While walking to school each morning, I imagine bumping into Dr, Doolittle as there is such an abundance of birds. There’s usually a pair of vermilion flycatchers, glowing like Dorothy ruby red slippers on a wire. Obnoxiously loud mitred parrots chatter in the palms, trying to create new homes as they are refugees with wings being displaced due to deforestation. […]
Birds and beetles
Bucket list
I live as if you only die once. I can think of three vivid days when I thought I would die, of have that infamous kick- the-bucket day. Once in Vietnam, another in Thailand, the third, going inside an abandoned mine in Peru. There were countless defying death days in China, where I’d risk my life just by crossing the […]
Time Travel
A week has seven days, 168 hours or 10,080 minutes theoretically. But in Peru, you can cram in thousands of years. More than potatoes or ceviche stands or presidential candidates, this country has history. Start with sexy women…no, not those pious women but sexy women, the tourist-friendly pronunciation of Sacsayhuaman, the citadel on the northeorthen outskirts of Cusco, not Costco, […]
Ollantay-something
I can’t remember where I put my phone, how to do long division, or the password to LATAM airlines, or the name of this hummingbird, yet alone how to pronounce Ollantayambo. It’s an ancient city outside of Machu Picchu, Peru. But in the middle of the ancient ruins in the Ollantay-something, I AM able to remember a face I hadn’t […]
Shake Things Up: Santiago’s Museums
The house was like an eclectic museum frozen in the seventies, filled with the avant garde items of that era which are now as outdated as dippity-do. Every inch of every wall covered with art, each piece having its own story. Secret doors, carvings from exotic islands, pottery from Portugal, glassware from Mexico, relics from French ships, portraits of his […]
Lost Pérdida
The list was worthy of a world record. Umbrellas. Fountain pens. Three cell phones (actually two, as one was stolen), two favorite pair of sunglasses, one being retro Bausch Lomb scored for two dollars at an estate sale in Detroit, then left at a bus station in Vietnam, and another in a coffee shop in China, and a pair of […]
Getting High
There’s a commercial for Puma shoes that plays a lot in Peru. It features a song about “getting high” one gets from the adrenaline rush of running. I don’t run, but I’m getting addicted to the thrill of hiking a huge mountain (metaphorically or physically) and the vibes felt afterwards. And in Peru, there’s a lot of getting high to […]
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 […]
Toil
His scythe is from a past century; his muscles from hard work, not a protein drink. He doesn’t have the luxury to complain about headlines or Facebook posts. He was a reminder about how most folks in Peru live. Hard work with no paid vacation, Lazy Boy chairs or coffee breaks. While parts of Peru are gorgeous , rural areas […]