Pearl of Paradise

It may have been another quiet week in Lake Wobegon, but in ciudad Lima, the days are filled with honking. To be fair, our hotel is on a major street and the hotel windows are none too soundproof, but still...

THE CULTURE OF HONKING is particular here. I am tempted to hang my laptop out the window to record.

The "here I come" safety short-honk 
--- just to let someone moving into your space know that, indeed, you are not stopping...honk

The "I'm the taxi you are looking for" double-tap
--- walking down the street, looking content? Maybe you want a taxi?...honk-honk

The, I kid you not, "shave and a haircut" honk for extra-humorous cabbies
--- hard to resist... honk----honk-a-honk-honk---honk-honk

The "you overstepped" 3-beat honk
--- been cut off in the typical way? Lay on the horn a bit longer... hooonk

The "taxi is stopped to negotiate a fare and blocking a lane" 6-beat honk
--- it's not like the cabbie is going to care that someone is honking, but what the heck? hoooooonk

The "traffic is at a stop and I can't see what is holding things up" honk
--- just lay on the horn for however long it takes for you to feel better. hooooooooooooooooooonk

Add to this symphony the yells of the combi barkers yelling their destinations, the circa 1991 car alarms, the sirens of all urban center, and suddenly 4am can seem blissfully quiet. How do I know? Well, a design project for Johnson & Johnson was due today and it just took most of the night.

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Chicha: not to be confused with its namesake, the sweet purple-corn drink, but a music style that I am introducing myself to. Endemic to Lima and the coast here, it is an amalgamation of:
> cumbia: an old Colombian-Panamanian style
> huayña: Andean music
> surf-rock of the 1960's

So imagine a kind of village rhythm with a Dick Dale guitar, sometimes with hints of ska. Here is a link to the album I am listening to. It is probably not a coincidence that it also sounds vaguely like the Dominican bachata music that I like, but I'm no musical philologist.
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Carter has joined a Taekwan-do school here in the local gym. This is his first real thing in which he is totally enveloped in Spanish.  There are some other kids from his school and the program clearly caters to that kind of clientele. There are several well-dressed moms waiting around, but also empleadas (I saw one empleada with an 8yr old boy, after class she took out wipes and cleaned his feet  and then baby-powdered them, while the boy sat there quietly).

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 PEACE CORPS: Jennifer forwarded me an email with an account of a cool story. A volunteer is part of a program that has created a store that sells locally sourced Peruvian products like cheese, honey, nuts, etc. The store is an outlet for several remote community micro-banks. The micro-banks loan money in their community, individuals pay back the loans with interest and sell their products to via the store and elsewhere. The volunteer is closely involved with one of these community banks, a cheese producing community of about 20 families. To get there, the volunteer takes a bus for an hour AND then walks for an hour and a half. This community, Vaqueria (which Google translates as "Cowshed") has a successful micro-bank they call "Asociacion Perla del Paraiso". In addition to what the loans have enabled, the bank has built up a surplus of almost $700. Instead of dividing it up among community members, they have decided to put the funds towards a piece of communal equipment.