Tag Archives: Peru

Forget 2012 – watch the ice on Ausangate

Posted on by under History and culture

I shamelessly robbed this picture of my friends FB page, just gorgeous:

Nevado Ausangate

Nevado Ausangate near Cusco, Peru

Picture copyright Jorge Vera.

The picture’s caption:

“…ice is fast disappearing. Local people cite ancient legend that when all the ice is gone from Apu Ausangate, the world as we know it will end and a new one will be born.”

Eerrgghhh, if Hollywood can’t get the end of the world correct, surely Facebook can, right 😉

All kidding aside, the indigenous Peruvian people do worship the “apu” or deity in the many mountain peaks of the Andes. “Nevado Ausangate” or “Apu Ausangate” is a magnificent mountain peak in the Southern Andes of Peru. It is the site of the annual Señor de Qoyllur Rit’i pilgrimage which has origins in Andean culture long before Christianity.

From The Sacred Land film project:

“Today, the indigenous Q’eros community of Quechua people revere the mountains of the Cordillera Vilcanota, believing that they are divinities to be protected. The apu’s servant cat Ccoa holds court in the belly of Ausangate in a palace that only great shamans dare to visit. The glaciers on Ausangate are where the spirits of the dead wait for salvation.”

More info about “apus” from Apus-Peru:

“In the Quechua language of the Andes, “Apu” refers to the spirit of each mountain which is not unlike a god. In every snow capped peak, to smaller hills, there is an Apu. Each Apu is different, with individual characteristics and personalities. They have in common that from them emerge the life giving waters of springs, lakes and rivers, as well as the forests and creatures that dwell in them. Like gods, the Apus possess the power of giving and taking life. Andean people look first to their local Apus and then to Mother Earth when they are undertaking a pilgrimage or enterprise.”

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 😉

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.
AllĂ­ descubre que hay un infierno para cada paĂ­s.

Va primero al infierno alemĂĄn y pregunta:
¿Qué te hacen acå?

-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 alemån 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 hacĂ­an lo mismo. Entonces, ve que en el infierno peruano hay gente esperando entrar.

Intrigado, pregunta al Ășltimo de la fila:
¿Qué es lo que hacen acå?
-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 dĂ­a 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 pĂșblico, viene, firma y se va.

ÂĄViva el PerĂș, carajo !

Ahh, Holandés

Posted on by under Life in Peru

Last week while I was in Lima I had breakfast a couple of times at a small, local restaurant by Benavides and Porta in Miraflores. A typical family business, there were 2 girls working in the front, a cook and his “ayudante” in the kitchen and dad keeping an eye on the place.

Since it was a local place I was usually the only gringo there, and the girls in the front started to ask me some of the typical curious questions:

Are you visiting Peru for vacation?
Where are you from?
How long are you staying?
…

All pretty innocent stuff.

When I told the girls I was from Belgica, they didn’t really know what to make of that, so I told them a bit about where Belgium is. “Between France, England and Germany.” After all, Belgium as we know it was created back in the day to be a buffer between those countries and keep them from going to war all the time, but that’s another story.

“Oh, Belgica. En Belgica hablas AlemĂĄn?”
“No, HolandĂ©s”
“Uuh… HolandĂ©s.”

I could tell right away the younger girl was taken back a bit and she became all quiet, while I kept eating my yummie pan con bisteck and her older sister went back to squeezing the lemons for that afternoon’s ceviche.

“So what do you think about that HolandĂ©s Joran van der Sloot?” asked the younger girl after a while, kind of embarrased and not wanting to look straight at me any more.

What could I say. I believe in “innocent until proven guilty” as much as anyone, but 2 young women are dead after they were both last seen alive with this guy. He destroyed the reputation of Aruba and now young women in Lima are on edge at the mere sight of a tall gringo.

“I guess probably not all gringos are like that…” the girl said after a while.

Joran van der Sloot in custody in Peru

Joran van der Sloot in custody in Peru

I hope the Dutch realize how much damage this guy has done to their reputation in Peru, with his picture in every tabloid newspaper until he gets convicted. Worse, since there are essentially no guards inside Peruvian prisons, a psychopath like Joran Van Der Sloot may end up thriving in that environment.

Note: check out Stuarts post on Peruvian prisons.

My first dog bite in Peru

Posted on by under Life in Peru

Seems like most people I know here in Peru have gotten bit by a dog at least once, and now I’ve joined those ranks myself 😩

Here in Cusco, like in much of Latin America, many dogs roam freely in city streets and parks. Many are strays and others are simply allowed to run free by their owners. People who walk their dog on a leash are an exception here in Cusco. Most of the stray dogs are actually quite nice, but unfortunately some are skittish or defensive because people often throw rocks at them and kids play rough with them, pull their tails and things of that nature.

I usually do good with dogs, I say hello to them, play nice, all that good stuff. Occasionally if a loose dog growls or barks at me, I stare it down or just stay out of the way. Rabies is still big here in Peru, so you really don’t want to get into a fight with a dog you don’t know.

A while ago a new dog moved into the neighborhood, and we pass by his house between our home and that of my suegra. Seems like the dog had already barked and nipped at other people, but I just kept going by his house since he never paid attention to me. However, a few days ago I walked by and the darn mutt came flying out of his little yard, ran up behind me barking and fussing at me. Typically I would have yelled at him but for some reason I didn’t feel like making a scene and just kept walking. The dog stopped for a second, and then ran up and nipped my calf. Ouch. At that point I did yell at him and his owner, who happened to be in the yard, threw water at the darn dog – like that’s gonna help.

When I got to my suegra’s house and told them the story my wife and her mom immediately ran down to the house to complain to the owner. I kind of felt like a dumbass having 2 women defend my honor, so to speak, but I guess since dog bites are so common here they are much better prepared to go and complain about the whole ordeal.

Long story short, the owner was quite apologetic about it and a day or so later he put up a better fence to keep the dog inside his yard.

Woof.

We have 2 strong and protective mutts as well, but they don’t run loose.

Baby with dogs

Baby with dogs

LAN Peru to invest $1 billion in Peru

Posted on by under Business & Economy, Life in Peru

The airline industry in Peru is doing well. Here’s the link from Andina: LAN Peru to invest $1 billion, and a quick excerpt:

Lima, jun. 30 (ANDINA). La empresa Lan PerĂș invertirĂĄ 1,000 millones de dĂłlares en el paĂ­s hasta 2011, para incrementar la flota de naves y en una mayor tecnologĂ­a de la aerolĂ­nea, manifestĂł su gerente general, Jorge Vilches.
“Invertimos muy fuerte en una nueva flota porque el crecimiento del sector en PerĂș asĂ­ lo justifica. Traemos cuatro aviones pequeños y dos grandes Boeing 767, que son para la operaciĂłn internacional”, indicĂł a la agencia Andina.

Read the full article at Andina.

I’ve been trying to get a flying job here in Peru, here’s to hoping for a good opportunity in the near future 🙂

To stay current as a pilot I’ve been doing some airplane deliveries and ferry flights, mostly to Europe. Here’s a picture I took approaching Greenland on a recent Trans-Atlantic ferry flight to Europe:

Approaching Greenland on a trans-Atlantic airplane delivery flight

Approaching Greenland on a trans-Atlantic airplane delivery flight

More flying pictures on my contract pilot blog.