Goodbye, Breakfast Club

Despite the timely title, the title is hardly a tribute to the late John Hughes (although plans for a Breakfast Club party are percolating). No, this post is actually intended as a way to pay my respects to the passing of my own Breakfast Club -- a group that I regularly did brunch with here in Winston for the past two years. With JaryMane leaving town on Saturday for the bright lights of Chicago, and DJ Dan heading to the West Coast only weeks before, I have suddenly found myself the only Breakfast Club member left to roam our old stomping grounds in Winston.

Below I detail -- In Memoriam -- the members of my Breakfast Club. RIP.

	DJ Dan. AKA, "the Athlete" Earned his nickname through keeping a ridiculous pace during hikes to South Mountain or the Profile Trail around Grandfather Mountain and never breaking a sweat. Jerk.
	J.P. AKA, "the Princess" Earned her nickname through the fact that she was obviously worshipped by DJ Dan. Molly Ringwald had nothing on J.P.
	"GED", AKA, "the Brain" The ironically-named GED was the first one to leave, moving on to the rarified lands of New York City law schools, where she has already started her inevitable march to the US Supreme Court.
	DW, AKA "the Criminal" Oh yes, recently I got all my hair cut off. Arrrgh! I'm a pirate.
	JaryMane, AKA "the Basketcase" Earned her nickname through the fact that she is a vegan who kills rats (true! trying figuring that one out...) and the fact that she left Winston-Salem for Chicago. What is she thinking? That's right, she's crazy. But she will be missed.

My closing tribute to the Breakfast Club:

We accepted the fact that we had to sacrifice whole Sunday mornings eating brunch with one another for whatever it was we did wrong, but we think its crazy to write an essay telling you who we think we are. You may see us as you want to see us... In the simplest terms and the most convenient definitions: We found that each one of us is a brain, an athlete, a basketcase, a princess, and a criminal.

Sincerely yours, the Breakfast Club.

Peru in Review

I still have a couple things to remember from Peru, including what I've been calling the Swine Cold -- a nasty little bugger that I've had since two days before I left town.

In any case, I put together a little photo album of the trip, which can be seen at this link. !Salud!

Haggling in Peru

One of the sad things about Peru is just how easy it is to haggle if you don´t care about people´s feelings. I try here to get the essence of two conversations (conveniently glossing over the fact that I speak Spanish worse than horribly, and the other people involved speak very little English).

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Story 1: Yesterday, while getting a shoeshine in Cuzco´s Plaza de Armas. Boy who appears to be about 14 approaches and since my shoes are being cleaned, I am sort of a captive audience:

Boy: Do you want to see my art?

Me: Sorry... I don´t want to buy any art.

Boy: Please, look. I painted these myself. My name is Mario. [Shows me his name in the corner of the paintings.]

Me: I´m not really interested in buying any art.

[Boy puts artwork in my hands... these are basically postcard-sized, but each one is handpainted. Eventually I find one that I kind of like.]

Me: How much does this one cost?

Boy: It is 20 soles for 1, or 2 for 35, or 3 for 45.

Me: I was thinking I would be paying closer to 3 soles.

Boy (stunned... insulted I think): 12 soles.

Me: I´ll pay 8. This is the most I will pay... [Eventually he agrees, and the 8 soles change hands]

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Story 2: Today, on a guided tour through Chincheros (a very high mountain town). The tour guide has us pass through a market on our way to look at a church.

Girl: You want to buy a hat.

Me: I don´t need a hat.

Girl (whining): You want a hat... 15 soles! [note: a dollar is worth about 3 soles. So... she is offering me a hat that I would probably buy in the states for 15 dollars for 5 dollars]

Me: Maybe later.*

[About half an hour later I return to the bus... the girl spots me.]

Girl: You want to buy a hat.

Me: I don´t need a hat.

Girl: But you said maybe later! 10 soles.

Me: I really don´t need a hat.

Girl: But you said maybe later! 5 soles.

Me (trying to walk away, fruitlessly): No, I really don´t need a hat... I already have a hat.

Girl: But you said maybe later! 2 soles! [Yes, she is trying to sell me a hat that I would get in the states for $15 for about 60 cents]

Me: I´m sorry! I don´t need a hat.

[I walk into the bus and sit by a window. The girl continues to knock on my window for awhile, until the tour guide shooes her away...]

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In my own defense, I would like to say that I was only able to get these poor kids to commit to these insulting prices because I really didn´t particularly want what they were selling... so they were basically agreeing that getting something was better than getting nothing. When I have been interested in the goods, I have usually paid fairly close to their initial asking price. But yes... you could easily take advantage of the extreme poverty out here. The Footprint guide that I´ve been walking around with suggests that you pay ¨fair prices¨ noting that people are so poor here and there are sooooo many people trying to sell things to tourists that you can often get people to agree to almost any price, however insulting. I've certainly seen this to be true, and it makes me sad...


* I don´t actually remember saying ¨maybe later¨... however, given the end result I would generally just advise against using these particular words)

The Search for Warmth

I got back to Cuzco after a trip down the Rio Apurímac today, no worse for wear except for a couple bug bites and being quite sore from three days of rafting. More on that later...

One thing I had forgotten in getting back into town after being in down almost in a jungle climate for a couple days is how hard it is to stay warm in this town. Cuzco is about two miles high, and it is the middle of Cuzco´s winter, so when the sun goes down the temperature drops quickly. I decided to walk around the Cuzco´s central square, the Plaza de Armas, waiting for one of the seemingly endless masseuses to stop me on the street so that I could get a nice massage. The massage would be nice, but to be honest I was more interested in potential supplementary services, like a jacuzzi or a sauna so I could restore some body heat...

Finding this combination ended up being a little harder than I expected. I passed up several potential masseuses (?) because they didn´t offer these secondary heat-providing services. Ultimately, I ended up agreeing to go to a place where they offered ¨Inca Massage,¨which apparently means that they do regular massage and then put hot stones on you for awhile. The hot stones sounded like just what I wanted.

The location of the massage ended up being, as far as I could tell, a massage spa + travel agency + private home. (Not unusual... other stores can sell you groceries, change money, book trips, and allow you to make international phone calls all in about a 12x12 room...) The woman who enlisted me in the massage got me to the building and asked her son through the door to turn off the television before letting me in. Afterwards, she led me upstairs -- above the travel agency -- to a sort of rickety second floor with three massage tables set up pretty close to one another. And this is where I realized that the place was disappointingly drafty.

The massage ended up being pretty good, but the hot stones were not hot enough, and as soon as it was over, I laid on the table for a couple minutes, trying to avoid the cold that awaited just outside of the towel, and then finally dressed as quickly as possible. I suppose I will have to try harder next time. The going rate for massages here is about $8 an hour, so why not? Maybe I won´t even wait until tomorrow...

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Current location: Inside an Internet cafe in the San Blas district of Cuzco. They are playing a version of John Lennon´s 'Imagine' on Peruvian pan-pipes and I am wearing a scarf and hat.

DW Does Machu Picchu... Solo

My friend Tracey organized our trip to Machu Picchu, and then the morning afterward fell violently ill and only got into the park for about an hour before deciding that she had to return to our hostel and sleep/vomit/do whatever other horrible things it is sick people do. Que lastima...

In any case, as Tracey was leaving Machu Picchu she gave me the all important task of documenting the trip. I only had about two hours to do this and so I ended up walking through there at a pretty brisk pace, but I think I was successful enough. Here are a couple pictures:

	Guide with a tour group during the sunrise at Machu Picchu.
	My version of the shot that you've already seen 1000 times. BTW -- you can hike that mountain thing in the back. It's called Huayna Picchu (or Wayna Picchu), and they only let the first 400 people that come hike it each day... something good to know for next time...
	People pay a whole bunch of money to do the four-day Inca Trail hike, in large part because they think that this is the only way to see the Sun Gate. Well, you can save yourself a lot of time by just hiking backwards from Machu Picchu... it'll take about half an hour and this is about what you'll see.
	A picture of me walking back into Machu Picchu from the Inca Trail taken by... me... When hiking alone, desperate times call for desperate measures...
	As I walked through Machu Picchu, I stumbled onto this little vizcacha and a Peruvian couple. The woman kept saying "¡Que linda, que linda!" (how beautiful! How beautiful!) while the husband tortured the poor animal by getting as close to it as possible until it scurried away.
	More or less what Tracey was up to all day as I was having my fun.

Tracey has since had to head back to work, and so I am now in Cuzco for the next week sans travelling companions. Next up: the Río Apurímac, where I'll be floating Class 4 rapids with a bunch of Israelis (I think). Catch you on the flip-side!

The Really South: Goodbye Lima

I´ve noticed that I have a nasty habit of going AWOL for a long time just after leaving somewhat disconcerting posts. Well, the rumors of my death have been greatly exaggerated. I am currently in Cusco (Cuzco? ...Both work) after spending a wonderful last couple days in Lima. I ate some wonderful ceviche, had my first anticuchos (marinated beef hearts... delicious!), drank free whiskeys all night at a party hosted by Lima´s DedoMedio (Middle Finger) magazine, and crossed Barranco's beautiful Puente De Los Suspiros (Bridge of Sighs).

We'll see if this video loads, but this was one of my highlights of my trip -- the relatively new "Circuito Mágico Del Agua", which is a park that consists almost entirely of water fountains:

The Ladrons and the Gringo-Swindling

* The word "ladrons" translates approximately to "thieves" but it also somehow reminds me of "toilets" for some reason which is appropriate enough.

** Also note that all the facts of my accounting of the events of yesterday are highly suspect... this includes the names of the people I interacted with, to my accounting of anything I think I might have said since I don't speak spanish...  I just got tired of writing "supposedly" to qualify every sentence and so you can mentally add those in if you like.

OK... a full accounting of the events of yesterday would take a long time, but suffice it to say that yesterday while wandering the streets of Lima I ended up bumping into a man named Jose, who was playing in a band in Barranco later that evening.  We talked as well as people can when one person doesn't speak better than pre-K English and the other doesn't speak better than pre-K Spanish, but we were having a good enough time and soon I agreed to buy him a drink at a bar.

We get to a dark bar -- I think that we were the only people there at the time, and soon another friend of his shows up.  I agree to get pisco sours (the drink I'm holding here) for the three of us, and we order a plate of alpaca meat with other goodies.  Both were tasty enough.  And we had most of the conversation in Spanish... so I was having a pleasant time with good food and drink practicing my Espanol.

There is much more to this story really (including their attempts to get me to buy an expensive bottle of "ayawaska" from a shaman -- this is a sort of hallucinogenic elixir which appeared to me to look like blended toilet water), but in any case, I ended up walking out of there $150 poorer from the three drinks and alpaca meat I had bought... which might not sound like the most money in the world to Americans, but things are cheaper here and my friend Fabi assures me this is about the price you would pay for a good meal at the most expensive restaurants in town.

In any case, I probably would have been out a lot more except for the convenient fact that I didn't have any credit cards on me and hadn't brought enough money to pay the bill I had already racked up anyway, and so the party had to end sooner than my compadres had originally intended... I imagine I could have been blindsided by a much larger bill later if they hadn't learned sooner how little I was carrying on me.  

The owners of the bar wanted me to leave some sort of collateral behind while I picked up the rest of the money. I was only carrying my passport and camera, and I didn't want these people to know where I was staying, so this seemed to me to be a horrible option, but I luckily had a cell phone on me from Fabi's mom, which was supposed to help me get out of any emergencies.  I thought this qualified, and so I called and luckily Fabi came to the rescue.

It took Fabi about a half hour to arrive at which point Jose and his friend (the one in the picture... I don't remember his name) were gone.  As I sat and waited I actually had a very pleasant time trying to talk with some of the staff of this bar in Spanish, who for the most part spoke no English whatsoever.  But I started our conversation by noting to one that "that was an expensive Spanish lesson..."

The Really South (Prelude): A Lesson from Avshalom Caspi

A couple years ago as I was in graduate school, working my ass off on my dissertation and generally feeling stressed out of my mind, we had a guest speaker come to town by the name of Avshalom Caspi, who I had the privilege of joining for a free lunch at a classy restaurant as a part of his festivities. Dr. Caspi is a widely regarded authority on the study of genetics and personality development, and conducts ridiculously massive studies including one which consists of surveying an entire birth cohort of New Zealanders every two or three years (others are more ridiculous). He also has long flowing hair and was wearing bright purple socks with yellow spots with his suit at the time.

I was supposed to have gleaned many lessons about how to conduct research from him at this lunch, but given my generally stressed out state at the time I don´t remember anything from that day at all. Except for one thing: he told me that when he and his wife got married, they made a vow to one another that they would have a trip once a year where they would go someplace exotic for a full month. And after some 15 or so years of marriage, they have stuck by this vow, travelling to places like Madagascar and Ecuador and Thailand.

At the time this was a sort of revelation to me: you could conduct research that was good enough to get you papers published in Science and get you a job at Cambridge, while at the same time taking vacation that lasted an entire month out of the year. My last several years of almost incessant working started to seem... unnecessary and perhaps counterproductive. That year, I resolved to do one of these trips myself (I ended up in Turkey) and currently I am sipping pisco sours in Lima, Peru, just a couple days away from Cuzco and Machu Picchu. Thanks, Dr. Caspi! I´m now trying to spread the good word to other hopeless workaholics.

More later...