The air is thick, the beer is cheap.
Last time this week, I was in Penetang, Ontario, racing by snowmobile at one-hundred miles and hour on a frozen lake, blanketed with slush and water. That was my goodbye to the small town where I spent most my youth. I could barely breath as I latched on to the sides of myfriend taking me over the lake at such crazy speeds.
There are two interesting things I can tell you about Lima so far. One is a personal story, and the other is very large, and journalistic, and I don't think I can quiet explain it yet. So let me start with the small story first, and maybe after I will try with the other more daunting story to etch.
I arrived at Lima airport about an hour before midnight. Lima has no buildings higher than two-stories, for the most part - but it is a vast and expansive city and houses about 8 million habitantes. The magic of this squat city reveals itself from the air: stretched out over the miles and miles of space are what appear to millions of yellow Christmas lights, all part of some gigantic, magic christian web.
The dark mountains - there are three big ones forming a triangle in the area and hundreds of smaller ones, are visible in the sky at night only from their pure blackness that juts them apart from the twinkling lights.
Jesus, I don't really have the energy to go into all of this. But let me at least try and get the basics down:
I was greeted at the airport by a friend of a friend's back in Ottawa. His name is Mario, and he is an architect and professor here in the city. He was wearing a red cape and denim hat and we walked about 15 minutes to get into his old Volkswagon hatchback.
Driving to his place in San Isidro, a relatively wealthy and residential enclave, Mario keeps his hand above the horn - a ceaseless background noise here - and the Volks in the middle of both lanes, so that he is cruising with the yellow line dividing the car in two.
We get to his little pad on Pezet, where I drop off my bags in a small room with ceramic tile, this is where I am too sleep for the next ten days. Or at least thats what I was told. This morning I woke up and decided Id rather live in the relative comfort of a hostel and have lots of people around me, so while Mario was at work I packed my bags up again, left him $20 and headed to the Loki. I feel bad, since he was very kind, but the immortal - immoral - words of Miller ultimately assured me I had made the right choice: "I am alive. Morally I am free."
My comfort over the world's feelings, that will be my first rule.
And that is sort of it for the first item. I coudl tell you more, but I doubt it makes much difference at this point: we are just getting to know eachother, and me this blog, and I will save you all some of the details.
Finallly: the broad sketch of what I see as perhaps a dispatch from Peru:
There are Casinos at almost every corner here in Miraflores, filled with the emphysemic and gansters. There are babies selling cigarettes and 10 year old boys shining shoes. No public transportation, and thousands of taxis. I haven't seen one old man driving the cabs, nearly all of them are my age or perhaps ten years older.
That is not so much an idea but a spalsh of details that I think will all fit in, somehow, to something more tangible, one day.
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