Chinese New Year is around the corner. In order to avoid crowds at Carrefour and Walmart, I decided to go to the slightly less crowded wet market.
A lot of action happens outside of the market. The sidewalks are bustling with delivery bikes.
The three-wheeler belongs to a recycler. Recyclers get a nominal fee for the flattened boxes. If I need boxes I will purchase new ones from the Chinese Post office. If I take one discarded by someone else, I feel I am taking income from the recyler.
The pine bows are just one of the auspicious items you see this time of year. It is said that this is a traditional way to invite Toshigami (Shinto god). Other traditions include not washing clothes, as the beginning of the festival is the birthday of the water god. If you wash clothes, you will offend him.
I want it on record that I didn’t offend any gods today.
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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,…
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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…
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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…
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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–…
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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…
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Cantamarca
You can learn a lot of Spanish from a cow, especially when you cross paths with one. Or two. Or more cows than you can count. I learned that last week when I joined the Red de Montanistas hiking group to Canta, a Peruvian town where cow pies are plentiful and oxygen is not. Honestly?…