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