Lima Antigua

This video is really good, with excellent music, and unlike some I have posted recently, it is not American made:

This one, too:

Axé.

Coal Is Not an Alternative Fuel

I used to hear that only APRA, or only foreign investment could save Peru. Then I heard that only Alberto Fujimori and the sinchis could save it. Now mining is supposed to be saving the country, which has coal among other minerals. We interrupt our regularly scheduled programming to show this video about coal mining.

I should be also giving instructions for action - the video came from the Sierra Club, which wants donations to stop this kind of mining, and that is one thing to do - but there may be other things to do as well. I recently observed a pretty good slag heap. It is not at all clear to me how to stop the complete and final destruction of Peru, whose ecology is in my view near collapse. Salute that Pastoruri one last time. Canten con nosotros: How green was my valley then, the valley of them that are gone!

Axé.

Fancy Cafés of Lima: Open Thread

We already know that of things one can have done to oneself at low prices in Lima, I prefer acupuncture over beauty services. We also know that I almost never go to restaurants, and that when I do, they are cheap ones, that I like Lima 1, and that I shop in the central market although the rest of my household is afraid to go in. I have also nearly given up on the bus system, in favor of cabs, until further notice (i.e. until they finish the current obras which cause so many main arteries to be torn up and incapacitated) - because it just takes too long to ride buses around all the detours and through the congestion, because I am too lazy to re-learn all the road maps so that I can be an efficient taker of buses in these circumstances, because I can, or am willing to walk further than people from Lima can or are, and because, when faced with the choice of taking two buses at 1 nuevo sol apiece or one cab for 5 nuevos soles, I go for the cab, saying, “It is just a dollar” (really it is a little more, and over time these dollars add up, but still [and notice, I think in dollars because it is in dollars that I am paid]).

The other extremely bourgeois thing I do is sit in fancy cafés, the topic of this post. I want to know about more of them since I currently only go to three and a half on a regular basis. (I used to go to various others in Lima 1, but I do not live there now. There are other cafés I go to occasionally, but which I think of more as bars or restaurants and suspect it would be invasive of me to use as offices). Because I only go to three a half and want to go to more, we are having an open thread on fancy cafés of Lima (good and bad).

Disqualified from the outset are Starbuck’s, the McDonald’s café (yes, it serves espresso), any café in a mall, and the café of the bookstore CRISOL. This last café looks good but is ultimately too flashy, and the wait staff appears never to have been customers in a café, so they do not know what they are doing. Now I will review the cafés I like.

The HAITI on the Parque Kennedy is the most traditional and is probably everyone’s first choice. It’s an old fashioned café like those in Spain, with a professional wait staff and a varied restaurant menu too (expensive). Café con leche is currently $2.25 here and, give or take a few cents, in all other cafés of this level. This café is good for conversation and for reading, for study groups, and for writing in notebooks. I do not think it would look right there to set up a laptop, and I have not seen people do it; for me it is too noisy and busy there to be writing on a laptop, anyway. Maybe one could at a back table, late at night. It might be possible to hook into the wi-fi hot spot that is the park. The HAITI always gives change in brand new coins, which is fun.

A friend always goes to the CAFE DE LA PAZ on the other side of the Parque Kennedy. Having obviously been named after the CAFE DE LA PAIX in Paris, which is somewhat right bank, shall we say, this café appeared too expensive to me for years. However, it is superior to the HAITI in that its infusions ($1.85) are made of real herbs and grasses, not tea bags. It has a lot of tables outdoors that are well enough covered with umbrellas so that you can really sit there in the rain, and these tables are pleasant at night with candles. To go by myself or to read or work, though, I still strongly recommend the HAITI. The CAFE DE LA PAZ, although good for what it is, is the least useful to me of the cafés under review here, although perhaps the inside seats, during the day, could be useful for my purposes. I am rating it third, and its neighbor right next door whose name I forget but which is very similar, fourth. Both, I am assuming, are able to catch the public wi-fi.

The HAVANNA, on Miguel Dasso in San Isidro, has the very great advantage of being next to the LIBRERIA VIRREY. This, in addition to its wi-fi and its comfortable chairs, place it second, as a marvelous place to study, read and write, despite (or perhaps because of) the overly bourgeois aspect of the neighborhood which truly forces one to concentrate on one’s book (although they also have a good set of current newspapers and magazines on a rack for you to read). This café, however, is part of an Argentine chain and shows worrisome signs of Starbucksification. The wait staff is semi professional, trained by HAVANNA to push the addition of caramel syrup and other things like that to your coffee, or to supersize it. They want you to order their pastries and chocolates, or a four dollar tray of chocolates, juice, and coffee. Unlike the other cafés reviewed here, they do not have a full restaurant waiting behind the scenes, but they do have expensive breakfast and merienda sandwiches, and they want to sell them. Whenever you order, numerous suggestions for additions to your plan will be made. You have to negotiate and insist, no, I really only want an espresso (or whatever it is you want).

Because of the areas they are in (RITZY), many lot of foreigners go to all of these cafés, but most of the clientele is still local. I may be overly suspicious but I think I have seen some rendezvous related to discreet, very high class sex tourism take place at the HAVANNA. And as I say, I used to have various haunts in Lima 1, but I have lost them (and wish to restore them). Perhaps I should buy an old building, restore it as a marvelous café, and live upstairs.

Axé.

Yet Another Coda

The owner of the bus company HORNA, in whose vehicle I was riding when it hit a truck and then crashed into a car, said that he had no way of controlling whether or not the drivers had accidents. He was therefore not responsible for anything that happened, so that it was not his duty to pay for the damage to the car, or send another bus to pick up the stranded HORNA passengers.

It occurred to me that if he said this among the Reeducated and Reeducands, people would give a standing ovation - he would have shown himself to have assimilated the absolute insouciance, irresponsibility, indifference, authoritarianism, and self-serving behavior that Reeducation, the Religious Right, the government, and a few other entities have managed to inculcate in a great many people over the past two decades.

Hattie has an important post which addresses these matters from another angle, although it is about sex so it is more fun than this post. You should really watch the interview to which she links. It explains why the Religious right is a sexual movement. I could give more highlights, but watch the video - then get the book.

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On Reeducation, I think its most dangerous idea is that people have permanent, congenital defects they cannot see, and with which they need permanent help from Reeducation. (I am now having the remnants of Reeducation removed with acupuncture. The acupuncturist’s view is that Reeducation cut my connection to life. Part of the treatment is to eat fish, mushrooms, and seaweed - my favorite foods, anyway, which I can now justify buying as medicine.)

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A friend, meanwhile, lives with an alcoholic and believes in Reeducation. She says that one needs to learn not to criticize one’s circumstances, but to rise above them, learn to live in them without having them affect one. She says God has taught her tolerance, so that she is not affected. Yet being at the house is like standing at the edge of an open wound, and when our friend is at home she is rigid with tension.

There are five bedrooms and seven household members. The alcoholic says my friend is not tolerant enough. The other five agree, in a way - she is committed to arguing with the alcoholic about drinking, committed to complaining, and will neither leave nor just let things ride. Every cousin over eighteen years of age is moving out, making various excuses. My friend and the alcoholic have arranged for a new set of cousins to move in, so that the feeling of having a family can go on.

The teenaged nieces have been grounded, not by their aunt, but by their mother, who lives in the country. One is grounded for using Tampax (on this, please see Hattie’s post, referenced above), and the other for refusing to ride in a car driven by the alcoholic while he was drunk. The adults, remember, are Bodhisattvas, having learned to rise above the uncle’s drinking.

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My point on the above, of course, is that it is not tolerance - it is Denial 101. But then there is a lot of denial in Lima. I would even say there are U.S. levels of denial, only on different topics. One of the most obvious ones to me is the current cant and prayer that foreign investment and the revival of the mining industry is going to “save Peru.” It amazes me that Peruvians, of all people, do not remember that these things have been said before.

Axé.

On Birth Control

This is very good. H/T Hattie. As a side note, it alludes to one of my main themes: the fallacious idea that it is more healthy and “natural” (or “genuine”) for women to be irrational than for us to be logical. As we know, that idea is central in Reeducation.

Axé.

Meones en Lima

It is a serious problem. Listen closely to the clever commentary by the reporter!

And here, we see people burning electrical cables in the street near the Gamarra market.

Update: Some of the commentators on the second video say the reason people are committing this ecological crime is that they are “shitty Indians” (sic). In the first video all the interviewees are poor, but the activity in which they are indulging is in fact shared by one and all.

Axé.

Your Travel Guide Requete-speaks

FUN AND FLUFFY

I associate Peru with seafood, but usually we eat many forms of starch, fruit, and milk - with instant coffee and herb tea. This diet causes me to crave fried eggs. Today, fortunately, we consumed meat, vegetables, and wine, and I was fortified at last. Then we consumed an item new to me - PISCO SOUR ICE, from the current most popular gelato place, Laritza (the one in Miraflores I used to go to, which was famous in its day and made ices and ice cream from every kind of tropical fruit and left whole pieces of fruit in it, has disappeared). In any case, Pisco Sour ice is really good. I am not sure how to make it but I think that if you used a regular ice recipe, substituting Pisco Sour for the fruit, it would work.

Modifying a lemon ice recipe: dissolve a cup of sugar in a quart of boiling water and let this mixture cool. While it is cooling make a generous 12 ounce Pisco Sour. Add this to the mixture when it is cool. Freeze in a tray, stirring every now and then so that it does not freeze rock solid. The ice will be ready in 90 minutes.

This recipe is theoretical, not tested, and I need help testing and adjusting it. The hardest part is getting the Pisco Sour ingredients and making it. Alejandro is helping us with this by showing that there are easier and harder ways to make a Pisco Sour. I think one of the easier recipes would be good enough for an ice, but I insist on using limes, not lemons. And I am used to receiving Pisco Sours with cinnamon or nutmeg in lieu of Angostura bitters. But I believe the Pisco Sour ice contained neither.

SERIOUS

Is Lima, then, a viable place to live? In the long term, no, because the smog and traffic will only worsen and with any small problem the city will run out of drinking water - studies have been done which show why. People do not realize this. A minister of the government recently announced that people in the country would just have to migrate to cities so as to have access to potable water (the streams and rivers having been polluted by mining and other activities), because the country cannot afford to put a source of potable water in each town. There are numerous problems with his statement but one of them is that concentration of people in cities is not a solution to the water problem.

In the short term, I believe I could make Lima viable. It is definitely not viable in the way I have been here these last months, because where I live is too inconvenient in too many ways (it is like living in Metairie, which New Orleans people will understand). Now, they call Miraflores “Choliwood,” and the Paseo de la República reminds me of the Harbor Freeway. We can continue the Los Angeles analogies and say that a part of town everyone but me wants to live in, San Isidro, is Beverly Hills. I do not want to live there, although I would rather live there than where I do. Neither do I feel great desire for the convenient “Choliwood” (which is in other ways something like West Los Angeles), but I like Barranco, which we can perhaps call Venice. (Indeed, I have just discovered that the house I have always coveted is none other than Ricardo Palma’s house … well, you knew already that I had seignorial tastes!)

I wonder, I wonder, about Jesús María, Lince, Pueblo Libre, and Magdalena del Mar. I like Pueblo Libre just for the name. As the Republic-related name suggests, it has nice nineteenth century buildings, and it is very convenient to my main universities. I have been told to think out of the box and consider living in one of the good parts of San Juan de Lurigancho or even Los Olivos. But where I claim I would ultimately like it is where I liked living before, Lima 1 - downtown. Many people I know speak with some pride about how they never go to Lima 1, the way Metairie and Baton Rouge people boast about their lack of interest in New Orleans. This only encourages me. I wonder.

Axé.

Reading for Pleasure Wednesday: Jorge Bruce

For the third day in a row I have failed to get into the Lima film festival. It is somewhat disappointing, but now I know: you have to study the program way ahead of time, and drop down on those tickets like a hawk the first hour they are available. I justified buying Jorge Bruce’s Nos habíamos choleado tanto as a work related book, but I am reading this lucidly written set of psychoanalytic essays on race and racism for pleasure.

Cholear in one of its more superficially neutral meanings is to mix red and white wine. Here is a better and more complete definition of the verb cholear, and here is an excellent blog post on it. Here you can see the verb in its complete conjugation, including the archaic future subjunctive.

This book contains, among much else, a psychoanalytic interpretation of the only apparently rebellious popular song lyric Cholo soy, y no me compadezcas [I am a working class mestizo or amestizado person, but do not feel sorry for me] (also available at art galleries as a T shirt). This song, interestingly, is a criollo waltz; here its creator, Luis Abanto Morales, sings it:

I also learned from Bruce’s book that although 12% of Lima residents in a fairly recent poll identified as white, only 8% were identified as such by the pollsters. Splitting the difference, we can say that Lima is about 90% non white, which would explain why I so stick out here and why I always feel so out of place if I remember at all what I look like, or see myself in any mirrors. Lima, not Salvador, Bahia, or New Orleans, Louisiana - each about 30% white in my time - is the least white city I have ever lived in. That is why I used to be so shocked to see my own face in the mirror - I do not look normal. And I, as much as any Lima resident, assume white people may be foreign, and look at them and listen to their voices, trying to figure it out.

In daily life, we are choleando, too, or perhaps we are choleados. Our teenager is going to have her birthday party. She grew up mostly in Orange County, California, where she became a fan of chicha music, as she would not have done here for reasons you will soon infer. Somehow she has arranged for a chicha band or DJ, I am not sure, to provide music for the party. Chicha music being working class, cholo, and mountain inflected, the maid has prohibited the party from being given in the house because we will lose class status “in the view of the neighbors.” We depend very greatly upon the approval of our maid, so we are looking for a hall to rent.

In honor of the party, which I will miss, here are LOS SHAPIS on “Chofercito,” a chicha song:

Axé.

An Authoritarian Conversation

Where I wanted to be was at the Lima Film Festival, a truly good thing, but so did everyone else. I could not get in, I was too late in trying to buy my ticket, so I went and got my bangs trimmed.

Manicurist: Do you want a manicure?
Professor Zero: No, thank you, not today.
M: You need one, and I need the $5.
PZ: Well, all right.
M: What color nail polish do you want?
PZ: No polish, or transparent polish.
M: This (pale pink) is the most transparent I have. It looks more natural, even, than clear polish.
PZ: Hm. All right.
…
PZ: This is not natural, it is the color of bubble gum. Pass me the acetone, please.
M: Oh, you actually meant it when you said you wanted no polish or clear polish?

People seem to believe salons and spas are places of luxury and delight, but mostly I find them to be places of discipline. I had a facial also, and although it was less absurd, it was in the same mold. A session of acupuncture costs less than a facial (facials = $18, acupuncture = $14 first visit, $7 subsequent visits). It has much more content, and more of an effect.

Axé.

Lima en 1927

This is a promotional film from General Motors, but check it out. You see a good mountain road, better than those I have been on recently. You discover that Lima has the oldest traffic laws in the world - ironic now that traffic is so savage, laws are not obeyed, and the discussion of the many accidents and deaths is the theme of the day. You learn that the one-way street was invented by a limeño - apparently in the nineteenth century (Paris got its first one-way streets in 1909. Footnote 1: London got gas traffic lights in 1868, and electric ones appeared in Salt Lake City in 1912. Footnote 2: [City] buses here and in Chile are called microbuses, I do not know why and should ask, although I have always assumed it was in contrast to inter-city buses (”omnibuses”) which, of course, tend to be the same size. In any case, they are called “micros” for short, and “microbes” as a joke.)

In 1927 I bet the food was fantastic, for those who had it - and perhaps as many or more people had it than do now, I would like to have some statistics on this. I have not mentioned that there is this serrano ham existing mythically in Santiago de Chuco and Huamachuco, but that I could not get any. The butter there is supposed to be wonderful but it is only made by individuals for their own consumption, since not enough can be made to make it worthwhile to distribute.

In general, in both Peru and Brazil margarine and Spam-like products prevail over butter and ham, even among those who can afford the latter. The same goes for instant coffee and powdered milk. And one day in Huamachuco I ordered coffee with milk and was asked, did I mean cow’s milk? I said do you mean you also have goat’s milk, but no, the question was did I want fresh or canned milk? Many people prefer canned milk and I still do not know whether they are just used to it, or whether they like it because it is thicker and thus reminds them of cream.

Axé.