There are two Perus. There is Lima, and there is everywhere else. It is important to me, when I tell people about our summer, to say we were in Lima, not just Peru. Lima is its own world--enormous, loud, never-ending: you can drive for three hours and not leave the city. Hell, you can live wherever in Lima and not leave a 5 block radius if you don't want to. Over a third of Peru's population resides in Lima, although many were not born there: many times, I would ask my taxi driver if they were from Lima. If they said no, the follow-up was inevitably "Soy de provincia" (I'm from a province). It didn't seem to matter which one, although I always asked. At this point my driver would almost inevitably become much more animated, telling me how beautiful their their homeland was, how different it was from Lima, how I had to go visit it even though it was far away. My response was always the same: "En otro viaje" (On the next trip).
This answer was mainly formulated on our budget, which depended on us staying in Lima with minimal extra travel. On another level, though, I was determined to simply get to know Lima the best I could with the two months we had. It is a city of infinite variety, rich and poor, beautiful and ugly, ornate and utilitarian. It is, quite simply, everything in Peru, in a way that no city in the United States really is: it is the political capital, the cultural capital, the economic capital, the educational capital, the technological capital, the port capital. Imagine New York City, Washington, D.C., Los Angeles, Silicon Valley, the docks of New Jersey, and the Ivy League all in one city. Now, imagine that over 100 million people live in that city, and the other 2/3 of the U.S. was left among the remaining territory.
This is Lima.
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One week ago today we started the day in Lima and ended it in Iowa City. We left Adita's apartment at 1:00 A.M. A 4:20 A.M. flight to San Salvador. An 8:45 A.M. departure for Chicago. Landed a little after three P.M. Went through all the bullshit of renting a car and arrived home at 11:00 P.M.
All in all, it's great to be home. I haven't gone through (at least not yet) that reverse culture shock that I have with other trips, and I'm not sure why not. Maybe I just haven't been back long enough. Probably my favorite thing about being back, besides not having to boil my water just to drink it, is the extra daylight: it was winter in Peru, and dark by 6:15. Here it's 8:15.
I have taken many evening walks the past week, and the biggest difference is the space. A house, thirty or forty feet of open ground, another house, another huge gap. If I walk for a mile around my house, I may walk by, say, 50 dwellings. In Lima I would have passed 50 dwellings within about 300 feet of my front door.
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I walked a lot in Lima, as well, although not so much in the evenings, as I was feeding and bathing kids. If I walked at night it was mainly to get something to eat, like some pasta or eggs. There were 10 such stores within a 500 foot walk from my house. The supermarkets are used by the middle and upper classes; everyone else buys at these local entities. Inevitably, you begin to prefer one or two over the others. Our store was ran by an older couple, parents of five children, all grown, one daughter in Atlanta, where my sister Teresa lives.
They were "de provincia". Juliaca, in the province of Cuzco. They are planning on visiting in October. The old woman's eyes shined every time she talked about their upcoming trip; who knows how long it had been since she'd been home. It isn't so easy to get back and forth in Peru. One young woman I met had moved to Lima "de provincia" five years ago. She hasn't been back since. She hasn't seen her mom in five years. It would cost her about 400 soles, or $130, for a round trip ticket in bus. She can't afford the bus fare or the time off work.
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It is another gorgeous, warm, sunny day in Iowa. It is so nice to see the sun shine again. We had a few days of sunshine in Lima, but it was winter and that generally meant cloudy skies and high humidity. The high was always around 70 but the humid breeze off the ocean made it feel cooler when the sun wasn't shining. I hesitate to say forever, but I don't know if I'll ever miss another Iowa summer by choice. We go through so much shit in winter, it seems wasteful not to take advantage of summer, even if it does get a little warm. I can't wait to go read the newspaper on the deck after I finish writing this. Hell, maybe I'll just take a break and do it now.
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I loved reading the newspaper in Lima, too. A cup of coffee and newspaper is one of my main gateways into a country's culture. There were SO many different newspapers published, I'd say around twenty dailies. They were sold at little kiosks and usually closed by three in the afternoon. Most of the newspaper were fairly trashy tabloids; only a couple really impressed me with their journalism. The best one, El Comercio, was incredibly conservative; it made the Wall Street Journal look central in comparison. It was a little hard on this lefty, but it reflects its country; Peru is a very conservative country, where boys play soccer and girls play volleyball and that's the way it is.
The newspapers also reflected the Lima/provinces division, I think without really trying to. If something happened outside of Lima you generally didn't read about it until at least page 10. One of the exceptions was when the departments of Cuzco and Puno, up in the mountains, received about 15 inches of snow, an incredibly rare occurrence brought on by El Niño. Several dozen people died, but what many of the people were worried about was keeping their livestock warm; their livestock is, in economic terms, all they have. Lima was back on the front page the next day, but there was a great cartoon on the opinion page, with a little kid in Puno standing in a foot of snow and a light jacket listening to a nurse say, "Now, little boy, the best way to avoid pneumonia is to make sure your hands you wash your hands."
The little boy in the cartoon, and most of those who live outside of Lima, are often referred to as "cholos" ("cholas" or "cholitas" in the case of women). I don't particularly care for this term, as it reflects an ethnic and socioeconomic bias among the people of Lima who use it, but it kind of becomes impossible not to use it if you spend enough time in Peru (or married to a Peruvian :)) Cholos aren't from the capital, and the term, although broadly used, generally applies to people of Native American descent (although pretty much all Peruvians have Native American blood). My shop tenders, then, would be cholos; and so would the young woman who hadn't been home in 5 years to see her mom. I really don't think Peruvians use it pejoratively, at least not always and on purpose; it is just another one of those markers, this one linguistic, that divides Lima and the rest of Peru.
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We actually got up in the mountains for a few days. Not the REAL mountains like Cuzco and Puno, but a province called Canta, technically still a part the department of Lima, but culturally a million miles away. We went in the middle of the week and did the whole trip, lodging and transportation, for under $200. We left Adita's apartment at 11:00; it was 1:00 before we were actually leaving the city of Lima. As we got to the northeast edge of the city, in a district called Carabayllo, the terrain started sloping up and gradually the population density began to decrease. On the hillsides you could see homes constructed out of leftover materials: they were the beginnings of shantytowns, which will eventually become more and more populated as people try desperately to move into Lima, using whatever they can for materials. Our driver said that in twenty-five years Carabayllo will be the most populous district in Lima, and I think he's right.
It was 2:30 when we arrived in Obrajillo, a little town of probably less than a thousand people where we stayed. Three hours from Lima but it felt like we'd changed countries. The streets were dirt and they were shared by people, huge trucks, and farm animals. We rode horses, we hiked, we explored waterfalls, a spotted dog accompanying us most of the time. There were no newspapers available to buy or internet cafes, and since I don't watch much TV, I pretty much lost track of the outside world. There was an older cholita who would, literally, spend all day sitting on the corner and watching the passers by.
One day we followed some roads in search of a trout farm, finally finding it, asking if they served food. They did. We ate at a table in front of this family's house, all their chickens and cats and walking around us as we dined. $16 for four freshly caught trout dinners, served to us by a ten year old girl named Teresa, whom I challenged to race Niko. Niko's a fast kid but they tied. And there was our spotted dog: turned out this family owned him, and his name was Pirate.
Two days later we returned to Lima. Canta became Carabayllo, Carabayllo became Comas, Comas became Los Olivos, Los Olivos became San Martin de Porres, and then we were back in Cercado de Lima. My ears didn't pop until the next day.
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I need to finish this. It's just too nice of a day to sit here and write, you know? It's my birthday tradition, though, and I'm glad I've done it. I guess I'll take this spot to go ahead and thank everyone for all their birthday wishes, and repeat as I always do that I have a great life, and that's all due to all of you, my loved ones, family and friends, who span several continents and languages, but all are in my heart. I'm thrilled to be 38, because, well, that means I'm not dead yet. There's more joy in that phrase than it might sound like.
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On one of our last days in Lima, Sonia was busy doing something with the kids, so I went to the gym. My gym was a fifteen minute walk, then a fifteen bus ride away, in Jesús María, close to the kids' school.
I finished my workout around 6:30 and then showered. I LOVED showering in my gym because the water pressure was great and the hot water was like here, not electronically warmed as it was in most houses. It was a cool but pleasant evening as I walked to the Avenida Brasil to get my bus, where the big military parade would be held in a week's time. My particular bus had to make two turns and didn't come along too frequently, but that night I didn't mind waiting. I felt great after my workout and although it was dark, the streets were still teeming with people.
People sell things at bus stops. Candy and drinks are the most popular, but it is really amazing what you can find sometimes just at a bus stop, like headphones or textual guides to C++. On this night there was an older cholita woman selling little bags of popcorn and, since I had to wait for my bus, I heard her call out several times, trying to make a sale and earn a few soles. "Canchitas, canchitas, un sol". As had happened so many times on this trip, I was amazed at how hard people worked just to make a few soles.
My bus finally showed up. As I climbed aboard, the cholita and I crossed right by each other. When I actually looked at her face, I was shocked. She was actually not older--she was young, quite a bit younger than me, probably in her twenties. It was only her clothing and the way she went about her work that made me think she was older. I reflected on how these two people happened to intersect with one another: me, thirty-seven (soon to be thirty-eight), upper middle class, on la Avenida Brasil because I had spent money using exercise machines. Her, young, needing money enough to sell popcorn at the bus stop on la Avenida Brasil. I wondered what she did with the money she made selling popcorn. Did she have a child? More than one? Was she supporting an older relative?
I got on the bus and sat down. "I didn't mean to think of you as 'cholita'," I thought.
The bus swerved into traffic. Ahead of me stretched the mighty Avenida Brasil. Behind me, framed by the streetlight, I watched the young woman call out to her prospective customers, "Canchitas, canchitas, un sol."
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