Category Archives: Life in Peru

Our life in Cusco, Peru.

Peru elections 2010 – ley seca

Posted on by under Life in Peru

Yesterday Peru held local / municipal elections. I don’t follow politics very closely but the local elections seem to be quite important because in the provinces outside Lima the local government seems to be more relevant than the central government back in Lima.

Here are the official 2010 Peru election results.

What amazed me about the elections is that the entire country was “dry” by ley seca. No alcohol was sold in the country during the entire election weekend.

Papi votes in Belgica, so no ley seca for papi! Mamacita went to a birthday party Saturday evening where I believe the ley seca might have been enforced a weee bit loosely as well 😉

no ley seca here!

no ley seca here!

Salud!

Willie Colon detained in Peru

Posted on by under History and culture, Life in Peru

This is a few days old, and just wild.

“After a successful concert in Lima, the veteran Puerto Rican salsa musician, born in New York, was intercepted on Saturday by Fiscal Police agents, on orders by attorney Lucila Cabrera, an expert in intellectual property crime.”

He’s accused of having plagiarized a song he recorded in 1974. Read the full story at Andina.

Can you say hypocrisy?

Here in Peru intellectual property rights are virtually non-existent. I’d venture to say in Cusco, a city of about 300,000 people, you CANNOT BUY ANY LEGAL CDs or DVDs. There is no store that I know of that sells the real thing. You can buy pirated CDs and DVDs for S/.2 – S/.4 (~$1) all day long.

The Willie Colon story is reminiscent of the controversy around Paul Simon’s “El Condor Pasa (If I Could)”, except that this was settled on friendly terms.

Cusco’s barbed wire obsession

Posted on by under Life in Peru

I thought barbed wire was for prisons and farms, but here in Cusco people have different ideas. Barbed wire is everywhere. Take a look…

barbed wire in Cusco

barbed wire

more useless barbed wire

I could take a hundred pictures like this within 2 blocks of our apartment. We live in the heart of the city, yet you see barbed wire everywhere, wrapped around fences, flower beds, gardens, etc.

At first I thought all the barbed wire in the city was a by-product of the huge migrations to the cities in Peru since the 1960s, with people bringing a lifestyle from the country to the city, but you frankly don’t see much barbed wire in the countryside in Peru. Most of the animals are herded and the lands are treated somewhat as community property.

So what gives, why is there so much useless barbed wire everywhere? I say “useless” because every last piece of barbed wire you see in the city is jerry-rigged in the poorest possible fashion, and none of it would even appear to keep any person or animal in or out.

Was there a big recall on Chinese barbed wire that someone down here got a good deal on? Or is it simply the middle-class in the cities paranoia about crime?

There’s definitely a fair amount of petty crime in the cities, but this barbed wire won’t stop any of that. If the powers-that-be were really interested in fighting petty crime, they could simply shut down the black markets where all the stolen goods are sold, like “Paraiso” and “Baratillo” in the Santiago district of Cusco.

At the end of the day, the barbed wire doesn’t stand out too badly because most of it is wrapped around regular hedges and fences where you won’t notice unless you’re looking, but when you have a baby who’s just starting to walk and grab everything, it’s certainly a nuisance. In fact, one time when we were at an elementary school in a small town, a young girl of about 9 or 10 who was playing a blindfold game ran into a barbed wire fence. That’s right, a barbed-wire fence, around a flowerbed, in a school !!!

I still have a 10″ scar on my left leg from running into a barbed wire in my hometown when I was about 8 or 10, so dumbassery certainly isn’t limited to Cusco, but I found the only piece of barbed wire in my town and ran into it… over here, it’s everywhere.

September

Posted on by under Life in Peru

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…

“Hi I’m Patricia, the girl from Ri-Ra’s…”
“I’m hungry, let’s go eat something and watch a movie…”

So I was shamelessly deceived and the rest, as they say, is history.

“Left a good job in the city,

Working for The Man every night and day,

And I never lost one minute of sleeping,

Worrying ’bout the way things might have been.”

Never tell a Peruvian 15 minutes

Posted on by under Life in Peru

Peruvians are famous for their rather peculiar sense of timing. Peruvians are habitually late, they call it “la hora Peruana” or “the Peruvian hour”. Even for business meetings everyone is typically at least 20 minutes late.

That isn’t news in itself, I’ve written about this before. However, the other day I jinxed myself, I know better by now…

Since mamacita now works in the afternoons, I’ll try to cook dinner most days right around the time when she arrives home, around 8:30 or sometimes later. Now meals in any Latin culture are typically much later than in Western Europe or the US. We normally eat lunch between 2:30 and 3:30 in the afternoon, dinner is sometimes as late as 9:00 pm.

As I said, the other day I jinxed myself. I was cooking my famous lemon-pepper baked chicken with tortellini and alfredo sauce… Mira, que rico 😉

chicken with tortellini

Papi's famoso lemon-pepper chicken with tortellini and alfredo sauce

Just as I was getting the water for the tortellini to a boil, mamacita called to say she’d be a little late. I’m not the best cook and I usually wing it a bit when I’m cooking, but one thing I’m picky about is the time to cook the noodles. So as I was talking on the phone I just happened to have the box of noodles in my hand and looked at the “recommended cooking time” and said to mamacita:

… okay, hurry home, the food will be ready in 15 minutes exactly.
… okay, love you, bye.
… okay, love you, bye.

Just as soon as I hung up the phone it hit me. Because the “recommended cooking time” said 15 minutes I told Patricia 15 minutes.

You never tell a Peruvian 15 minutes

You can be assured 15 minutes will be at least 45 minutes on a real clock, and probably closer to an hour. If you want a Peruvian to do something in 15 minutes, you better use words like “hurry up”, “right now” or “2 minutes”. That’s not to be fussy or anything, that’s simply the Peruvian sense of timing.

So I turned down all the food as best as I could, but after about half an hour the little goose and I ate our dinner anyway, since it was after 9:00 already. About 45 minutes to an hour after the original 15-minute call, mommy did make it home and gobbled away the remaining noodles and chicken, which was sort of lukewarm but still yummie 😉

News of the day

Posted on by under Life in Peru

In the US, seems that people don’t want to make wawas anymore. I don’t know what the birth rate is here in Peru, but I sure see a lot of wawas every day.

It makes sense, people have more babies when their outlook on life is more optimistic. The only issue I have with the article is this:

“The downward trend invites worrisome comparisons to Japan and its lost decade…”

A lot of English language news refers to Japan in terms of “lost decade”, but this so called “lost decade” has lasted from the late 1980s until today.

But have no fear USA, Bernanke sez he’ll just print up more money. Printing money has sustained the US economy for 30 years, why stop now?

Words fail me, take it away Bruce…

The so-called economic growth in the so-called developed world will continue somehow or other because the old guys in suits that run the place will find a way to spin it that way. They’re desperate for you to believe that you need their whizdumb and leadership. They need you to build up their ego, so they can sip their expensive wine and eat their caviar at Davos every year.

Look, I’m really not pessimistic. I’m happy with my life, my family, my wawa. Rant over 🙂

Infierno Peruano.

Posted on by under Life in Peru

NOTE: as I am copying / pasting this chiste from an email, SEDACUSCO has once again turned of the water in our neighborhood.

Un hombre muere y va al infierno.
Allí descubre que hay un infierno para cada país.

Va primero al infierno alemán y pregunta:
¿Qué te hacen acá?

-Aquí primero te ponen frente a un foco de luz durante una hora, luego en la silla eléctrica otra hora,después te acuestan en una cama llena de clavos otra hora, y el resto del día viene el diablo alemán y te da latigazos.

Al personaje no le gustó nada el asunto y se fue a ver en qué consistían los otros infiernos.

Tanto el infierno estadounidense como el ruso y el resto de infiernos de distintas naciones hacían lo mismo. Entonces, ve que en el infierno peruano hay gente esperando entrar.

Intrigado, pregunta al último de la fila:
¿Qué es lo que hacen acá?
-Aquí te ponen frente a un foco durante una hora, en una silla eléctrica otra hora,
luego en una cama llena de clavos otros sesenta minutos, y el resto del día viene el diablo peruano y te da latigazos.

-Pero es exactamente igual a los otros infiernos. Entonces, ¿por qué aquí hay tanta gente queriendo entrar?

Porque nunca hay luz, la silla eléctrica no sirve,
los clavos de la cama se los robaron y
el diablo peruano es funcionario público, viene, firma y se va.

¡Viva el Perú, carajo !

The man knows his food

Posted on by under Life in Peru

I just have to chuckle every time I see this…

Picture of Alan Garcia

Posing with the president and a pig...

That would be Alan Garcia, current (and former) President of Peru, next to a huge pig – click on the pictures to see full size.

These pictures hang on the wall at a chicharonneria we go to in Saylla, a town just outside of Cusco known for “chicharron” or fried pig. I positively know there’s no pun intended. I’ve asked the owner (the lady in the picture with Alan Garcia), and there’s no special relation or political affiliation, they’re just proud that Mr. President frequents their restaurant.

Here’s a couple of closeups:

Alan Garcia and a huge pig

Picture of Alan Garcia

Regardless of how you feel about Peruvian President Alan Garcia and APRA politics, one thing is for sure: the man knows his food 🙂