questions not to ask me

As many of you already know, I’m looking for a sublet in San Francisco this summer from the beginning of June to around mid-August. [Related plea: anyone know of apartments that will be available during that time? I've lived in enough places over the past few years that I'm not really that picky anymore, I just want somewhere I can chill when I'm not working.] So far, not so much luck. Here’s a conversation I had with a prospective landlord the other day:

Me: Hi, I’m calling about the sublet you posted on craigslist

Landlord: Oh hi, great. So, where are you calling from? You showed up as zeros on my caller ID.

Me: Right, I’m in Peru.

(pause)

LL: Peru… wow… say, I have another guy that called me from Spain. Peru is pretty close to Spain, right?

Me: Um.

*10 seconds later*

LL: Hey, the people in Peru are really dark, right?

Until now, I didn’t even consider myself that much of a snob about this — I’ll admit that extreme geographic ignorance bothers me a little, but I can’t really be a purist since I do occasionally get mixed up about parts of the world I haven’t traveled to. But those 2 questions coming right on top of each other left me flailing for a response. I mean, seriously: if we’re talking on the phone and I say I’m in Peru, that’s what you ask before anything else? Or better yet, that’s the only thing you ask?

Reiterating plea: if anyone has any apartment-hunting leads for this summer, let me know. I’ll be eternally grateful — and see what you’ll be saving me from?

on spelling bees

Here’s something random, and possibly obvious, that I’ve been thinking about since a conversation with my flatmates the other day: spelling bees are really, really weird. For a number of reasons, I guess, but the reason I have in mind is that it seems like English is one of relatively few languages (Roman alphabet-based languages, anyway — Chinese would be a different story) in which the written version is complicated and counterintuitive enough that spelling things is actually a challenge. It goes without saying that all languages have quirks, but in many cases if you know the basic rules, hearing someone correctly pronounce the word will give you a good idea of how it’s spelled. Spanish, for instance: b and v are pronounced very similarly, and s can sound like c and z, depending on where they are in the word and whether you’re in Spain or Latin America. But once you get the hang of that, you’re pretty much in the clear. The idea of studying a dictionary, learning words individually because they defy any standard rules, and practicing over and over for a spelling contest is profoundly odd. I’ve never minded English spelling (except when I embarrass myself by mispronouncing a word that I’ve only ever read, or failing to connect the correctly pronounced word to its written form), but I’m very glad I didn’t have to learn it as a second or third language. When people here ask me how to pronounce a word they’ve seen, I often have to admit I don’t have a clue.

On a related but tangential note: I used to love the board game version of Clue, but for a long time I imagined that “lead pipe” meant that it was first among many — in other words, LEED as in leader rather than LED as in metal. I never bothered to figure out why the pipe had so much status, and eventually I saw the movie and understood that I had been pronouncing it wrong. What’s the term for words that are spelled exactly the same but pronounced differently? Like lead (meaning to be in charge, or the metal), read (present tense, past tense), close (meaning proximity, or to shut the door), desert (as in dry places, or well-deserved reward)…

I guess this whole thing is probably pretty obvious, but it had never really occurred to me before. Maybe learning one of those consonant-filled Eastern European languages, or trying out a language that has traditionally been taught orally would cure me of thinking that spelling should be easy.

on the possibility of getting sucked into a black hole

Something that fascinates me: the current discussion about the opening of the CERN large hadron collider. From the NYTimes:

The world’s physicists have spent 14 years and $8 billion building the Large Hadron Collider, in which the colliding protons will recreate energies and conditions last seen a trillionth of a second after the Big Bang. Researchers will sift the debris from these primordial recreations for clues to the nature of mass and new forces and symmetries of nature.

But Walter L. Wagner and Luis Sancho contend that scientists at the European Center for Nuclear Research, or CERN, have played down the chances that the collider could produce, among other horrors, a tiny black hole, which, they say, could eat the Earth. Or it could spit out something called a “strangelet” that would convert our planet to a shrunken dense dead lump of something called “strange matter.” Their suit also says CERN has failed to provide an environmental impact statement as required under the National Environmental Policy Act.

I am obviously not qualified to even begin to understand the physics involved here. Maybe that’s why the idea of getting sucked into a black hole doesn’t bother me. But I think part of it is also that, well, it would just be such an absurd — and quick, right? — way to go that I almost don’t think I could be angry even if it were to happen. I mean, part of me might be like, OW, that’s a lot of gravity. But then the other part of me would be like, but isn’t this interesting? And I’d have to agree that yeah, it actually kind of is.

news from exotic miraflores

I am, as you may have noticed, a big fan of travel. Well, not the actual act of getting from place to place, especially if I have to do it by airplane coach class after standing in line for three gazillion hours to check in and then almost missing my flight because airport security insists that I remove my rubber flip-flops for screening. But I like going places, and I like figuring places out, and all in all I really respect people who are willing to take risks and experience things outside of their everyday orbit.

Which is why I kind of hate to bust up people’s image of me as a crazy, savvy world traveler, and a little bit sorry to break the news to anyone who doesn’t already know: Lima is not a city that you need a PhD in Adventure to explore. Especially if you stick to the fancier areas — which, admittedly, are not at all representative of the rest of them, and certainly not representative of the rest of the country, but which are really the only ones most foreigners will ever see. My apartment here is newer and nicer than anything I’ll be able to afford for the foreseeable future, and if I ever get a craving for good old-fashioned American fast food, I am within walking distance of every US chain in existence. The supermarkets are new and nice, the streets are clean, the lawns are green (look, I rhymed!), the earthquake fortifications apparently secure… basically, Miraflores irritations are:

1. Traffic

2. That’s all I can think of.

I’m telling you this because one of these days, I will get around to posting my thoughts on the traffic situation here, and you’re going to say, Grace, this is ridiculous. You’re in PERU, for crying out loud, and you can’t find anything more interesting to post about than the TRAFFIC? But that’s the thing. I live in a city. Cities have traffic. I don’t like traffic, and since Lima traffic is wretched, that’s what I like to gripe about in my spare time (everyone needs something).

What I’m really hoping, though, is that one of these days, if I keep talking about traffic for long enough, people will start to get it: big cities are big cities. There are lots and lots of kinds of big cities, but in many ways it’s more variations on a theme than huge distinctions. There are (of course) very real cultural differences and unique local quirks in every place, and the differences seem bigger when you compare cities in different countries or continents. I don’t know how to explain this. I love traveling, and I’m not saying that it’s bad to notice differences–I think it’s the opposite, actually; really noticing and trying to understand differences can be incredibly broadening. But I’m not comfortable with “exotic”, because it lumps people together who are totally different (ever heard people talk about “Africa” as if it were a country instead of a continent?) and separates people who are a lot more similar than they realize. Part of understanding things that are foreign is taking them off of that pedestal and getting rid of the idea that differences in fact are symbolic of differences in humanity.

So that’s why I’m trying — somewhat ineptly — to explain that the way people live in the nicer areas of South America is not that different from the way they’d live in the States (which is not to say that this is at all the way they live in the other areas… but at least let’s try to separate poverty from culture). And on that note, here’s an embarrassing confession: I went to Starbucks the other day. Yeah, I know. And I bought a chai latte for EXACTLY the same price it would have been in the States, which is just absurdly overpriced here. Yeah, I know. Seriously, who pays 10 soles for coffee? (The Starbucks was full.) I was using the free Wifi there to catch up on my email (Yeah, I know), and decided to write a blog post. So I typed:

Peru is great. I’m in Starbucks checking my email and looking out at the big traffic circle in Miraflores. Let’s see, there’s a Papa John’s Pizza, a TGI Fridays, a Chili’s… oh yeah, and the movie theater is playing all American movies except one. Also, there’s a Domino’s and a Pizza Hut and Burger King and of course McDonald’s down the street.

And then I stopped.

Okay, no more confessions. Seriously, or the kids in the audience are going to start believing that any fool could do this. Which is CERTAINLY not true. Children, it takes a very brave person to sample the INDIAN CURRY chicken patty at McDonald’s in Lima, Peru. Also, children, said Indian curry chicken patty is definitely not worth the trip to South America.