link 1
link 2
link 3
Upsaid

Please God Don't
sign my Guestbook
View :: Sign

I pity the 1112866 fools who hit here.

Rummage through my entry

View archived entries

Post a new entry

These blogs just don't do RSS:

Gravity Zero

del.icio.us

Sierra

My friends and family have visited Perú, you know.  But what they saw was the coast.  The coast is different.  On the coast, women are now permitted to go to university, to begin (if not yet fully execute) a career.  They can smoke in public, delay marriage and children, travel independently (even though they don't, they can), see something different on the street and tolerate it.  The banks used to only employ beautiful girls, but nowadays quite a few banks will employ ugly women, too, if they are good at their jobs.
The coast is much more advanced than where I live.

Sure, maybe in comparison to back home, it seems shabby, dirty and limited.  Bit like Hull thirty years ago.  Women are not yet emancipated enough to have short hair, or to want to sacrifice family for the sake of their new careers.  And if they see a facial piercing, a boy in eyeliner, their jaws drop in shock.  But in the contest of Peru, of costa, sierra, selva (coast, mountain, jungle, the three separate cultures of any Andean country), they're worldly, liberal, cosmopolitan.  Tolerant.
My partner's from the coast.  But that's not My Perú. 

I live in the high sierra.  Coastal people use serrano (someone from the sierra is a serrano) as an insult.  It means backward, insular, unevolved. (believe me, you don't want to know what they think of selva culture...)

... and they have a bit of a point, there, see.

In the sierra, women still walk three paces behind their husband.  (who, incidentally, has never boiled water, but expects a three course meal for lunch, waiting on the table as he steps in the door.)  Women can run a family business, but nothing else - a woman is for the cleaning, the cooking, the breeding, the carrying.  Women don't even pay for things here.  Many's the night I've watched three knockout girls in a bar yawning around a man so inebriated that his face is in his navel, because if they don't dance attendance , who would pay for the drinks and the food?
[Explaining the concept of 'going dutch' to C----, coastal chica, she says, "yes, but on a date it'd be different, no?"  then gapes as I explain, no, that is a date.]

It's not unusual to see a halfcut fat rolling feller slouching down the street at one pm while his wife and his mother carry two stones of potatoes and three kids on their backs, behind him.  Women are treated as donkeys, here.

For that matter, so's everybody.  Treated like a donkey, I mean.
If you call an electrician he'll like as not arrive three days late and pissed for the first month of appointments.  There's a national ban on sale of alcohol two days before any election, to ensure people use the time off correctly.  In a restaurant, maybe you'll get served, and maybe you won't.    Maybe half of what you ordered will do.  Taxis are Toyota estates, and they carry between 12 and 18 people, a goat on the roof and a bag of chickens in the boot with the children, and yes, they do offroad.  What road?
An average taxi ride is four hours.  The handbrake is space for another passenger, there's a horn for that purpose.  If you enter a clothes shop in the sierra, they're quite likely to throw you out again.  Certainly you have little chance of trying on any clothes.  Workers in the sierra often work for three months, then disappear, having tired of it.  And yes, it's true, the manual workers outside of the cities will chew coca all day.

It's a bit like living in cave somewhere.  And slowly, slowly, the cave walls creep closer, and you begin to find it normal, to think that everywhere is always like this.  'Perú is advancing,' goes the national slogan, and yes, it is.  There's little terrorism now, educational standards are improving, even if alfabetismo doesn't yet hit every community, we have KFC, Starbucks, and a corrupt premier league just like you.
But that's one thousand kilometres south west of here, on the coast. 

Yesterday I saw a young calf walking through the regional capital city, with 'I'm yours for $11' tacked onto its belly.  (even in the godfearing sierra, a woman is cheaper.) 
Here, where I live, is the sierra.  And we're different.

Posted by Sarsparilla at 9:08 pm ~ There are shitloads - 4 - of notes [ View ~ Add ]

Snippets from real conversations

In the street, in the city square, in the market ...

• "I love you because your skin is white."
• "Is your country perfect?  Have peruvians ever existed in your country?"
• "Little white girl!  Little white girl!  Buy from me!"
• "Oh my god, look how fat you are.  Are you pregnent?  No?  You're just very, very fat, then.  It's because you're in love!"
• "When you people enter a room, somehow, we peruvians, we feel less."
• "You're too tall, but your eyes are nice."
• "White girl!"  [multiply this one by a million, and repeat it ad nauseum]
• "That food is poisonous.  You people can eat it only because your stomachs are different, because you are from Mars."
• "Oh my god, you're white.  You're so white.  How pretty.  How, how pretyyou are."
• "What's your problem, why are you buying vegetables so late?  It's one o'clock, did you get up late?" [other woman interjects] "Don't be stupid, she'ws the white girl rom the institute.  She works all the night, so she sleeps all day.  That's why she cooks at stupid times*.   How come you don't know this?"           [*30 minutes past the national lunchtime, fact fans]
• "I know about you.  You're the exploited white girl that guy keeps, no?"
• "I wish I was slim and beautiful like you, but I am black*."   [* from latin women who'd certainly be considered white in my country]
• "You have beautiful eyes but you like to hide them."
• "White giant.  You people eat only old food, many years old, isn't that true.  That's why peruvians will always be healthier than you."
• "Britain?  What part of the US is that, then?"
• "You are getting fatter, aren't you?"
• "Look, look! Look at that white girl!  Oh, she's pretty."
• "You tourists, you all behave like you are God.  You're nothing in your country."
• "Give me your eyes.  I like your eyes."
• "Can you see that?! It's a white girl!  Incredible."
• "White whore, go home.  American whore."
• "I would eat your eyes.  And then I want my daughter to have the same eyes."
• "I cannot go to your country.  I am not spoilt like you.  They would kill me because I am black*."       [* olive skin, inca cheekbones, or chinese features are considered 'black' in Perú]
• "Look, it's a prostitute!"
• "White girl, I have an uncle in the United States.  Do you know him?"
• "White bitch, what can he give you that I can't?"

For the record, I am not fat, beautiful, pretty, or possessed of unusually tempting eyes.  Listening to this all the time fucks with your sense of self.

Posted by Sarsparilla at 4:49 pm ~ There are shitloads - 7 - of notes [ View ~ Add ]

Blind to it

I was having a hard time with the silence, the lack of friends, the machismo, the racism, thepoverty, the language barrier, and got pretty depressed a couple of times (in the 'I give up, gimme drugs and get me through this' kind of sense - dicey in a country where access to powerful anti-depressants is utterly unregulated), but A--- pointed out to me that seeing things as black and white is itself a symptom of depression, and that gave me enough patience to ride it out a little longer.

"A person who is depressed doesn't see things as they are.  They see things in black and white.  And all the black is my fault."

Isolation doesn't compete well when set against rosy memories.

Posted by Sarsparilla at 11:40 pm ~ There are shitloads - 3 - of notes [ View ~ Add ]

No matter how many times you take the road to Pittsburgh

No matter how many times you take the road to Pittsburgh, it's not going to get you to Philadelphia

Drunken posts we have known.  And man, it's harder to be pissed in an internet cafe.

Desperation.

The internet tells me this: "tell your friends and family.  But you may have to be specific about what you want them to do".

I want you to do this:

• don't imagine that I don't exist until I'm in Europe.  Speak to me, communicate with me.  If you have some vague, comforting idea that I have friends here, that I have anyone who will even reply to an enquiry, I don't.  If you communicate with me, it will be one of the few human voices I hear this month;
• telephone me.  I know most people send your their numbers in case you lose your mobile. Actually I sent you my number, because in three years, only looby (internet friend), eroica (internet friend), my mum, russell, caroline, my best friend and my sister ever sent a call.  And that was one each.
• or, say yes when I ask if it's okay that I stay with you on my first lentgthy UK visit since July2005.  Even if it's for two hours, just don't blank the email.
• send me a letter.  It takes a month, more while we still have avalanches but no gas or food, but it will get there.
• remember I'm alive. Sincerely, that's my biggest fear.
• try really hard to stop saying 'no' to me.  Really.  If you say 'yes', I'll make hardly any demands at all, and the bounty to my immortal soul will be considerable just not to live in a world where everyone in a first world country says 'no'.  Or, 'what have you done for me lately?'

Posted by Sarsparilla at 12:17 am ~ There are shitloads - 6 - of notes [ View ~ Add ]

Delineation

August 27th, 2006. Written in the UK.

Delineation. It’s interesting what people consider public, or private. My sole rule of blogging is Finished Business Only. Dale comments that if anything, his writing is all unfinished business. Occasionally I get emails from people who’ve built up an entire cyber-personality for me, from the shreds they see on the web. I never quite know how to break it, how to let them down gently that the words here don’t represent who I am (that prime directive, in fact, means that, if anything, my online writing could only ever tell you Who I Have Once Been).

I’ve met plenty of people through various onscreen guises (and before you get snobby, as long as I can’t detect a clique forming, I like it; it’s just another way humans adapt cyberspace and personalise it. Stick that in your arsey up-yourself pipe and choke on it, all you ‘blogging is shit’-shouting, mediocre dead-media columnists – if you had any talent, you wouldn’t need to be scornful.) One of the most predictable responses I get from people I’ve met a time or two, who crack and start to be honest – is that they find me nothing like the person they’d imagined. So the writing isn’t feeding you the woman.

Whereas RL friends who read the blog (and there are plenty of posturing declaimers who like to greet me with ‘I don’t read your blog, you know!’ (if they’d had a few, they’ll follow it up with ‘it’s so self-indulgent!’) I’ve bitten my tongue on the fact that my site stats show they update weekly – if they think new media’s an excuse for poor manners, it’s their funeral) tend to see it as an extension of the person they know. Kind of a clue about what the quiet, sulky one is thinking. That seems more realistic an interpretation to me. I mean, just knowing someone isn’t any guarantee you actually know them.

Two of my exes read this blog (actually, lots do, but these two actually respond like puppets to scissors (so their reaction comes to gain meaning, simply via volume)). One read the blog before we dated. One knew me in RL, then, as part of some inexplicable pre-date stalking ritual, uncovered the blog.

• The former, who read the blog before ‘reading’ me regarded onscreen writing in much the same way as drunken musing. If I said something particularly ill-advised, I’d get a phone call to talk it out. The blog was seen as ‘surface’, and the person as what’s real.

• The latter, the one who knew me, then knew the blog regarded onscreen writing as some sort of lightning bolt truth blow delivered straight from my soul to the ether. If I gabbed my gob off ill-advisedly, I’d be ignored for weeks, then get some portentous admission. “I’ve read The Blog.” Real-life me was seen as ‘surface’, and the blog suddenly represented what was real.

In fact, when I spoke to Dutch about the ethics of dating and blogging, she did the Old Lady With The Second Sight act from any slasher B movie, complete with mad eyes, and clutching – “whatever you do, don’t tell her/him about the blog.”

I suppose I’ve never really had a strong delineation between public and private (isolated childhoods can fuck with your values). And I suppose an easy way out is to tell no one.

I dunno. I think they’ve all got it wrong. Sometimes, my blog is truer than my voice. Most times you’d not connect my RL calmness with the hysteric onscreen. We all have a mass of contradictory opinions that we hope nobody else will notice.

I am not the person you read here. As if that needed saying. This is not truth; this is not truth. No blog is ever truth.

The only way you know people? Really?

1. You have to do things with them. New things.

2. They have to want to let you in. That cuts out about 90% of the human race, then.

You don’t know me? Whaddaya talking about? You don’t even know you.

Posted by Sarsparilla at 1:54 pm ~ There are shitloads - 2 - of notes [ View ~ Add ]

Who's Ya Hero?

20th August, 2006; written in south west England

Change? Change is easy. The unknown, the step into the new. Fuckin' easy. It's like being back in school, because there's an easy sense of progress built in. It doesn't take strength of character, initiative, or self awareness to change anything - to change everything in your life.
What's hard is sticking about to see something through. That's where the real, gutsy heroes are, you know.

Posted by Sarsparilla at 5:41 pm ~ There are shitloads - 4 - of notes [ View ~ Add ]

Derrumbe

The derrumbes continue. Earthquake season is not till August, but it's the rainy season in the sierra (while equatorial, flat, coastal Perú enjoys their sweltering summer), and along the Andes - being largely formed of cities on mountain peaks, accessed by roads along valley chasms, alongside the white water furies that formed them - sometimes when the rivers swell, they take things with them.
It started two weeks ago, when the river swoll and took a suspension bridge, two cars, a truck and fifteen people. But we laughed nervously, here on our safe mountainpeak, and listened to stories of the rope bridge built across the still roaring white water, of the extra two hour hike to get to the ropes.
No hay pase became a new phrase I learnt. There's no way through. Cars can ford so much river, but not a torrent.
Another week of rain, and showers, and buses to the nearest city started to take 24 hours to complete a 9 hour journey. The slowness necessitated by the awkward, perilous task of riding over a fresh derrumbe, a fresh avalanche fall, on precipice white water overhangs, at five different points in the journey. Once the soil has started to slide, there's not much to stop it doing so again, so often you see colectivo drivers winging it, deciding to drive through an active avalanche, in the hope that it's not too serious yet, but if they wait, it will block the road for two days.

There are two roads into Bumfuck, Perú. We are situated on the eastern side of the Andean range, closer to the Amazonian jungle than to the coast (and civilisation). One road leads north, to the jungle fork, to the source of the river Amazon, to the turn off for the coast. The government have spent two years trying to pave this road, and in doing so for half of the route, has cut three hours from the travel time. The other leads south, and up: to 3500 metre frozen peaks and a city in the clouds, on the western side of the range. This road is not yet, and will not ever be paved, so a journey this way is steambreath cold, bumpy like a bike on a pebble beach, and dangerous.

Soon the word comes in - a derrumbe has closed the north road. For all the time and money spent paving the thing, no government can control the sheer Andean peak on one side, and the white water rushing on the other. The mountain has moved, shifted, and destroyed, taking with it not only the road, but the entire winding chasm of a valley. Not just the road is gone. The route is gone. Under shifting, unstable roack, it will never be there again.
If we want a route to the coast, we will have to cut one from the mountain through a different valley.
The estimated time for reopening the route is 3 years, or perhaps 30 days. It continues to rain.

We hear news from our sister city, in the western sierra, at the foot of the road south. They too have been cut off from the rest of the country. Now there is only the road to the jungle to feed us.  In the sierra, we grow potatoes. No more. We do not grow vegetables, we do not farm cattle (excepting the odd llama on the forgotten creepered fortresses in the junglier valleys), we do not grow rice, or farm chickens, or tank up gas for anywhere. Everything we eat has to be brought here. Peru survives on twice daily chicken and rice. This is going to be bad.

We wait for the prices to rise. My house runs out of gas to cook on day two. We go to the market and buy an electric kettle, saving my western addiction to coffee from the torture. There's no warm water to be boiled to wash with, but I got me my morning coffee. Go me.

My mother in law lives in one of the smaller towns stranded on all sides by the derrumbes, in the fertile valleys that provide us with rice. The restaurants in her town have run out of food and fuel, and refuse to serve anyone. The houses with kitchens are the only ones with gas. But no food to cook on it. She has decided to make a dash for the jungle. The route is clear, if you can get colectivos from derrumbe to derrumbe, and are willing to hike an hour or so over the unstable silt top of each avalanche. She wants to risk it.

Realising that foreigners will be the last to secure sought after supplies, we end up sending a peruvian out to whisper in corners about where more gas can be bribed out of the woodwork.  We hear: the houses who sell gas canisters have been hiding their stock, pretending it's run out, so they can reserve it for the big customers, the restaurants, and hoik the price up sky high.
The police discover this fraud, and raid all the gas sellers, confiscate their stock on the charge of having hidden it. The police now have all the gas in town. They hide it, and sell it at ridiculous prices, only to their friends. The rain continues.

One of our staff is having an affair with a married frenchman. He works for Medecins Sans Frontiers, in the African Republic of Congo, saving lives. He says his marriage is dead, and she is the first person to make him feel alive again. He spends $4000 USD flying from Congo to Lima, via Rio de Janeiro. There is no way through from Lima to the sierra.
He flies again, north to the coastal cities. There is no way through. He has ten days before he has to go back to Africa and save lives again. She cries a lot, and buys tickets from Paola.

The government sends an army cargo plane, to ship people out of the city to the coast, and food and fuel in. They promise that food will be sold at no more than usual profit, market prices. Fuel, too.
Nobody in the city ever sees a whisper of this food and fuel, but we've all heard it exists. They begin to ship people to the coast. The flights are free (Paola is cross, and refuses to let the private plane leave until it's full). People flying cargo have no seats, they simply strap themselves to a bench, try to endure the roaring noise, and the memories of the plane crash, swearing that they will never fly again.
The swell of people wanting free shipment to the coast is too big, and the army need to find a way to identify the most deserving cases. They decide that people with hospital appointments on the coast are not the most deserving cases, but people with important jobs who are friends of the mayor are. It keeps raining.

The restaurants are beginning to run out of fuel. Royser has a secret store of kerosene to roast chicken from. Luis reckons he has the inside info on where the camioneta full of gas canisters everybody saw this morning ended up.  The taxis in the city move around by pushing. Tempers are beginning to fray, and all across the Andes, the internet, the cellphones flare with gossip about a route over the peaks here, a possibility of movement there.

According to the government, the siege will last 15 days, or 2 years, now. We look at the local cathedral, demolished 15 months ago, sporting a government sign bragging of its rebuilding program, 'in only 90 days!'  Peruvians are ingenious people, can make something from nothing, can always always fix things, somehow. We know that in government speak, this means 8 days, or 30 days.  Or maybe ten years.

Posted by Sarsparilla at 4:04 pm ~ There are shitloads - 3 - of notes [ View ~ Add ]

The Pleasures of Poverty

Written in December 07, Perú

It's not a new thing to be poor.  Poverty's causes cycle through a range of reasons:  you're a student, you're saving, you're paying rent on two houses, your ex stole a shitload of moolah from you, your money's earmarked for a higher or more important cause than eating right now, your job is shit, your partner's sick, you're waiting on a payout, it's a bad month for the business, you spent like hell last month, or you're just grinding shiteating dirt poor.

Doesn't make a whole lot of difference, I find, the reason.  Not to your stomach.  Not when you find yourself mentally rehearsing ways to tell your family you can't afford a christmas present for them that year.  Not when you try to nice it up that you didn't ring for a year cos there was no money for the phone.  Or can you send me a t shirt, a book, a blanket, so I don't have to stop eating to buy one.
My reason this time is that if I stay here, in SA, forever - or at least for such a period that makes pensionability impossible in my country of origin - then I have no pension and no health insurance for when I'm getting old enough for the parts to go rotten.  So the wee pile of money I have left from selling a London flat in 05 is now earmarked for double bypasses in a country with no NHS, for prescription drugs in a place where you buy the surgical implements and the medicines at the store and take them with you to the hospital.  For that, and for emergency plane fares home if for some reason I need an out route.  Suddenly, the pile that made me feel comfy for two years is not so much when I see the back up plan (a job, in a first world country) disappearing.

So I'm poor.  But the kind of poor where there's money, there's just a fucking good reason not to put it in my stomach.

And, as ever, I find there's a lot more peace in having nothing in your stomach, than in having something, but knowing there'll be less tomorrow.  Somehow, the possession of my last ten soles (one pound twenty four, fact fans) is astronomically stressful, when the possession of zero centavos is simply something I have no option but to endure.

Posted by Sarsparilla at 12:43 pm ~ There are shitloads - 8 - of notes [ View ~ Add ]

At night I have cried small, bitterly resented tears

For a friend who finds themselves there, also, and for myself, who needs a reminder of the basic untruth telling of blogging at all, a piece I wrote in anger, when I got back from Delhi to England, on July 23^rd, 2006:

Of course, it’s a fucking pretence to say loneliness and transitoryness and friendlessness were what the problem has been lately. That’s a smothering lie I use to avoid the rawness, and I know it. I know it and you know it and truth knows it and eternity knows it and the sheltered prison I live inside of knows it.

I had my heart broken six months ago. I had my heart gouged and torn, I had acid poured in the cavity, and it hurts too much to say it, it rips me too much to even look at it.

Music doesn’t get avoided ‘because it reminds me of Tybalt.’ Lie. Barefaced. I play music and think of his mouth.

Dates don’t get avoided just because Hap was ‘twisted’ or ‘controlling’. Lie. Barefaced. I avoid them because they’re empty ritual, devoid of meaning or promise. My diary tells me I dated Sarhaj two months ago. I can’t remember a word he said. I think I remember a shiny BMW he used to drive me in. But it was such a waste of time to listen. It’s not like I’ll ever mend this, patch it up all crazy-mended and go out and care about someone ever again.

Something inside me got ripped and torn forever this year. And if I insist on pretending otherwise, I’ll never step a single pace forward.

By the way. If I ever told you I love you? I don’t. I didn’t. It was a lie. A barefaced lie. I didn’t know it, of course (until you’ve had the knife slide into your guts, how can you know these slaps and bruises weren’t really ever pain?) But it wasn’t love.

It won’t ever be love again.

A lie. A barefaced, tragic, obvious lie.

I had my heart stamped on this year. I had it broken, shattered, destroyed. It’s in pieces that will never ever fit back right again.

There’s a sixty foot iceberg between me and the world. There’s a ten mile splinter in the skin of my soul. It hurt, it hurt badly; nothing can ever be the same again because of it. Every word I say to you which fails to scream that - it is a lie, a barefaced, shitty, broken lie.

Now then. That’s out of the way and I’ve told you. Back to the shambling and the limping, and the pretending it’s all alright these days.
As you were. Vanessa.

Posted by Sarsparilla at 11:20 pm ~ There are shitloads - 2 - of notes [ View ~ Add ]

Not Lima. Not Cusco. Just Perú.

Based on a principle of always doing whatever he says, I joined this, and found at least one interesting new blog, here (if you want a more informative idea of what life in the Andean sierra is like, rather than just me whingeing that the coffee is weird and I don't speak perfect spanish yet, he has it here).

But most of the blogs in Peru are based in Lima and Cusco - international, touristic cities that are as far removed from ordinary peruvian life as they can possibly be.  Nobody in my city has ever heard of muesli, or toast, or bacon.  I live in BumFuck, the regional capital of Nowhere, in the northern sierra of Perú.  Life's pretty cheap here, especially compared to the 'low' prices of Lima.

Having skimmed through the prices of other SA countries in the expat forum, it seems I underestimated 'pretty cheap'.  It seems a war-torn, Sudanese level of cheap would be more appropriate a term.  Here, look ...

> accommodation prices
Our staff (I run a language school) rent rooms locally for $20 a month. They're pretty basic.
If you want a luxury furnished apartment, you'd be paying $60 a month.  But the concept of 'luxury' is somewhat different than back home. For instance, pretty much nobody in the city has an apartment with a kitchen, so eating out is the norm, and therefore cheapísimo.

> public transportation fares (tube, bus etc ...)
Well, we're remote.  No, I mean remote.  It's 12 hours bus to the nearest city with bookshops supermarkets or cinemas.  That would cost you around $12.
Anywhere within the city costs you $0.80c in a taxi.  But as only six roads are paved, it's actually more comfortable to forget the hurry and just walk.

> food prices(per month, how much does it cost you?)
If you eat in a restaurant daily, a two course lunch and refreshment would cost you $1 on average.  I'm a rare creature with a kitchen, so it's a little less.  I share the cost of cooking with my staff, and we all dig in.  It costs us around $28 a month.

> health prices (for those who need medical insurance)
I have medical insurance, but as it only covers doctors who practise in the cities on the coast, around 200 miles from here, I've never used it.  The public hospital charges $1.10 per consultation, and a private hospital charges around $11 for a consultation.  That could rise as far as $13 if you get any work done.

> education prices (if you need to pay)
Most people don't need to pay, and can attend state schools, but private education is expensive, and largely religious.  As many kids study in cities far from their families, offsetting the guilt by slamming them in a religious school is popular (so that families don't need to worry so much about what discos the teens are working in over the weekends, it seems.  Average age of bar staff seems to be 15). 
You can study for 90 minutes a day at the school I run for around $32 per month.  Mind you, the private university only charges $7 per month for the same thing, but with poor teaching, no materials and added insults when you fail, burro.

> energy prices (oil, electricity)
Water is around $8 per month for a household of four, and a school, too, and electricity a little over that.  Gasoline I don't know about, because nobody in their right mind would run a car on unsealed Andean roads.  You need an experienced driver to escape the potholes, flash floods, avalanches, and the 12 hour dark stretches of road, so you would be suicidal not to employ a taxi or passenger bus for that purpose.

> common bills (Internet, television, telephone, mobile phone)
Nobody uses personal internet, because there's quite enough web cafes dotted around the city, who all charge $0.30 per hour.
TV costs nothing, if you like 3 blurry channels - or if you want cable, you can pay $35 a month, or do what most people do - go to a pollería with cable and spend the duration of the movie you want to see gently nursing a cup of tea - $0.20 for as long as you can stretch it.
Pay as you go, or prepaid mobiles are the rage here.  In a room full of 60 people, generally nobody will have credit.  The cheapest PAYG phone costs about $10 from Claro.

> prices of a good menu in a traditional restaurant
A trad local restaurant will offer the 'menu' or almuerzo (2 course lunch) for $1.  You can go ritzy, and pay $1.50 if you want silverware and a tablecloth, though.
Typical regional food is pricier - a plate of cecina  - beef jerky, but oh ... moist, tasty, different - will cost you anything from $1.80 to $3. 
The most expensive dish you could order is $12 - a whole roast cuy, or guinea pig.

> prices of a beer and of a coffee in a regular pub
A beer is $1.20 for a big stein of Pilsen.  The local custom of 'one beer' is that you share one bottle, and one glass, between all of your party.
A Pisco Sour would come in at $2 and is for impressing girls.  A coffee is $0.30 for a good one, a cafe pasado.  But you could pay less if you prefer instant. 
The favourite weekend brain maasher is to round off a night of beer drinking, with a jug of coffee with six piscos in it.  But that's for the government workers, not the ordinary guy.

Posted by Sarsparilla at 12:05 pm ~ There are shitloads - 13 - of notes [ View ~ Add ]

I could rain perspectives down forever

> Online chat with someone who's living out the other side of the equation, living in a non Western world, and in a relationship with someone from another country.  As all my best chats seem to be, these days.

me: Had a really good day the other day - I had spent 5 hours cooking a birthday cake for one of the staff.  See, happiness guaranteed, by 5 kilos of butter and two bags of sugar...
her:  J   That's great.  Are you still writing, I mean outside the blog?
me: Noooo.
her: Not even in your diary? or something like that?
me: I will be kicking myself at some other point in my life, when I dont have the time-time-time all the time, but no.  Nope, nothing.
her: Why? Writing has always been cathartic for you, puts things in perspective for you.
me: Growing old, I think.  I have perspective, I don't know what to do with it.  It's not a process of self discovery to say that immigrating to a  new country is hard.  It's just obvious.  But what do you do with that knowledge.
her:  Your perspective being? You adjust, you adapt.
me:  Perspective:  it's hard here.
her: Yes.  Doubly so in  your case.
me:  Perspective: people could make it easier, but they won't.
her: No. I found out in my self that with the adjustment, I can only do so much to make it easier for my partner. But they have to deal with other people too, with their own subjective expectations, and biases. Or prejudices.
me: Perspective: It's also hard in different ways if I go back.
Perspective: I'm stubborn.  I may be able to make it work.  But is that the right thing to do?
What I lack is action, not ideas.
I found: I can't change a country.
her: No, unfortunately.  The country will change you, though.  But it is of course different if that country is trying to spit you out.
me:  And the same problem would occur if I go back to the UK.  It's too hard to fight a whole country.  It's much easier to go with what they want.  So although I might like, say, the pace of life her, the lack of ambition driving all other priorities from existence, the time people take to live their lives; I would not be able to import that to a job in the UK.   You can't fight a country, you just end up unhappy all the time. 
her:  UK is at least not trying to spit you out.  But you are not happy there, are you?
me: They're not trying to spit me out.  I'm not important enough for that.  They just don't give a shit about me.  I'm irrelevant.  In Ecuador they try to frighten the gringos out.  Here I'm just ... oddity.
her: But do you have a niche in Perú?
me:  We have some US staff.  One of them plays footie every day with the local guys (another thing females are barred from), and ends up yelling 'my name is not gringo, my name is J****' at them.
That's when they're not beating the crap out of him, because it's easier to do that than compete with a foreigner. 
Because everyone knows foreigners have unfair advantages, so there's nothing you can do to them that is unfair.
her: Ha, in that sense, it is the same in this country.
me:  I have some sort of niche in some ways, but in others, I have no friends, nobody to speak to, nothing to do.  
There are other ways of framing it, too: I have a family here, I have a business of my own here, I have a unique opportunity to build something.
I could rain perspectives down forever.  But what do you DO?
her: Build on that positive frame you just said.
me: It isn't everyday I have that positive frame.

Posted by Sarsparilla at 3:11 pm ~ There are shitloads - 4 - of notes [ View ~ Add ]

Another Year

I'm a little grumped out by the newest year, so I decided to blog in other people's comments for a while.  They're all better blogs than this one, so it's got to be interesting.

1   2   3

Posted by Sarsparilla at 6:41 pm ~ There are shitloads - 5 - of notes [ View ~ Add ]

Merry Christmas, you lot

The tradition here is to have hot chocolate with milk, and a slice of
pannettone bigger than your head at midnight on the 24th, then party
till the sun comes up and just sleep it off then go to work late on
christmas day.  I have no idea if that's  a spanish inherited thing or
not, but it feels really weird to go out in the sunshine and grab
yourself an omelette at a cafe on christmas day. I fall into ye Olde
Expat trap at christmas, and go around complaining, 'but that's just
Wrong' all the time.

I wonder if I can find sprouts in peru?

Posted by Sarsparilla at 1:49 pm ~ There are shitloads - 8 - of notes [ View ~ Add ]

The Heat of the Day.

The square is blasted with sunshine in the mornings - a chilly, windblasted British December it isn't.  Diciembre, baked in early summer, it is.  No one dares sit on the benches in the colonial parque, unless they're shaded by a palm tree, and all the palm trees are taken.  I enjoy the way the sun burns my hair dry as I hop the four city traffic lights, and walk five minutes to the other office.  I daren't sit longer: in November I passed an hour in the sun and spent a month waiting for the 1st degree burns to crack and flake off my grated carrot spine.

Once there, I invent a pointless question to ask Aurestelia.  She speaks only very rudimentary english, but has the patience to speak slowly, and to sometimes correct me.  I say hello to the niños who run around my knees, in English, then stomp off to do something useful.  Buy something, eat something, shop for something, whatever.  I don't work till the evening, and there's really nothing to do till 12.30.

Blokes in big brimmed panama hats wander the streets of the regional capital - all 40 or 50 streets, 6 of which have actual tarmac, staring at the big-city delights on display with shocked eyes.  Shocked eyes glare at me at every corner, too.  Occasionally, they run up to me to tell me in congratulatory tones that I am 'really white'.  Occasionally they call me whore and spit. I'm the one who's different, not them, so it's all part of the day.

In the cafes, I can blurt an order in rapid spanish, but hope for no unexpected replies.  I sample causa, juanes from the jungle, papa rellena, cafe cortada, or jugo de papaya - sin azucar, perhaps a humita, or if I'm feeling particularly weak, gorge on fried salty cancha.  I hang about.  I read.  Every four months I call Caroline.  Once a month I write to jatb.  I ask stupid questions on email, and spend too much time rearranging my music collection.  I do nothing much.

In the PM, the cloud hanging over Levanto, the nearest mountain, breaks, and everything becomes a river of orange dirt, racing down mountainside streets with no drains.  Lunch is the main meal of the day, from 1pm to 3pm, and there's no real reason to be outdoors if you're not eating.  Most people live in apartments without kitchens, so two courses and a drink cost around 21 pence, if you don't want choice about what you're eating.  Two or three courses, and a town shuttered up make for nothing else to do but nap in the PM.  At 5, the kids run out of school, laughing at the overtall foreigner who comes once a month to talk to them during military manouevres morning, in broken spanish.  They populate the streets, bring a bit of life, and suddenly, the sky clears, everyone's relaxing under the colonial arches, greeting people over formally again, wangling things, negotiating futures in a casual aside.

Sunset is 6PM sharp, day after day after day.  If you can see more than 6 mountains from your balcony, you get a great view of the roiling red heat burst, as darkness comes sudden.   The adobe walled houses on the next mountain become easy to hear, the red dirt walls and unsealed roads glowing in the encroaching black-blue night.

At cloudforest altitude, we rarely see stars, and they're not the same ones you see up there, anyway.  Southern Hemisphere means the slice of moon is at a different angle to the north - a cheshire cat grin, or a hammock, or a boat, hanging behind invisible clouds.  The temperature drops from 22 to around 18, and we all pull on mouldy over sweaty sweaters, fucked and holed from treks and cold water handwringing.  The mountain music starts up, somewhere on the hillside.

Posted by Sarsparilla at 12:48 pm ~ Love Letters Straight from One Heart [ View ~ Add ]

You wanted to hear about a typical day.

My day starts at midnight with a shaman attack.  This takes the form of objects - strewn rubbish, unlighted matches - or essences - the sounds of dogs howling, the smell of burning wax or paper - invading the premises, which are open to the street till the end of the day.

This needs anti-shaman tactics, pure alochol spitting, prayers, stuff like that, to defuse the cursing, which is particularly strong on Tuesdays, 12 till 4am.  I'm not particularly superstitious, but all the other buggers are, so I don't fight the host culture, and join in.  Nightmares are another manifestation of the invidious nature of sierran Perú, and they stop around the 4am pee mark, when the seven mountains over my bathroom are still shrouded in dense cloud, and the roosters are beginning to crow.

I sleep on a mattress on the floor in the corner of a classroom, in a quartered off area with no windows.  There's green fly webbing at ceiling height, and I can hear the echo of carts and heels heading into the city square from 6 on.  At 8 I get up to heat some water for a bucket wash.  I make strong coffee in a blue plastic jug, and filter it through an orange sieve, while I check out the seven mountains, see what the day is like.  Usually it's chilly in the shade, but strong sun, and the cloudforest is cleared by now.

While the red bucket is cooling, I drink my coffee black and unsweetened, having bought 8 pence worth of white bread rolls from Señora Letty at the bakery just over the yellow dirt road.  Butter rolls are better.  I dunk them in the cup, and the table or the floor serves as plate.

I wash up the stuff with cold water from a standpipe, and a cloth dipped into a tub of solid green soap.  A rat lives in my cooker, so I bleach every surface before I use it.  I chat to my flatmates, and read an old US magazine sent by a blog reader.  The floor needs sweeping after breakfast, but first I need to squat by the bucket (less wind if you crouch) and use a yellow tub to throw warm water over myself.  I brush my teeth with red Colgate (col-gaht-ay), and I wash my hair with green Pert.  The bathroom floor's grey concrete, running to the same drain the toilet filters into.  I wear flip flops throughout the process.

I hang my towel out on the line below the balcony, comb my hair, dress, leaving wet prints across the wooden floors.  Sweep the four paces worth of dirt from the sleeping area, sweep the breadcrumbs from the kitchen, sweep the bugs from the balcony, and turn off the anti-shaman balcony nightlight.

About ten, I'm good.  Smeared with oily sun-proof gunk, I can clatter down the steps and walk into the heat of the day.

Posted by Sarsparilla at 4:26 pm ~ There are shitloads - 11 - of notes [ View ~ Add ]