Back to school in Belgica, unofficial end of summer in the US, and soon it’ll be springtime in Cusco. But the turn of the calendar had me thinking, this month marks the 6-year anniversary of the time that….
Somewhere in a Mexican restaurant in North Carolina, a Peruvian girl named Norma picked up her cellphone and pretended to be a Peruvian girl named Patricia. The real Patricia got out a phone number on the back of a crumpled business card that a goofy Belgian guy gave her in an Irish restaurant a few weeks before.
The real Patricia had said she would call the goofy Belgian guy, but never did. She wasn’t too interested in goofy Belgian guy, in fact the only reason she had talked to him was because he blocked her view of the TV.
Nevertheless, pretend-Patricia (aka Normita) had a blind date the following evening and didn’t want to leave her best friend Patricia all by her lonesome self. Pretend-Patricia was going on her blind date no matter what, so she called goofy Belgian guy…
So I was shamelessly deceived and the rest, as they say, is history.
Working for The Man every night and day,
And I never lost one minute of sleeping,
Worrying ’bout the way things might have been.”
Life in Peru 