Cooking, or the Lack Thereof (by Lawrence)

It's funny, but I can't get this scene from one of my favorite (and now canceled) television shows out of my head. Lindsay, the ne'er-do-well, filthy rich daughter of a scamming real estate developer in "Arrested Development" decides to try and cook. She has not worked a day in her life and is impressed with her ability to even locate and operate the stove. Sporting a pristine chef's hat and apron, she announces to her family that she is experimenting with some recipes and has come up with a winner! "I put canned ham in a pot with water and cooked it until it was warm. I call it "Hot Ham Water"." Sadly, I think Lindsay and I have a lot in common these days.

The food in restaurants here in Cusco is so much better than anything I can make, that it kind of takes the wind out of my culinary sails. All fruits and vegetables get a soaking in a weak bleach solution as soon as they are through our door. We still don't trust lettuce which is a huge part of our diet in the USA, so we are eating differently. A lot of avocados, potatoes, chrimoya, fava beans, bananas, tomatoes, RICE RICE RICE and CHICKEN CHICKEN CHICKEN. I make a lot of "soup" which I should probably call "Hot Chicken Water." Tonight we deglazed the pan in which the chicken breasts had been sauteed (CHICKEN CHICKEN CHICKEN...) with -- dah dah dah --coca cola! Really! And, scarily enough, it was delicious.

There is a dearth of cheese here. There are two kinds: Queso Andino (a salty tasteless round) and a Swiss-like variety of American cheese. We were pretty smug about locating some nice Manchego in the Mega supermarket, only to get home and find that it had the hardness of a diamond and required herculean force to cut. It had probably been sitting behind that deli glass for quite some time. We miss our Cabot Cheddar! There are also no corn tortillas, so there goes burrito night (which is almost every night at our house in Maine). And how about the grill!? We are confined to cooking on a mini-stove that is just one half step above a Coleman camp stove. My ability to cook has basically evaporated here in Peru. Cooking is one of those skills that you build up over a long period of time, and involves everything from knowing where to get which ingredients to how best prepare and serve them. Without my familiar tools, ingredients and kitchen layout, I have become Lindsay! Hey everybody, dinner's on! Hot Chicken Water!

But the meals at the restaurants serving "good food" usually cost between $3 and $8. So, we do eat out a lot more than at home, and it doesn't break the bank.

Enjoy the photos of Sophia on her "school bus." I think she likes the bus ride more than school! If you look carefully you can see her smiling face through the back window as the bus pulls away.

We also had a nice rain storm today that shed some glorious light on the neighbors' homes as it departed.

A day or two in the life (by Lawrence)

Busy busy busy!!!

Here are some photos from the last few days. Violin lessons, ballet lessons, new school uniforms, our first dinner guests and their amazing VW van, and photos from yesterday morning's bike ride into the mountains surrounding Cusco. More words soon!

Uh oh... (by Lawrence)

I am the proud and temporary owner of a new bike! New to me that is. I have bought a weather beaten Kona Coiler; a full suspension mountain bike made for jumping off things and going down hill fast. I bought it from Dougie at Gravity Peru and I plan to sell it right back to him when we leave Peru.

The thing is heavy, but its weight is trumped by how much fun it is to ride. I spent some time setting up the cockpit to fit my body last night, and headed off on my first ride this morning at 6:15.

The Andes don't bear much resemblance to coastal Maine. Both places are on planet Earth, but that's pretty much where the similarities end. I began by riding on Tanda Pata, a pedestrian street that contours around the bowl of Cusco. After riding down one staircase and carrying the bike up another, I was on the paved road up to Saksaywaman and the highlands beyond. I climbed up this road, in my granny gear the entire time, for fifty minutes! I estimate I may have been averaging 3 or 4 miles an hour. All this work landed me at the same tiny settlement I had arrived at via truck last week, and there's no denying it, the truck option is a hell of a lot easier.

Now, has excitement and adventure ever gotten the best of you? If so, the next series of events may sound familiar. I took a moment to get off the bike and stretch, lower the seat and take in the view before beginning the great descent I wrote about last week. It was amazingly quiet as I gained some distance from the road. I tried a wee jump on the bike and landed it softly. Yeah! I was feeling great as I entered a small stand of trees exactly 7 minutes into the downhill. That's when I heard the whirring hiss and I knew, I had a flat.

I also knew I had no spare tube. No pump. No patches. No money.

Ride over.

Back in Maine, I would walk back home or maybe hitch a ride if I didn't have my repair kit. But I almost always have my repair kit. In Peru, well I wasn't quite sure how this would work out. I figured the odds of getting a flat on my first trip out were pretty slim. As it turns out, the odds-meter was pegged at 100%.

For just a few seconds, I started to completely lose it. Then (I am not making this up) I put the bike down, stood in Tadasana/Mountain Pose, softened my focus, and returned to my current reality. It worked. I sang one of my favorite songs out loud as I pushed the wounded bike up the hill: "Se me Poncho la Llanta" by The Iguanas (roughly translated as "I got a flat," and totally apropos for the occasion). It took only fifteen minutes to get back to the road and it dawned on me that a flat fifteen or twenty minutes further down the mountain would have been WAY worse.

As I walked along the road toward the tiny gathering of adobe homes, I wasn't quite sure how to handle the situation. There was a group of five or six "combis" filling up with passengers headed for the city. One by one I explained my predicament to them, and each time when I got to the part about me not having any money they literally shut the door in my face. So here I was with my fancy flat-tired bike, in my stupid spandex shorts and my Patagonia Hoodie, surrounded by campesinos in much more practical clothing looking at me like I had dropped out of the sky from a spacecraft. I put my head down and started to trudge.

About five minutes down the road, a tiny Daewoo Tica taxi blew by me. I waved at him (as I had to at least ten previous cars) and amazingly, he stopped! "Por supuesto" he told me, I'll give you a ride. And so he did. I got home just an hour later than planned, changed my clothing and went directly to the bike shop in town to buy patches and tubes. Amen.

Same Difference (by Lawrence, with help from Isabel and Sophia)

Well I can't write in html yet, so here is a gang caption for all the photos you see in order from top to bottom:

The morning view from our dining area

Sophia investigating the veracity of the Coreolis effect in the Plaza de Armas

Ditto

Krista at work in the dining room

Flag of Cusco




Cuties at tea time



Panther lamp post and church



































Musicians

Sunday morning cartoons


Tea time.

Rainbow as seen from the girls' bedroom

Cusco ridgeline at sunset

The view from the long way home




















































































































I am going to take a break from waxing philosophic today. There are some basic differences in everyday life in Peru that I thought you all might find interesting. In no specific order, and accompanied by a few photos I took today, here are some aspects of life that are new to us.

1. There are lots of dogs on the streets, and some of them are vicious. The vicious ones usually respond favorably to rocks thrown at their head, however I have seen one dog catch the projectile, shake it violently until it was "dead," and then proceed with the attack.
2. It is impossible to walk through the city without being solicited to buy something, get your shoes shined, or eat at a restaurant.
3. There are llamas and alpacas roaming the streets led by campesinas in traditional dress.
4. Toilet paper does not go in the toilet! It goes in a trash can (ewwwww!) next to the toilet so the pipes don't get clogged.
5. It is cold here, but there is no central heat in any building.
   
6. Public transportation and taxis are everywhere. It costs between $1 and $2 to go almost anywhere in the city in a cab.
7. Houses here are not visible from the street. They are built behind the walls that are on the street and usually have their own courtyard inside. Our "yard" is a ten-foot square concrete pad. No lawns to mow!
8. Houses are made out of either adobe, concrete, or both.
   
9. All kids wear uniforms to school.
10. There is one large supermarket, but it's not the place to buy vegetables. The vegetables are much better at the outdoor market, and they're cheaper too!
11. The streets here are very narrow! They were built for horses, not cars.
12. There is no running water after 9pm. Luckily our house has a holding tank on the roof that covers the water blackout until 6am when the municipal supply comes back on.
13. You need to turn on the water heater a few hours before showering, and turn it off once you are done. No one leaves the water heater on all the time.
14. You can get a really good, three course meal at a restaurant for 15 soles, or $5.
15. 10 to 15 loud bottle rockets (think m-80s) are launched into the sky above the city every morning starting around 7am. Nobody seems to know why this happens...
16. Our part of the city is considered the "arts district," and has a disproportionate number of pierced, dreadlocked, inked, glassy-eyed street dwellers hawking free-form jewelry and alabaster pot pipes.
17. Furniture is cheap. We bought a big dining room table for 100 soles (around $30), and four matching chairs for 140 soles ($45).
18. Laundry service is AWESOME! We bring a bag of our clothing in to the laundry lady, and she washes/dries/folds it for $1 a kilo! That's about $6 a week. We will all miss this service once we get back...
    
19. Pressure cookers are a good idea at 11,500 feet.
20. The water from the tap is not potable. We have a 20 liter bottle in the kitchen that lasts around four days.
21. We wash all our produce in bleach water before eating it.

That's it for today! We had a lovely Sunday of doing pretty much nothing. Thank goodness. Tomorrow is the start of another busy week.

Bit by Bit (by Lawrence)

Interesting marketing strategy.



















Even MORE interesting marketing strategy.

Let's see. We have been in Cusco just over three weeks and:

• We have a nice apartment
• Sophia is in a bilingual school five days a week
• Isabel is enjoying being home schooled
• We have found both a ballet school and a violin teacher for Isabel
• We have managed to cook all meals at home for the last 6 days
• We have made some nice new friends
• We are all doing pretty well with Spanish
• Krista has been making a lot of contacts for her research
• I went for a mountain bike ride

By my estimation, we're doing OK.

We joined an organization yesterday called the South American Explorer's Club. Krista had heard about it from a friend and had intended to visit the "clubhouse" straight away once we arrived, but we never had the time. Funnily enough it turns out to be located five doors away from our apartment! It is an international organization for English speakers who are traveling through South America. I went to visit looking for good topographical maps of Peru, and found them and a whole lot more. A mini-library with DVDs and good books, a book exchange for the more pulpy reads, volumes of terrific advice written by travelers on places to visit in Peru, and activities ranging from presentations on trekking, to trivia nights, to service projects. I think it will be a great resource for the whole family. On Monday there is a service trip planned to pick up garbage along a popular trekking route in Lares, a three hour drive from here, and I would love to go do it with Isabel... We'll see if time permits.

Garbage? you say, in the vast high- mountain wilderness of Peru? Yes, a lot of it apparently. While this is sad, it doesn't surprise me that much. When I lived in Bolivia I was shocked at the way people living in the campo would toss plastic bags, cans, boxes, toilet paper, and broken gadgets indiscriminately across the landscape. I tried to rationalize their behavior from a class-level perspective. Americans, arguably the protagonists of global culture, are famous for their consumption and its greatest by-product, trash. So why, I thought, should it be a surprise that the rest of the world wants to be like us and consume things and make trash? The Peruvians and Bolivians just lack the infrastructure to gather their garbage and hide it in landfills, or recycle it like we do. Hopefully, as more and more developed countries embrace a lower impact, "greener" lifestyle, the rest of the world will follow suit. But until that time, the intersection of "low impact" and "high impact" living (like trekking past piles of trash in a glorious place like Machu Picchu) will smack us on the face whenever we come across it, like a cold snowball thrown from a blind corner.

All this makes me think of my own life and the choices I make, both here in Peru and at home in the US. Before we owned a house, we could fit most of our life's possessions in one car. We were both used to backpacking and living by the wilderness edict of "Leave No Trace," a practice where you carry out of the woods everything that you brought in. As my life evolved and I became a homeowner and parent, it became more difficult to live so simply. We currently own a very old house (119 years and counting) built out of lumber milled from the very trees that once occupied its footprint. This seems like the essence of low impact to me. Now we are essentially recycling a product that someone put a lot of thought and work into, and we are maintaining and improving it so it will last another 200 years. But it is a really big house. And Maine is a very cold place. It takes over one thousand gallons of oil and who-knows-how-many kilowatt hours of electricity per year to make the house inhabitable by human beings. I have been over every inch of the place with caulk guns, cans of foam, infrared cameras, weather stripping, sheets of foil-backed polystyrene, and storm windows. Still, the structure was not built with energy efficiency in mind, at least not by 2009's standards. I sometimes wonder if the original owners just lived here in the summer and fall and had a "winter house" nearby that was easier to make livable in the cold months? In any case, I am not living in a tent anymore. We create a fair amount of trash and depend on polluting, non-renewable resources for our livelihood. Is this so different from the campesinos chucking bottles and cans down into the ravine outside their home? I think not. My "ravine" is just the air around me, and my "trash" is mainly in the form of carbon dioxide. But my analogy is not pure hyperbole...

All of you who know me are aware that cycling is a big part of my life, and that I am a denizen of the woods around Bath, Maine. One of the best trails in the area follows Whiskeag Creek out to a stunning peninsula known as Thorn Head, which juts majestically out into the waters of Merrymeeting Bay. In one section the trail drops down, right to the waters edge, and is permeated by a foul odor when the wind is coming from the east. That’s because this bit of precious green space shares its acreage with the Municipal Landfill. In fact, until recently, Thorn Head was almost completely cut off from town by the landfill cutting a swath from one end of the peninsula to the other. While it’s sad to think the early residents of my city thought it was a good idea to dump their trash in such a beautiful place, that is what they did. They too were just chucking their bottles and cans down into the ravine outside their homes. But all these years later the landfill is slowly being phased out. The city has instated a “pay-per-bag” garbage program (which has cut trash amounts by 60%), and has done a great deal of outreach to help people see the benefit of recycling and composting. In my lifetime, Thorn Head will return to something resembling its original, natural state.

So the news is not all bad. We can all change the way we live and the choices we make. I am imagining what my "winter home" might look like, and I am also looking forward to being part of the solution on Monday on the trail to Lares, Peru.

High altitude playground.

The Pusher Man

Well, if you want someone to buy a bike from you in Peru because the biking is so amazing, I guess you ought to take them for a ride. So it was with me and Dougie Stewart today. Dougie is the proprietor of Gravity Assisted Mountain Biking Peru, a first rate mountain bike tour company right here in Cusco. After this first taste, I am afraid I am hooked.

Dougie is a Sottish ex-pat with two young children, one of whom is named Sophia and goes to the same school as our Sophia. Dougie suggested I bring our Sophia over to play whilst we go for a ride and I test-ride one of his 70 Kona mountain bikes. I showed up with my child, pedals, shoes and shorts, borrowed a helmet, and boarded the ascent vehicle -- a haggard sky blue SUV with a custom welded rack on top meant to carry six bikes. I must admit I was a bit freaked out by the fact that everyone but me was packing body armor and full face helmets. Hmmm, I wondered, what exactly was I getting myself into?


After driving up to around 12,500 feet, we disembarked next to a tiny roadside village. The bikes were lowered off the roof of the vehicle, helmets and gloves were donned, and we did a quick spin around the parking lot. I was riding with Dougie, his business partner Paul, and two of their Peruvian guides. The one word of advice I received was to lean back behind the saddle on the big drops. OK, I thought, I can do that. And then we were off, bombing down a rutted ribbon of singletrack winding through a grassy meadow.

I found the first drop somewhat by surprise, and with a slight, involuntary, guttural noise emanating from my throat, made it over. The bike rode like an easy chair. I felt a bit like a kid bouncing in the moonwalk at the county fair. Big air, but soft landings. The terrain was unbelievable. Amazing single track surrounded by sun dappled peaks in every direction. Nerve wracking terraces carved into canyon walls. Barely makeable (or not, in my case) rock gardens of lava-rock and gravel. I made most of the obstacles, but I was concentrating pretty damn hard. I opted not to do the drops with bad (i.e. potentially fatal) run-outs. I also opted not to try the staircase (yes, about 200 yards of stairs...) that everyone else bombed down. At least not until I get a little more used to the bike and figure out what it can and can't do.

I also got the low down on how to get up the hill, and it sounds doable, but a bit lung singeing. From my house to the entrance of the downhill routes sounds like a good 50 minutes of serious climbing. This will take some getting used to at 12,000 feet, but look out when I get back to sea level after 10 months! There was also some mention of kids getting beat up and having their bikes taken, but no gringos or adults yet. I am told it is safest to go in groups or to go in the morning. Both Paul and Dougie ride alone, but perhaps I can connect with them a few days a week both for security, and to learn where I am going!

I look forward to finding some more amazing places on two wheels, and I'll be sure to carry my camera with me to share the view with you.

Settling In

I am sitting here today, thinking about how our little apartment on the top floor of this building resembles a one-room school house. 11 year old Isabel is at her desk in her room doing work on vocabulary words, 4 year old Sophia is outlining and coloring pictures in the living room, and I am running back and forth between them. Sophia is home from school for the third day in a row (fever Friday, diarrhea Monday and today), but will most likely go back tomorrow. She keeps asking, "Can we go back to our yellow house in Maine, right now?"

It's no fun being sick in the best of circumstances, and it's really no fun being sick in a place that is literally quite foreign to you. Thankfully, Isabel and Krista remain healthy, but Sophia and I were both suffering with a little bug in our guts. I, in my state of constant culture shock, had visions of Sophia pooping herself into severe dehydration, but she has been able to keep liquids down and appears to be on the mend.

We located both a ballet school and a music school for Isabel today and they both seem great. The music school also has programs for Sophia which made her very excited (but she still wants to go back to our yellow house, right now!). The folks who told us about these extra-curricular opportunities are a missionary family from Texas. I walked over to their apartment to get directions to the violin school. They live on the fourth floor of an apartment building and instead of walking down the stairs to open the door for us, they dropped a key attached to a long white line, and then hauled it back up once we were in. Too funny. Old school intercom service.

I am planning to go for a mountain bike ride tomorrow which I am SO looking forward to. I haven't touched a bike in three weeks and I'm getting a little twitchy. Dougie is a Scot who runs an operation down here called Gravity Assisted Mountain Biking. He and I will get a ride up some mountain in a truck, and then bomb down on a couple of his full suspension bikes. Fun.

It's time for a nice cup of anise tea and immersion in my warm sleeping bag. It is cold here. A heater of some sort is in our future.