repensando estrategias...

1 Quando todo o chao e' de azulejo e o miudo que la esta sentado tem 13 meses, talvez nao seja aconselhavel deixar-lo, ainda que por instantes, para ir ver quem bate a porta... a velocidade que consegue atingir uma cabeca a 20 cm do chao nao e' explicavel por mecanica newtoniana...
2 Num orfanato, talvez nao seja aconselhavel como segunda aula de ingles ensinar os diversos graus de parentesco.
3 Com miudos de entre 6 e 12 anos, talvez nao seja aconselhavel mostrar como se faz malabarismo com tres pequenas pedras.. eles tem uma enorme facilidade em encontrar-las maiores.


... tenho muito mais estrategias para repensar, mas para nao ter que repensar a estrategia numero 1, vou ter que sair agora para ir buscar os colchoes que deixamos a fazer.

optimising...

I believe, here, the concept only exists when trying to fit lots of people into a taxi...
A very long post would be needed to describe the process of making a peach juice using... and even longer if I would try do describe my hair cutting experience... which isn't finished yet. It was initialy supposed to take 15 minutes, when 20 min where passed I mentioned that I had to meet some friends in 10 minutes time, as 30 minutes after the start the hair cut was at a very assymetric stage, I suggested, shave it all... she wouldn't, she wanted to cut more before starting the shave, 10 minutes later I realised she had never used the machine, and the cutting continued, 5 minutes later she added my neck to the cutting experience... 50 min after the start of the adventure I pledged to leave... 10 miutes later I left saying I would be back another day to finish the job... Some will be thinking I went to some random cheap barber as a result of my stingyness, nop, it was the second most expensive in town... 1 euro...

Upps and upps again

I lost a big post about my semana santa weekend... twice...
(which reminds me that I have left my debit card in the cash machine for the second time...)
I am annoyed! I will not mention that weekend again!

Upps, something went wrong in the last post...

no news, good news...

More on going local...

Going local is also about loosing most of the fears regarding Peruvian food (not drinking tap water though) and having a Menu of two dishes for 2.5 soles (0.6 euros)... been there done that!

my stomach has been for the past week on that threshold level where everything may go wrong at any minute, but I prefer to believe I am building up resistences.

Going local

I am staying in a nice neighborhood of huancayo, a middle class kind of suburb, by nice neighborhood I meant that the houses look almost finished (for some odd reason the last floor of most of the houses seems to be permanently ready to take a further floor), they have large fashionable dark windows, the road (Av. San Carlos) is asphalted, which is not true for most of the small roads that cross it... those are made of soil. In one of these roads, the one that separates the seventh from the eighth block, the locals (the lady of the tinymarket, the guy from the car garage, and their friends and family) play volleyball... the net crosses the entire road, and is slightly lifted whenever a taxi wants to pass, or laid down when the odd truck appears down the road... Me, being neither family nor friend, and having played for two hours yesterday, have to assume that I am now a local (I even got offered a young single Peruvian).

As vezes simplesmente nao chegamos para as encomendas...

Nessas alturas aconselha a sabedoria peruana a rezar a S. Martin (santo peruano) que certo dia foi apanhado a curar uma crianca cuja perna gangrenada estava prestes a ser cortada em El Salvador, enquanto ao mesmo tempo salvava uma bela senhora que sufocava no Peru... pois... Como nao tenho grande fé nesta metodologia, depois de uma semana a apalpar terreno e perceber que por aqui o terreno é muito inconsistente, é agora tempo de comecar a estabelecer prioridades e perceceber o que é que se pode realmente fazer nas semanas que se seguem... que possa durar um pouco mais do que as tais semanas que se seguem.

Perla...

is so far my favorite one.. she is one of my 11am to 1pm distraction, she is 17 months but still can't do much walking... as none of the 20 kids between 10 days and two years old that are in that ward... mainly that is the consequence of only having two baby-sitters (that accumulate with the position of cleaners with no washing machine, cooks and whatever else they might have to do) doing 12 hour shifts (I am not blaming them, they do put lots of effort, but it is just overwhelming),... the kids are mainly left on their own ... no language or walking stimulus... it definetly makes the growing process much slower.

Cuy?

Cuy à Arequipeña é muito bom, mesmo depois de saber que não passa de um porco da guiné (uma das razões pela qual este mail vai em português)... O pobre animal é muito utilizado por estes lados para encontrar a origem de doenças indeterminadas... passa-se o animal sobre todo o corpo do doente, o que provoca a sua morte, segue-se em seguida a sua dissecação... o orgão doente aparecerá a negro... pois...

Height sickness...

Estar sentado num autocarro a 4800m de altitude não causa grande enjoo ed altitude... o mesmo não posso dizer da subida de dez degraus que todo o santo dia penso ser capaz de fazer a correr, ou dos 30 minutos non-stop de cantigas pop rock na paróquia metodista da minha família de acolhimento...

Happy birthday to you!

Un feliz compleaño cristo te dará

todos te deseamos la felicidad,

y rogamos todos por um dia feliz,

que Dios te bendiga ahora y siempre.

Amen

Música de parabéns dos metodistas peruanos

more on public transports...

after all the positive mocking on city transports, I fill I have to revisite the theme...
Coaches are great... they are better than many of our flights, the luggage gets checked in (they even give you a receipt for each piece of luggage), it gets filmed buy a digital camera, once inside the bus, everybody gets filmed on their places wich are really large, you get a meal, films and you even get to play Bingo (the price being a free trip with the company)... Yesterday, the trip took 7 hours starting at sea level, going up to 4800m and then down to 3200m... the views were tremendous until we got into the clouds...

Papas a la Huancaina

This was my welcome dish to huancayo...

3 or 4 of boiled potatoes
1 or 2 chillis, chopped
200g of goat cheese (feta will do the job)
6 crackers
1 boiled egg
1 small can of evaporated milk

Just about liquidise (don't get it too liquid) everything exept the potatoes. Pour the sauce on the thickly sliced potatoes... all you need to do now is to try to make the dish look pretty, by putting some lettuce or olives around...

first post... in peru

Not sure why it took so long, there are internet shops absolutely everywhere, in the most unexpected places, you can find them in the normal touristy areas, habitational areas, inside the market, in the middle of a road which sells mainly tunning exaustors, on a small road with 50 different eyeglasses shops, or on a road with hundreds of people selling you the most random things, from cakes (there was even a very tasty looking pudding), to rullers, going through books, tables, chairs, dvd, color markers, black boards, white boards... even in small towns such as Ica (in Ica there was even one in the middle of a oasis next to the shop that rented sandboard) or in Pisco (I failed to spot one in the Paracas Reserve, coincidence or not I also failed to spot the promised penguins, sealions and flamingos)... Overall I believe I was overwhelmed with the internet offer, and kept looking for the perfect place to post.
I ended up taking just as much time to post for the first time in peru, as to get my first diarrhea... I believe washing the grapes with tap water just isn't enough... I will consider peeling the next lot.
Other things took me far less time... for example, it took me only four hours in peru to notice I had a debit card missing in the wallet ...thankfully, it took me only another hour to find it back inside the cashpoint where I had been far too carefull checking no one was watching how much I was withdrawing.

Public transports...

Most public transports are tiny, there are various scales of tinyness, the motokar tiny, the tico taxi tiny and the local bus/van tiny... not only are they tiny and they also move in random directions, because of that brownian kind of motion it is not very easy to find a car that hasn't at least a couple of bumps on the side (that meant having to get on through the window of the taxi picking me up, for safety reasons, from the airport). Although not as pretty as the three mentioned above, so far, my favorite public transport is the colectivo, they are absolutely conventional taxis but, as the driver picks the first passenger, he defines a route, sticks a paper on the window, and starts trying to convince anyone walking by spending most of the time buzzing to get peoples attention... a normal car can get up to 4 people (other then the driver) in lima... but in paracas, people just kept comming in, and at some stage there were 6... It is a very nice place to socialise, and you often can have some really nice chats out of it...
The only negative thing about colectivos is that you don't get to argue the price, they are cheap and the price is the same for everyone, I believe they are the ultimate socialist taxi.

two and a half days to go...

my list of things to do before flying is just as big as it was two and a half days ago... but I now know something new, a password...

sei que depois de dois voos que me farão chegar a Lima terei que proferir uma palavra passe: Cusco... tal palavra abrir-me-á as portas de um taxi que me levará até à HomePeru. Tudo por motivos de segurança, disse-me a giovanna, recepcionista do hotel...

I am not sure if writting half the post in english and half in portuguese is the most democratic option... one lives (posts and reads complaints) and learns...

5 days to go...

The plan is simple:
be at the yellow star on the 15th of march and back to that same star on the 4th of may...
Further details, some more factual than others, will be posted as I go along.. a couple of times in English, a couple of times in Portuguese and if my spanish improves...

Before going back to my have to do list before the 14th, just a couple of short questions...
When temperatures vary from -5 to 30 Celsius, should one go for the winter or for the summer wardrobe? How many wardrobes can one fit in 20 Kilos? And how many cameras? If the answer is one, should one go for film or digital? With or without tripod? For how long will I have to stay away from alcoholic drinks due to the malaria treatment? Is yellow fever yellow? Is this anxiety?
Must be side effects from those malaria pills...

One week to go...

O título de blog fala-nos de uma viagem, daqui a uma semana começa a dita.