lima, part sun

This isn’t the first time I’ve been to Peru — J and I came in 2005 and spent about 3 weeks doing the standard tourist circuit of Cuzco, Machu Picchu, Lake Titicaca, Pisco, and Arequipa — but it’s the first time I’ve spent more than a day or two in Lima. I didn’t have much to say about the city last time I was here. Actually, all I really remember is that I was 1) appalled by the unrelenting grayness of the city, and 2) disproportionately pleased that I could get slightly defective American-brand clothes for extremely low prices.

I find it a bit embarrassing that that’s all I really remember. So I guess it’s lucky I have a chance to take a second look, and even luckier that this time around I’m missing the winter permafog. Lima in the summer is sunny, cheerful, and cosmopolitan, with beautiful views from the cliffs overlooking the ocean and unfailingly gorgeous sunsets. It’s no Rio… but what it lacks in spectacular beaches and crazy Brazilian jeito it makes up for in safety, relative cleanliness, low prices, and welcoming people.

I’m nearly 4 weeks into my 3-month internship with an NGO that does randomized control trials of poverty programs, mostly microfinance, and so far I love the work and the people. Through them, I also found a pair of great housemates — one Peruvian, one Spanish — and have my own room in a beautiful part of Miraflores near Parque Kennedy. Honestly, I don’t know Lima all that well yet, since I work during the week and have been going to the beach about an hour away on weekends. But so far I like what I’ve seen. And my Spanish? The good news is that since I live with native Spanish speakers, I get a lot of practice. The other good news is that I finally got over my compulsive perfectionism and am now willing to massacre as many words and verb tenses as necessary to get my point across. The bad news is that apparently, I just don’t have the brain space to keep two languages as similar as Spanish and Portuguese clearly separate in my head. The first few days were particularly bad: for example, the Portuguese word for “what?” is “oi?” — which happens to be pronounced exactly the same as “hoy”, the Spanish word for “today”. This led to several very frustrating conversations while I was apartment hunting:

Me: “What time can I look at the apartment?”

Them: “Does tomorrow at 7 work?”

Me (not understanding): “Oi?”

Them: “No, not hoy, tomorrow.”

Me: “Oh, I mean, como?”

Them: “Tomorrow”

Me: “No, I heard that part. I meant oi, not hoy, or, well, never mind… what time tomorrow?”

Them: “Oh, you want to stop by today?”

My Spanish has recovered a lot since then, but that in itself is a bit of a weird sensation — I swear that every time I remember a word or phrase I used to know in Spanish, I can literally feel the Portuguese equivalent being forced to the trash compactor of my memory. It drives me crazy to know that all those words that I spent so much time learning are now sitting there gathering dust, next to the scrap heap of my calculus skills and the joke that I always get halfway through telling before I realize that I no longer know the punchline. But I guess it’s a small price to pay. I get to spend 3 months in a city where I don’t even need to own an umbrella (take THAT, San Francisco downpour, Midwest floods, and Boston sleet), hemisphere-hop from summer to summer, and meet a ton of amazing people while attempting to get the travel bug out of my system before I settle down for what seems like an impossibly long 3 years of law school in the States. All in all, I’m not going to complain.

hold the helicopters

You know you’ve neglected your blog when…

On Mon, Mar 24, 2008 at 12:49 PM, Grace’s Aunt Gail <email@address> wrote:

Hi Grace,

I’m thinking that you are very busy or that peru is only marginally
internet enabled. How is life? I miss your blog. All is well with us
and I’ll tell you more if you return this form:

I’m fine and received your email ( )
I’m fine and didn’t receive your email ( )
I’m not fine, airlift me out ( )

Love, Gail

Ouch. Have I really fallen that far off the map? Peru, or at least the nicer parts of Lima, are hardly internet dead zones. True, the computer in my apartment seems to have developed a strange beeping disease that might actually signal hard-disk death, but on the other hand, I’m writing this on my laptop from a wifi-enabled coffee shop less than 2 blocks from the house. And it’s not that I haven’t had a free moment since my last post, in — oh wow, has it really been that long? — February. But where do I start? I’m looking out the window at the rush-hour traffic on Santa Cruz, at the crowded and decrepit combis passing by (did you know that all of Lima’s “public transportation” is actually privately owned?) and I have the worst writer’s block of my life. In all that’s happened recently — switching continents, starting a new internships, moving into a new apartment, weighing options for the summer, for law school, and everything else — I can’t think of one bite-size, blog-style anecdote. I will, though, I promise. Today is hopeless — I’m antsy from the giant cappuccino I just drank and annoyed by the cigarette smoke and people in what’s normally a completely deserted cafe. So not now, but soon, I’ll tell you about my internship, and about my apartment in Miraflores, my housemates, my friends, Lima, the beach at Punta Hermosa, and trying to speak Spanish again after 2 and a half years of attempting to put it completely out of my head. For now, let’s add an option number 4 to the above email from my fantastic and hilarious aunt:

(x) I’m fine, I received your email, I love it here, I love and miss you too, and I’ll write more soon.