¨"An Area of Darkness" three years ago. His first few chapters center around arrival in a sweltering, inefficient and uncaring Mumbai, and his narrative holds nothing back of the frustration and desperation that shake his whole countenance.
Even with a deep love of travelling, we are still imperfect journey makers, and thus fall prey to loneliness and fear in the moment we cease basking in what is easy, practiced.
When we finally got into Lima, I somehow managed to lose my record of vaccinations. Check.
Then a well-dressed older man named Francisco picked us up, threw our things into a van and wisked us for half an hour to the center of town to a lovely hotel that we could enjoy for an hour and a half only, our plane having gotten in too late for such a luxury as rest.
Francisco spent some time in Sardegna, and so he and I spent the whole carride chiacchiando in Italian while sleepy John watched the scenery. Cloked in early morning shadow, the industrial and military buildings, the deserted streets, reminded me somehow of Milan. The water tower that read "Ahorra agua cierra el cano¨"
I took a shivery shower as an attempt to sooth my tired bones, but wound up wasting more energy chattering the teeth. Then we got on a LAN plane to Cuzco, had to pay some kind of tariff just to go through security, and soared over the Andes in a stupor.
But arriving in Cuzco, our bellies momentarily sated by the generous breakfast that the Peruvian airline offered, I could smell wood burning. We descended stairs onto the tarmac and felt crisp, chilly air, saw colorful blankets draped to keep their owners warm, heard pipes playing as we picked up our luggage. The place felt like every wonderful fall memory I have ever had--from the Lake Eden Arts Festival in Asheville, to the Olde English Festival when I was little, and mountains all around us.
Cuzco is gorgeous. I am ready to collapse. John and I are scared that we won´t know the first thing about teaching English. But we have arrived for the moment with excitement intact.
Friday, July 20, 2007
Mariposas Del Infierno
I get to a point where I can no longer think because ideas are flying too fast. I can't sleep either. My stomach is gnawing me, and I'm forgetful.
Living at home in the days leading up to Sunday is preparing me to leave in a different way--I'll be eager to get out of the discomfort and the constant bickering. It's just the way that some people cope with preparing to miss someone.
I'm not complaining--the flutter of adventure is equal to the flutter of anxiety. I must keep referring to my jubilant conversation with Laura the other day, and her awe-inspiring pictures of Bolivia--landscapes from Dali.
The plane flight from Ft. Lauderdale to Lima is only five hours. But we'll be camping in the airport for seven. The getting there is always hardest. I remember the first day in South Africa after 24 hours on one plane in one seat, my lungs and limbs begging for a reprieve.
It is raining outside, and I feel jumpy, itchy, and utterly unfocused.
Living at home in the days leading up to Sunday is preparing me to leave in a different way--I'll be eager to get out of the discomfort and the constant bickering. It's just the way that some people cope with preparing to miss someone.
I'm not complaining--the flutter of adventure is equal to the flutter of anxiety. I must keep referring to my jubilant conversation with Laura the other day, and her awe-inspiring pictures of Bolivia--landscapes from Dali.
The plane flight from Ft. Lauderdale to Lima is only five hours. But we'll be camping in the airport for seven. The getting there is always hardest. I remember the first day in South Africa after 24 hours on one plane in one seat, my lungs and limbs begging for a reprieve.
It is raining outside, and I feel jumpy, itchy, and utterly unfocused.
Monday, July 16, 2007
Someone else's words, and some of my own.
"The impulse to write things down is a peculiarly compulsive one, inexplicable to those who do not share it, useful only accidentally, only secondarily, in the way that any compulsion tries to justify itself...
"Keepers of private notebooks are a different breed altogether, lonely and resistant rearrangers of things, anxious malcontents, children afflicted apparently at birth with some presentiment of loss...
"So the point of my keeping a notebook has never been, nor is it now, to have an actual factual record of what I have been doing or thinking. That would be a different impulse entirely, an instinct which I do not possess."
- Joan Didion, On Keeping a Notebook
I would like to note now how truly madly deeply I will miss Servapan and Molotov--The Boys--with their earnest and dainty stare downs, and their feline eccentricities.
"Keepers of private notebooks are a different breed altogether, lonely and resistant rearrangers of things, anxious malcontents, children afflicted apparently at birth with some presentiment of loss...
"So the point of my keeping a notebook has never been, nor is it now, to have an actual factual record of what I have been doing or thinking. That would be a different impulse entirely, an instinct which I do not possess."
- Joan Didion, On Keeping a Notebook
I would like to note now how truly madly deeply I will miss Servapan and Molotov--The Boys--with their earnest and dainty stare downs, and their feline eccentricities.
Friday, July 13, 2007
Wisdom
I just learned an expression in Portuguese. "Tenho saudades." According to Wikipedia, it is one of the hardest words to translate. It means "I have a deep longing/homesickness."
John pointed out to me yesterday that one only writes well while in the midst of a feverish optimism about oneself, or one's life. I think I just might follow that sage advice.
John pointed out to me yesterday that one only writes well while in the midst of a feverish optimism about oneself, or one's life. I think I just might follow that sage advice.
Thursday, July 12, 2007
OIIIIL... oiiiill...
So I'm a bit rusty at this business of "thinking."
TEFL has me completely stumped but I have to finish it, somehow, over the weekend.
Staring at the computer screen for the last half hour. My mind is turning into cheese under the lure of glowing information highway. I have added one sentence to the grammar assignment that has plagued my last week.
On another note... last night I arrived in Columbus and my grandmother showed me pictures of the snake farm in Sao Paolo where she used to take visiting dignitaries' wives as part of her duties at the American Consulate. Some black and white shots of some guy milking the venom out of these beautiful predators.
TEFL has me completely stumped but I have to finish it, somehow, over the weekend.
Staring at the computer screen for the last half hour. My mind is turning into cheese under the lure of glowing information highway. I have added one sentence to the grammar assignment that has plagued my last week.
On another note... last night I arrived in Columbus and my grandmother showed me pictures of the snake farm in Sao Paolo where she used to take visiting dignitaries' wives as part of her duties at the American Consulate. Some black and white shots of some guy milking the venom out of these beautiful predators.
Tuesday, July 10, 2007
Parallel-o-Gram
You know, I was just considering that my grandmother made a similar venture when she was almost exactly my age... travelling with the man she loved to a South American country that she knew so little about.
My grandparents' honeymoon transpired on a boat headed to Sao Paolo, Brazil, where my grandfather had an engineering job waiting for him. No sooner had their suitcases hit the ground than my grandfather was summoned on what should have been a two day work detail (building railroads).
What should have been a brief interlude arduously dragged into a month. The roads had closed down without warning and, in a cellphone exempt age, he had no way of contacting her at their temporary hotel lodging. With barely any grasp of Portuguese, my grandmother only timidly ventured outside, where she remembers invisible hands pinching her posterior unmercifully.
Quite the looker, my grandmother used to tutor a Brazilian man she worked with at the American consulate in English, until she came to understand that he had no interest in the language aspect of their lessons. When he invited her to dinner and she declined because her husband was out of town, he became infuriated and asked why on earth she thought he had been putting up with all of these early morning meetings??
She was once followed by a group of machismos who finally forced her to break feminine propriety and whack them all with her purse. She might have been in troubled waters, but a police officer came and shooed them. And then proceeded to hit on her himself.
Despite its rather agonizing moments, Grandma often recalls their sojourn in Brazil glowingly, as a defining moment, something that pushed her into self-reliance.
I go to Columbus, Ohio tomorrow after second attempt at shots. Grandma, with her faithful companion, the orange hoss-cat Bummer, have promised that the next few days will be full of cooking, stories--some new, some true favorites--and perhaps a visit with one of her Peruvian contacts. Perfect.
- Lex
My grandparents' honeymoon transpired on a boat headed to Sao Paolo, Brazil, where my grandfather had an engineering job waiting for him. No sooner had their suitcases hit the ground than my grandfather was summoned on what should have been a two day work detail (building railroads).
What should have been a brief interlude arduously dragged into a month. The roads had closed down without warning and, in a cellphone exempt age, he had no way of contacting her at their temporary hotel lodging. With barely any grasp of Portuguese, my grandmother only timidly ventured outside, where she remembers invisible hands pinching her posterior unmercifully.
Quite the looker, my grandmother used to tutor a Brazilian man she worked with at the American consulate in English, until she came to understand that he had no interest in the language aspect of their lessons. When he invited her to dinner and she declined because her husband was out of town, he became infuriated and asked why on earth she thought he had been putting up with all of these early morning meetings??
She was once followed by a group of machismos who finally forced her to break feminine propriety and whack them all with her purse. She might have been in troubled waters, but a police officer came and shooed them. And then proceeded to hit on her himself.
Despite its rather agonizing moments, Grandma often recalls their sojourn in Brazil glowingly, as a defining moment, something that pushed her into self-reliance.
I go to Columbus, Ohio tomorrow after second attempt at shots. Grandma, with her faithful companion, the orange hoss-cat Bummer, have promised that the next few days will be full of cooking, stories--some new, some true favorites--and perhaps a visit with one of her Peruvian contacts. Perfect.
- Lex
Monday, July 9, 2007
What They Call Cold Feet
I can't stop this gnawing in my stomach. It set in the minute that we stepped back onto Atlanta soil last night--well, Lilburn is more or less Atlanta (representative anyway). Four and a half days at the beach has burned away all motivation for movement, especially the sudden and essential movement the next two weeks will require. Already I have slept away a good part of the morning, and I can't seem to start with the first thing on my list.
So I'll write about Florida.
It was a rich and lazying week. Beginning, for me, with the discovery that the Dukes' collie Bonnie's will only drink filtered water over the coastal sludge.
Then so many stars, you forget how many.
I tried my hand at fishing for the first time. The first time that counts--I threw a fly out once with my ex-step-grandparents, when I was thirteen and still technically a vegetarian, wincing at the worm squirming on its hook, utterly horrifyed by the growling a fish makes as it struggles in vain for air. Then in March or so I went fish-catching with Kris and John at Lullwater, to feed not our bellies or our egos but the burgeoning aquarium at Harwood. Lullwater versus Flagler Beach proves an unfair comparison.
We stood outside Ron's bait shop for hours, and somehow the name on my license still wound up reading "Victoria A. Hulk."
My hands smelled like raw shrimp, and in mixing with the heat caused my stomach to rise and fall like the mysterious, fish-withholding waves. John, his mom Ceci and I went to the pier after dinner one night, and were greeted by cockroaches, and a depressing cast-aside exterminated stingray under dim lamplight. And nothing on our lines but seaweed.
Tortoises figured prominently in the visit. They're everywhere and have personality in excess. The first we spied busily scarfing down grass in the park, ignorant of our presence as one who has learned to tolerate constant outside attention.
We biked fifteen miles down historic highway A1A, and came across a dying turtle on the highway, deserted in the middle of the road but clinging to life like every animal does when it's doomed. Its durable shell was no match for the unforgiving crunch of a truck's tires. You could see its spine rising and falling as it breathed. John ran desperately out to the creature's aid, lifted it up gently and sadly, as blood gently cascading through the cracks in its shell. We placed it out of sight on a bed of grass, horrified for several moments, as if we too had been rolled over by something heavy.
The shock and grief of the helpless turtle's death, so easily avoidable, stirred up other sadness that afternoon. Other senseless images of death came to mind. But following our own humanness, we quickly became emmersed in the other wonders the beach held for us. Surrounded by blue in the evening, ocean and sky seeming as one and no way to distinguish the shoreline.
A wild storm overtook us the last day, and I sat with my swimsuit still on, watching the silvery flash of water skim across rooftops like steam in a pan.
We stopped by Greenbough yesterday and I got to see Thomas's tree. A holly that in a gentle rain seemed to have tear-stained its silvery bark. As we walked through the nature preserve the other day, a hawk kept diving just in front of us, and Ceci said it was Thomas's way of letting us know he's here. It's a bad time of year for all that--his birthday in ten days.
But we're back now, and I must get to work. I miss the kids at the Autism Center and had plenty of time during our lengthy carride back to regret the fact that I won't see certain smiling faces. Let's see if I can muster the energy to leave this couch.
- Lex
So I'll write about Florida.
It was a rich and lazying week. Beginning, for me, with the discovery that the Dukes' collie Bonnie's will only drink filtered water over the coastal sludge.
Then so many stars, you forget how many.
I tried my hand at fishing for the first time. The first time that counts--I threw a fly out once with my ex-step-grandparents, when I was thirteen and still technically a vegetarian, wincing at the worm squirming on its hook, utterly horrifyed by the growling a fish makes as it struggles in vain for air. Then in March or so I went fish-catching with Kris and John at Lullwater, to feed not our bellies or our egos but the burgeoning aquarium at Harwood. Lullwater versus Flagler Beach proves an unfair comparison.
We stood outside Ron's bait shop for hours, and somehow the name on my license still wound up reading "Victoria A. Hulk."
My hands smelled like raw shrimp, and in mixing with the heat caused my stomach to rise and fall like the mysterious, fish-withholding waves. John, his mom Ceci and I went to the pier after dinner one night, and were greeted by cockroaches, and a depressing cast-aside exterminated stingray under dim lamplight. And nothing on our lines but seaweed.
Tortoises figured prominently in the visit. They're everywhere and have personality in excess. The first we spied busily scarfing down grass in the park, ignorant of our presence as one who has learned to tolerate constant outside attention.
We biked fifteen miles down historic highway A1A, and came across a dying turtle on the highway, deserted in the middle of the road but clinging to life like every animal does when it's doomed. Its durable shell was no match for the unforgiving crunch of a truck's tires. You could see its spine rising and falling as it breathed. John ran desperately out to the creature's aid, lifted it up gently and sadly, as blood gently cascading through the cracks in its shell. We placed it out of sight on a bed of grass, horrified for several moments, as if we too had been rolled over by something heavy.
The shock and grief of the helpless turtle's death, so easily avoidable, stirred up other sadness that afternoon. Other senseless images of death came to mind. But following our own humanness, we quickly became emmersed in the other wonders the beach held for us. Surrounded by blue in the evening, ocean and sky seeming as one and no way to distinguish the shoreline.
A wild storm overtook us the last day, and I sat with my swimsuit still on, watching the silvery flash of water skim across rooftops like steam in a pan.
We stopped by Greenbough yesterday and I got to see Thomas's tree. A holly that in a gentle rain seemed to have tear-stained its silvery bark. As we walked through the nature preserve the other day, a hawk kept diving just in front of us, and Ceci said it was Thomas's way of letting us know he's here. It's a bad time of year for all that--his birthday in ten days.
But we're back now, and I must get to work. I miss the kids at the Autism Center and had plenty of time during our lengthy carride back to regret the fact that I won't see certain smiling faces. Let's see if I can muster the energy to leave this couch.
- Lex
Tuesday, July 3, 2007
Medical Bureaucracy Exists!
I realize now why I originally shied away from having this damn blog. It's so easy to pop in, scribble some terribly thought out rant on yourself, and then feel secure in being a published author.
This really is some of the worst writing of my life.
Visit to grandma postponed. Pennsylvania called off--far too ambitious. What matters is that I have bacteria injected into my blood, ASAP! And that I find someone with a needle who works for free!
(With such selective criteria I am bound for success)
My morning passed like a bloody stool: two and a half hours reading about Paris Hilton's miraculous reformation, there from my stagnant perch at the walk-in clinic. My failed attempt at inoculation before teatime.
I wound up having to cough up almost a hundred smackers just so that a doctor I don't know could hand me a printout of information from the CDC's website. My consultation mainly revolved around how much each shot would cost because, oh yeah, vaccines on short notice apparently equal the price of the actual ticket to your disease-ridden destination.
Am I being vague?
Apparently Piedmont Minor Emergency Clinic doesn't take health insurance, which I do still and now have thanks to my dad's wild financial success--another reason that Ms. Hilton and I are kindred spirits, I suppose, this unrestrained nepotism... They don't take health insurance in the case of TRAVEL VACCINATIONS; for everything else, yes.
So the doctor advised me to just get the vaccines that I would "really need." Like Yellow Fever as opposed to Tetanus. Which I distinctly remember getting--the shot, that is. And which will make my arm fall off if I get another too soon. Curse this failing memory! Curse this failing health care system!
At least it allowed me the fascinating conversation with a teacher from Guyana who shared my annoyance. For her summer of separation from the middle school math minions, she had received a grant to do research in Singapore.
I mentioned that my roommate had been living there with her family and was now working on a PhD in "some kind of physics." I wish I could have offered more about Sandhya; it's sad to have completely ignored the details about someone I have lived with for a year.
The professor--whose name I immediately forgot, a reprehensible habit of mine--said that her son was a student at Emory, too, noticeably disappointed when I answered that, no, my Oxford University shirt was my boyfriend's--and he studied for two months there, over the summer.
"He would never study at UGA or Georgia Tech," she said with a sigh. "He says he's too smart and doesn't want people thinking he's there just 'cause he's black." The nurse wisked her away and the hallway was empty once more.
No matter. Voluntary Duke-beaching on the horizon. Second trip to Florida ever. I say goodbye to my children tomorrow, marking a surreal end to a week which saw my return to freshman year--chatting till all hours with the Marco, Gabi, Lauren contingent at Java Monkey as the stormy winds gave an impish allusion to autumn.
Now I return to a bedroom filled with boxes, themselves filled with high school, college, papers that need to be thrown out but prove impossible to let go.
- Lex
This really is some of the worst writing of my life.
Visit to grandma postponed. Pennsylvania called off--far too ambitious. What matters is that I have bacteria injected into my blood, ASAP! And that I find someone with a needle who works for free!
(With such selective criteria I am bound for success)
My morning passed like a bloody stool: two and a half hours reading about Paris Hilton's miraculous reformation, there from my stagnant perch at the walk-in clinic. My failed attempt at inoculation before teatime.
I wound up having to cough up almost a hundred smackers just so that a doctor I don't know could hand me a printout of information from the CDC's website. My consultation mainly revolved around how much each shot would cost because, oh yeah, vaccines on short notice apparently equal the price of the actual ticket to your disease-ridden destination.
Am I being vague?
Apparently Piedmont Minor Emergency Clinic doesn't take health insurance, which I do still and now have thanks to my dad's wild financial success--another reason that Ms. Hilton and I are kindred spirits, I suppose, this unrestrained nepotism... They don't take health insurance in the case of TRAVEL VACCINATIONS; for everything else, yes.
So the doctor advised me to just get the vaccines that I would "really need." Like Yellow Fever as opposed to Tetanus. Which I distinctly remember getting--the shot, that is. And which will make my arm fall off if I get another too soon. Curse this failing memory! Curse this failing health care system!
At least it allowed me the fascinating conversation with a teacher from Guyana who shared my annoyance. For her summer of separation from the middle school math minions, she had received a grant to do research in Singapore.
I mentioned that my roommate had been living there with her family and was now working on a PhD in "some kind of physics." I wish I could have offered more about Sandhya; it's sad to have completely ignored the details about someone I have lived with for a year.
The professor--whose name I immediately forgot, a reprehensible habit of mine--said that her son was a student at Emory, too, noticeably disappointed when I answered that, no, my Oxford University shirt was my boyfriend's--and he studied for two months there, over the summer.
"He would never study at UGA or Georgia Tech," she said with a sigh. "He says he's too smart and doesn't want people thinking he's there just 'cause he's black." The nurse wisked her away and the hallway was empty once more.
No matter. Voluntary Duke-beaching on the horizon. Second trip to Florida ever. I say goodbye to my children tomorrow, marking a surreal end to a week which saw my return to freshman year--chatting till all hours with the Marco, Gabi, Lauren contingent at Java Monkey as the stormy winds gave an impish allusion to autumn.
Now I return to a bedroom filled with boxes, themselves filled with high school, college, papers that need to be thrown out but prove impossible to let go.
- Lex
Monday, July 2, 2007
Sam Peckinpah and my subconscious
I have been having very vivid and interesting dreams in the countdown to South America.
One of them, the other night, saw Paul Newman and I having a "salad off." I won but then found myself consoling a bereft Newman by giving him pointers--"It's all in the cucumber, kid."
Before that I dreamt that some of the kids from my class at the Autism Center were begging me not to send them to Iraq. I kept telling them that they were too young.
...
I won't bore you with interpretations. But I do plan to retrain myself to remember when I wake.
I am amazed at how full life can seem when you're waiting to leave.
One of them, the other night, saw Paul Newman and I having a "salad off." I won but then found myself consoling a bereft Newman by giving him pointers--"It's all in the cucumber, kid."
Before that I dreamt that some of the kids from my class at the Autism Center were begging me not to send them to Iraq. I kept telling them that they were too young.
...
I won't bore you with interpretations. But I do plan to retrain myself to remember when I wake.
I am amazed at how full life can seem when you're waiting to leave.
Friday, June 29, 2007
The Beginning
I am so used to writing these in email form, it feels a bit stiff at first to type into a blog, but I'm going to force myself, now that I may have something interesting to write about. (My life is always interesting to me, of course, since I'm a complete narcissist).
My boyfriend John and I are standing at the edge of our six month journey to Peru, to teach. With anxiety, bewilderment, but mostly with relief. I am currently reading "Prodigal Summer" and think that Kingsolver describes perfectly the necessity of this trip, this undertaking:
"A thirst of eons that no one living could keep from reaching to slake, once water was at hand."
The teaching gig is water to someone who over the last year since graduating has become mightily thirsty.
Our plane leaves on July 22nd for Fort Lauderdale. Then on to Lima, where we will be awarded 90-day visas. Then on to Cusco, and a job that requires me to wear "adult clothes."
I will try and regularly update this, timidly at first. Keep it interesting for you readers, all of whom speckle the wallpaper to my happiest of memories.
- Lex
My boyfriend John and I are standing at the edge of our six month journey to Peru, to teach. With anxiety, bewilderment, but mostly with relief. I am currently reading "Prodigal Summer" and think that Kingsolver describes perfectly the necessity of this trip, this undertaking:
"A thirst of eons that no one living could keep from reaching to slake, once water was at hand."
The teaching gig is water to someone who over the last year since graduating has become mightily thirsty.
Our plane leaves on July 22nd for Fort Lauderdale. Then on to Lima, where we will be awarded 90-day visas. Then on to Cusco, and a job that requires me to wear "adult clothes."
I will try and regularly update this, timidly at first. Keep it interesting for you readers, all of whom speckle the wallpaper to my happiest of memories.
- Lex
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