La Casa

This post is really just for people who really want to see our house in detail. It's a nice place and the photos make it look good. Up close, it's a little worn and we keep finding things that don't quite work right, and the downstairs is kind of dark. But all in all, it has good karma, is very functional, and has some great spaces. Considering what many people here call home, this house could be a lot worse and we would still be doing better than half the city.

	View from the back wall, the small unheated pool, the long covered patio, and bedroom windows upstairs. The embassy made us put in the stupid safety fence. The birds like this area.
	This will be a nice place to be when the weather warms up in a month or two. There is a banquet-sized table at the other end of the patio, so dining al fresco will be great.
Below are three shots from our sidewalk. In (1) you can see the kiosk for the watchman, in (2) you see the big dusty hill around which we go to get into central Lima. (3) is towards the north. The street is never this devoid of traffic though.
	There is a small courtyard for parking between the 10ft wall and the house. There's 3 garage doors in the wall, but we just have the one car.
	Left is the entry, below the (1) living room, and (2) dining room. In the living room you can see the ugly bars that the embassy forced upon us...hopefully those will be covered with curtains soon. And, yes, we intend to get a light fixture. The living room and the dining area are one room the length of the house, with a fireplace in the middle and big french doors out to the patio.
	The kitchen. Mariza will sit at the little table and eat while the rest of us eat in the dining room. This feels weird, and is something I would like to change so I don't have to feel quite so much the don of the hacienda, but attempting to change things plays out in unexpected ways when one is new to a culture. Not pictured is Mariza's small room and bath outside around the corner.
	By the way, here is a meal Mariza prepared. Lomo Saltado is a Peruvian sauté of beef and fried potatoes (basically french fries). Variations are many, but chicken is common, or noodles instead of the fries. Here she has served it with pea soup and rice and a salad. The salad features the unfailingly amazing avocado here, and the little yellow jungle fruit called aguaymanto (Cape Gooseberry). They taste like raspberry and kumquat, with the texture of a cherry tomato...and, indeed, they are relatives of the tomato.
	The den, with a little loft up on the second floor (not really visible).
	The landing upstairs, where I work (though it appears in this photo I am checking Facebook). Out the window to the left is the parking courtyard and the perimeter wall over which I see the street and the hills beyond. As I type, I have a visitor, the Vermillion Flycatcher (like a sparrow, but bright red). Usually it's the bright yellow version, the Social Flycatcher.
	Master BR
	Master Bath
	Carter's Room He likes the bars shut because then "even if a guy has a grappling hook, he can't get in". Note the Tintin painting is a scene from Temple of the Sun and the boat is called Pachacamac...and the story takes place in Peru. I painted this for Carter long before we knew we were coming here.
	Carter's Bath
	Guest Bath
	Guest Room It will be cozier by the time you get here.

Streets of Lima

Last week was a long one, marked for me by my first week of spanish class 4hrs per day. It's a great program, but getting to the other side of town by 9am is an endeavor unto itself. I am spending a lot of time on the roads of Lima, and there's a lot to see on the road.

My class is small, with a German kid, a Brazilian woman and a Texan guy. It is satisfying to finally discover some of the spanish grammar that has been swirling about me. Learning a small rule doesn't seem so small when it means I can suddenly comprehend something. Of course, on Wednesday, when the señora came running out of her house to yell at me because I had blocked her driveway for 4 hours, my spanish was clearly still so weak that she yelled at me in english. To be fair, it was totally bone-headed and I should have known better. People fit their cars into incredibly small spaces and, in this example, my gringo eyes just didn't even register that it was possible to put a car in her spot. When you get a ticket here, they put 3 giant stickers on your windows, so in addition to being fined you have to stand there in public humiliation for 5 minutes laboriously peeling the stickers off. Kind of an awesome penalty, actually...

 All over Lima, you find traffic police, most of them women who look remarkably alike. With their tight stretch riding pants, big black boots and sidearm, they perfectly fulfill someone’s kinky fetish. Not mine. When the intersection in front of us is unmoving for 10 minutes, we do dream of their arrival as they motorcycle around from traffic hot spot to hot spot. Police here are, in general, viewed through the lens of race and class. It's a potent combination, having power but being disrespected...so I choose to obey my local policia Limeño.

 Intersections have street-performers busquing for coins in 60sec intervals. Jugglers with pins or flame, break dancers, acrobats, musicians...all there. Last week, Jen and I saw a juggling clown pinned by a drunk seriously conversing with him. When a clown's expression translates as "Someone get this drunk out of my face!", it makes for a funny tableau. Completely unfunny are the apparently unattended children smaller than Carter who lean on car windows piteously. Or the Quechua-speaking grandmother, in her garb strait from the village, "selling" chiclets and pity. Younger mothers will beg with children strapped to their backs in a shawl, though when the child is 18mos it is old enough to hold the cup and press it toward you, some of their first words being those of begging. I need to start a deep, philosophy blog before I can truly explore the question as to why I have given coins to jugglers but never to beggars. It's only in true in the car, too, so who knows?

 One interesting thing in a poor country is that the streets are rife with the micro-economy. Wouldn't you like to have a woman on a 3-wheeled box-bike come along to sell you still-warm bread rolls? Or simply put some scrap on the sidewalk, and in a couple hours it is gone? Or park at the supermarket and have the guys pulling rolling barrels of water around wash your car by the time you get out?

Security Subconscious

I am just finishing a book called The Monkey's Paw by an American journalist named Robin Kirk. It is a collection of accounts, somewhere between reportage and subjective experiences, that provides a small window into the tempestuous 2 decades when the Shining Path and government forces spiraled into an orgy of violence. I recommend it to anyone interested in firsthand accounts from the personal perspective of a narrator that is at least honest about the limitations of what an outsider can know. [it's available on Amazon]

In addition to frothy, stone-cold terrorists, there are vivid accounts of security force depravity and a horrible "ends justify the means" extravagence on the part of police who routinely stuffed people in the trunk of a car, never to be seen again. Unlike many other countries that have "truth" commissions, Peru decided that there was nothing to gain by poking at the wounds and, after a general amnesty for any government misdeeds, just moved on. (to which I explicitly demur from expressing any opinion)

Meanwhile, the embassy has warned that whether it be venal crime or political crime, Peru is not  out of the woods yet. If someone knocks at your door delivering Pardo's Chicken, but you did not order Pardo's Chicken...well, do not open the door.

So today at Carter's taekwando, across the street from the embassy and next to the hotel where we lived for 6 weeks, the grandfather of 2 students who started at the same time as Carter came over to chat with me as usual. He appears to be in his low 50s and has lived in the US for 18 years driving trucks, currently in Massachusetts, but is down for half a year to see his son and grandsons. But today he starts the conversation with "Terrible what happened in Libya, those terrorists...". After some political chitchat that I kept tugging towards the shallow end of the pool, he then proceeds to tell me that people now don't want to remember what was really going on. He was a policeman, I am told, who trained in Spain and fought terrorism undercover in Lima, Bolivia, Ecuador. His brothers, he said, were also policemen, killed by the terrorists. He had to leave, he had a target on his back.

Interesting, right? But since I started this post referencing my reading material, I am sure you are now, as I was then, feeling a few hairs up on end. Sure, he may be a Peruvian in the US so long that he is lonely in his own country and specifically picks me to befriend at the twice-weekly taekwando. But really? Would an ex-secret-policeman really choose to chitchat about his intense past, in public, across the street from the embassy? It almost seems designed to turn my desire to connect directly with this country into a weakness, to exploit my naive egoism.

One of the things about the way we got ourselves to Peru is that, for better or worse, we are part of the diplomatic corps. This means that a veiled stranger with bad intent may want something more of us than our North American wealth. It means that even I, a spouse of a Peace Corps employee, am forced to suspicion. And of course, the sad part is that the guy may just be what he presented...a lonely man with a checkered past ready to talk about it at last. I mean, he bought his grandsons the full kit of expensive taekwando equipment!

This evening, directly after relating all this to Jennifer, our doorbell rang at 9:20pm. We did NOT order Pardo's Chicken. Jen asked who it was through the intercom, but got only garbles in response. Eventually we went and stood by the perimeter door and she hollered "Who is it?" Repeated queries never received anything more than "Señora Mariza" (our empleada). Mariza nervously couldn't fathom who would be asking for her at all, let alone this time of night. At this point, we called the embassy security who had the local car there in minutes. It was the pool guy apparently worried that he had left the pool filling to overflow. More likely, the household agrees, is that he is incoherently drunk at the end of the day and unwisely decided to pursue a crush on Mariza.

And that's a small account from behind the perimeter wire in our little corner of Peru.


PS: Lest anyone feel inclined to say "Be careful!" because my flip language here seems to lack seriousness about these things...be assured, that is not the case. This post is, if nothing else, a description of what it feels like to constantly be saying to oneself "Be careful."

Pachamanca in Pachacamac

It's like some bizarre word play, but Jen went to a place just south of Lima called Pachacamac...and while there, enjoyed the Andean cooking tradition called Pachamanca.

 Pachacamac is known as an important religious and cultural center of pre-Spaniard times, but we have yet to have a chance to explore the several ruins there. Interesting to me is that as various peoples conquered the area, they maintained the center's significance. Even the Inca, when they conquered it, allowed the Pachacamac priests to operate independently of the Inca priesthood. The Inca, though relatively small in population, seemed to be wiley administrators as well as military masters.

Pachamanca is a way of preparing large amounts of food by burying it in a hole with hot rocks. Jennifer was at a Peace Corps gathering and pachamanca meal. In one huge hole, the cooks have gotten rocks and coals nice and hot on stacked metal racks. They then transfer those racks into another hole, but interspersed with racks of meat, potatoes, sweet potatoes, little sweet tamales, etc., and plenty of herbs.

Photo one to the right shows a rack with slabs of ribs being lowered, photo two shows that they then throw in whole stalks of herbs, photo three shows a rack of chicken and, I believe, the tamales. More layers are added, including straw, until finally it is all covered in dirt and allowed to roast slowly. It is my impression that in the mountain villages it is much more of a rustic hole in the ground, they may not have the brick-lined hole and the fancy racks.

Back at the end of July, I sampled pachamanca, but didn't see the preparation. It is somewhere between stew and BBQ and it's a mystery how they get the savory juices out of the hole to your plate.

On a different note: here's a Vermillion Flycatcher sitting on our electrified perimeter wire. They pop by occasionally, more frequent are their cousins, the yellow Social Flycatchers that visit the bush outside my window as I work. Still haven't caught one on the camera.

We went Friday night to Chili's to watch Peru vs Venezuela play a World Cup Qualification match. The whole country watched it (and the replay on Saturday too, I think!). We had heard that Chili's would be full of fans because of all the TVs, and it was true. It was packed and I had to park using the Chili's/Starbucks valet (!) parking. Carter fell asleep on Jen's lap (only to be woken when Peru finally took the lead). Over our shoulders, pressed to the glass peering in at the TV were the intersection's police-man and the traffic controller. No traffic, and any self-respecting Peruvian criminal would be watching the game too, so why not?

The Car, the House

It has been a while, and much has changed. We got a car, we moved into our house and we hired a live-in empleada named Mariza.

THE CAR: A couple weeks ago, we got a Hyundai Elantra from friends of friends. Like a 16yr old, the wide world is now open, or at least I can get around town without a lot of hassle. But wait...this IS Lima and driving is no picnic. I am ready to affirm my earlier theory for driving here (no hesitation, no mercy, no resentment) but it feels a tad different when it is your own fender on the line. Plus, this week demonstrated the heinous backups that can happen. One morning, 45 minutes to take Carter the 3km to school and, Friday evening, an hour and twenty minutes to make the trip back from San Isidro that is normally 30min.  Think Mad Max stuck in traffic and you approximate the driving conditions. People are pushy/mean often in ways that don't even make sense and it is easy to forget that not EVERYONE is that way and to refrain from sinking as low.

THE HOUSE: Saturday before last, even though the house still had workers finishing up, we checked out of the hotel an brought our two carloads of suitcases over. It has been weeks and weeks of hotel living, so we were ready. The house is up behind a line of hills that look like massive, tired sand dunes. The sector, La Molina (View  Map) , is relatively well-to-do, though our area is not rife with the BMW set and our street would be considered quiet only relative to the insanely noisy street our hotel was on. I will post some pictures soon. The embassy required several layers of security, though most home hereabouts have a perimeter wall topped by electrified wire, so you basically drive right into your fort and park with the wall behind you. The house is appealing in many ways (nice flow, great plants, little pool) and not appealing in others (crumbly, badly wired, dim downstairs, etc). The house deserves a dedicated post sometime soon.

Carter is getting reacquainted with his toys, I am working on speedy internet, and Jennifer has started walking back from work or taking pilates in the evening. Normal life.

---except for the fact that we hired Mariza and we now have meals prepared for us, our beds made, Carter bathed, etc. Above a certain income level, having an empleada is absolutely regular in Lima. For us it is new territory and I hesitate to write about it because, as a gringo, the feelings are complicated. Suffice it to say that I've conveniently rationalized it...and it is AWESOME having meals prepared (ceviche for lunch, can't wait!) and the house cleaned and Carter watched. The relationship is an interesting mix of formal and intimate. Mariza is a talker, so I get some practice at Spanish, but she is pleased when Jen gets home and they can yak a bit. Mariza also deserves a dedicated post sometime soon.