The news headlines are like a toilet that won’t flush. Here’s what I’ve been reading instead.,
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Thanks Gracias
Sometime today, between the Lions game and second slice of pie and melting jello or dressing that isn’t as good as your mom’s, we say thanks. We pray for parking spots and good lab results and for lost dogs to be found and for wars to end and for willpower to lose the ten pounds we put on after the […]
Muerta
“Don’t take pictures of the birds!” my guide warned, waggling his finger at my phone. “You will carry home bad spirits.” So that explained a few things. I snapped away anyway, countless photos from Lima’s largest and oldest cemetery, the Presbitero Matias Maestro. Located in one of those neighborhoods in Lima that tourists seldom visit, the cemetery is full of […]
Church
Ok. I work at a Christian school. Along with grading papers, I am required to go to church– but not at the same time. For a while, I went to a bilingual church in Miraflores near the Malecon. It met in a four star hotel, lets call it Holiday Heaven, where I hoped to sneak in a buffet breakfast before […]
69 after 60
Am I too old for this,? I asked myself as I grappled for my morning pills and supplements in my travel pill case. I was about to venture Laguna 69, a hiking destination near Huaraz, Peru, and about half a mile in the sky. I checked my supplies: water, fiber-rich trail mix, several sole coins for toilet fees, my tried […]
Yungay
It was a few days past my 9th birthday. I was probably eating the last of a Bill Knapp’s chocolate cake when it happened. A mudslide triggered by a massive earthquake wiped out the town of Yungay, Peru. May 31, 1970. Many children were spared due to a circus being in town that day. They received free tickets and we’re […]
The Fourth Time I thought I would die: Tarapoto
OK. When I think about different ways to die, there is one that sounds worse than all of them. Not an earthquake or being being bit by a shark, which only kills six people a year, whereas forty-three folks die each year taking a selfie. Don’t ask me how I know. What scares me? It’s dying of boredom at Suncrest […]
lluvia
This weekend in Lima, I saw something rather unusual. It wasn’t seeing a guy getting beat up downtown –which I did see–near the used bookstore street–about five guys pummeling one guy. Yep, just another day in the Lima city center. The unusual thing I saw in Lima wasn’t the rare yellow-tailed oriole–which I also saw– the bird looking like a […]
Census
I was walking home from work on Lima’s ocean, the roaring of the waves making it hard to hear athe call. “Buenos Noches, Miss.” It was Samuel, the doorman at my building. He’s from Venezuela but has a larger English vocabulary than our American president. “I hate to bother you, but there’s a woman from the Census Bureau here. She […]
Lil’ Machu Pichu
I don’t know why it’s called this, either. I guess the name is an oddity, like GrapeNuts, Buffalo Wings, and autotheft, a word which continues to baffle my language learners, who envision an object stealing itself. Anyway, I went to Not-so-Macho last weekend, which is about a three-hour ride north of Lima, and a five-hour schlep back thanks to honking […]