Ceviche De Amor, Sadistic Torture, And More Exercise Than I Was Looking For

Another week has passed here in Lima and it is almost time to go. Crazy. This week was full of things oncemore; busy times full of study and running around. I have been doing a bit of photo uploading and finally I have a few photos online. Aside from the few photos on this blog I have a bunch more posted on my myspace page at www.myspace.com/cienfuegos2008

I took a "cooking class" with an old Peruvian woman who has spent many years making the ceviche that these folks are all so proud of. With good reason too. The dish includes nothing more than lime juice, firm-fleshed whitefish, aji chilies, shallots, cilantro and a little bit of salt, but wow, is it good. We also made tamales from corn and meat and herbs and then wrapped them in husks and steamed them. They have over a thousand types of potatoes here in Peru and the kind that we had that day are called camote. They are yellow with a redish-purple skin. We drank a homemade version of chichamorada which I described in a previous blog. All told, it was an incredible meal. After you've cooked for many years you don't really need to to be taught how to cook anything, you more just need to see it done and then understand where the cook is coming from. I truly believe that most food is really very simple, and that making it taste good is not so much technique, but more understanding what is right for the dish or ingredient. As with just about anything, it is best not to overthink it. This will sound cheesy, but the truth of the matter is that the most important thing to put into cooking is amor. These cooks here are not trained professionals, just as my teachers in Thailand and Africa weren't either, but their food tastes better than the majority of what I have had in restaurants where the cooks are formally taught. There is a lot of love for food in Thailand, parts of Africa, and here in Peru and it shows in what you eat...they don't think about it, they just make it, and it's great!

I had a funny experience with a salsa class that I was going to take with a friend from my school, Ruth from Chile. It was supposedly an instruction class, which I needed terribly, not being a formally trained dancer of any sort. (I can flail around in rythme with the best of them though!!!) We got all geared up for the class with a couple drinks and made our way there across the city. It was in a gimnasio, which I will admit raised a small red flag. Generally speaking, Matteo Del Norte has no dealings with gyms or gimnasios of any sort. It is safe to say that Matteo Del Norte could easily spend the rest of his life happily without ever entering a gimnasio...So we roll up into the gym, and we were greated by a small, but muscle-bound, Peruvian woman. This woman had her game face on. This woman was not about to take life lightly and it was clear that if we started goofing around there in the waiting area there would be Peruvian-style hell to pay. After surviving fifteen minutes under her no-pain-no-gain gaze, we ascended a couple floors to what was assumed to be our dance class. It turned out to be a dance/exercise class!!! With a very gay man as our instructor. I am sure that the gay part meant nothing to all the women who were there for the class, because even with the music playing, you could hear this guy's ass moving against the cloth of his gym clothes. He was enthusiastic about dancing to say the least. He started the music and then started going to town; stepping here, there and everywhere, shaking his hips and spinning around like the champ. It was a beginner's class and so I was waiting for some sort of explanation about what the hell was going on, but that never happened. I spent the next hour flailing around with the best of them. It was hilarious. It was actually really fun once I realized that I wasn't going to learn a thing and Ruth and I boogied and laughed and sweated like pigs in blankets until the Baby Jesus smiled on us and we were allowed to leave!! What a riot. I haven't "exercised" that much on purpose for years. There were times in San Francisco where I had to run for the bus, but that was only a couple minutes at a time. This was a solid hour and I admit that I was sore the next day. Good times. Next time I will be looking for a salsa teacher. Preferably a woman! Ha ha!!

On thursday I went to El Centro with my buddy Christian. We went to a bunch of old Euro-style churches which were quite something. We visited a bunch of historic sites and passed many interesting things on the street. People selling cheap tattoos, people trying to sell drugs to gringos, and amazing numbers of stores selling glasses. Eyeglasses...Cuppies would be in heaven here...they are all really good quality and cost about 20$ a pair. A lot of people come from Europe and the US to have dental work done or surgeries of various sorts because the medical care is top notch and it costs a tiny fraction of what it costs in the first world.

We got really lucky and ended up getting a tour of the Peruvian Congress. I guess normally they don't let people in off the street but my boy explained to the people at the gate that I was in town for a short time and it was really important for me to see the congress and the guard pulled some strings and the next thing we knew, we had visitor's passes and we were ushered through a series of metal detectors and armed guards into the huge electoral hall. (Nothing like the age old art of bullshitting!) It was cool to see the place where so much policy has been dictated for so long. Fujimori did his thing there, Bolivar too back in the day. We got the full treatment, descending into a rarely seen dungeon to admire The Tomb Of The Unknown Soldier, a soldier whose remains were found intact long after dying for his country. He is now a heavily guarded symbol. Of what, as of yet, it is not clear to me. They have had 12 different constitutions here, and many coup d'etat's, many interim dictator ships and many changes of direction. Throughout it all, old, white men with beards have dominated large groups of brown people. It's just not right.

Another this that just wasn't right was a thing called The Spanish Inquisition. We visited the Museum dedicated to the Inquisition here in Lima. It was basically a dungeon where people were interrogated as to their religious beliefs and then tortured, and frequently killed, when they answered "incorrectly". It strikes one as being quite ironic that, around all the world, the Godhead, (i.e., one GOD or another) is always quoted as being a cause for peace and unity, while at the same time, in reality, the Godhead has been one of the leading causes of death over the history of man. This fact is indeniable, and in current times we risk heading even deeper into this craziness. The Crusades, the Inquisition, and the Cathars were good examples Christian thinking gone berserk. Islam is not exactly a peaceful religion either, despite it's name translating to "submission" and it's claims of a peaceful core. Judaism has it's violence in Israel, Gaza and The West Bank. It is insane to think that you can convert the rest of the world to your way of thinking and believing, and if it doesn't work out, just kill the non-believers. In today's world of globalized politics mixing with so many versions of religion and weaponry, we really have to hope that those who enjoy the "my God has a bigger PeePee than your God" battles, will allow cooler heads to prevail. Anyway, on to the museum. What is was, basically, was a life size model of what was happening in this place at the time. Potential non-believers were tried and tortured to determine whether they would live in freedom, be imprisoned, or be burned at the stake. The tortures were horrendous. It is hard to believe that humans have come up with such unhuman ways of hurting each other. Here they would frequently hang a person from their wrists, while the wrists were bound behind the back so that the gravity pulling the body down effectively pulled the arms from their sockets. The person would hang for long periods of time in agony. Others were drawn with ropes from each arm and leg and the ropes would pull in four different directions until the body part was wrenched from the body. Chairs with spikes in them, (you can figure this one out) the placing of legs in wooden stocks with a wedge hammered in between the feet, (like in the Stephen King movie Misery) and all sorts of other sadistic things. The irony being that these sadistic practices were supposedly used to find out which people were sadistic. The prisoners were kept all the while in cold, dark holes with no light, food, or contact with other humans. There seems to be a disconnect between the genuine love for God, which can only be good in its simplicity and intention, and the fanaticism which more and more frequently defines our global perception of Christians and Muslims in various parts. It seems to me that God himself would rather not have his/her children dropping to a level below animal, to spend great amounts of time and energy concocting slow and torturous deaths for others. On this little, blue, spinning globe, the odds of human life happening the way that is has are incredibly low. We, as living creatures, face so many possible extinctions, and yet as a people, as a species of being, we spend so much time not helping each other to survive, but rather helping each other to die. On the other hand, with the looming global population crisis, maybe it is just as well that we kill each other off. Save Mother Nature some time and a few drops of sweat. This museum made an impression on me. It was a reminder that human nature is a thing that often contradicts itself. Humans, all in the same moment, have the ability to be immensly pious in one respect, and vastly evil in another. It's quite a thing.

Matteo finished his classes in Lima on friday by getting an A on the final exam!! Yay for A's! Maybe I would have done better in high school if it wasn't the most torturous experience of my life!! Ha ha! It's funny how we can do great at things that we actually like. I had a great time with my friends from the school and today my family is having a big going away meal. Marta is cooking something that smells like heaven, Aji de Gallina, so I am stoked. I will definatly be sad to leave here though. I get the feeling that if I was in this same situation for another month, I would be almost fluent and almost Peruvian!! It is a great place to be. I am leaving in the morning for Cusco to visit Machu Picchu. It sits at almost 12,000 feet elevation and the word is that el sorrocho (elevation sickness) is pretty heinous. I am ready for whatever may come, stay tuned amigos.

La Cumbia Peruana, The High Sierra and Grilled Beef Hearts

Well, what a week it has been here in Lima. I want to start by giving love to my family here in Lima and also the one that I had in Buenos Aires...it is crazy to think about the difference in experience they have provided for me. In Argentina, Alba and Miguel were nothing but terrific in accomodating me. Here, Silvia and her amiga Pilar have undertook the mission of making sure that Matteo Del Norte misses nothing Peruano...quite an undertaking I must say, and we have been frantically bustling this way and that in search of this end.

On thursday we travelled around to a bunch of districts in Lima so that I could see what life was like for the people living there. Sparing the politics, lets just say that there is an incredible amount of poverty here, and that the gap between upper and lower classes is gigantic. The middle class is very small and indeed the country is wrought with problems related to this poverty. Lima is a massive city consisting of proper districts, and then also less official masses of humanity that are referred to as ciudades jovenes. This basically means townships that haven't been around for very long. They are shantytowns lacking life's basic services such as running water, sewage, electricity and waste disposal. It is not a very good situation. It fits in with a blog I wrote last spring on my myspace page about the tendency of the world's population to be moving towards cities. Here, most of the migration is from the mountainous area of the Peruvian Andes that is locally known as the Sierra. People leave their homes in the mountains to seek refuge from the terrorism that exists there, or to seek the fortune and prosperity they percieve the people already residing in Lima to have. Of course, when they get here, there is no prosperity to be found. Thus, Lima, like many other cities enduring similar circumstances, has a high crime rate and, due to the locale, a huge problem with drugs. Travelling around the city I got a good feel for these stratified areas.

Friday night, after my classes, I accompanied Silvia and the elder of the Ricardos (Silvia's husband and son are both named Ricardo, I call them los dos Ricardos) to the theater. As in 'acting' theater, as opposed to 'movie' theater. It was great! It was a play called El Matrimonio A La Peruano and it was a sort of comedic satire of the marraige situation here. I am told that upwards of 70% percent of the population are divorced or separated. Thus, it is something that a strong majority can identify with. It was really funny, even though the percentage of what I understood was about the same as their divorce rate.

After the play we took the scenic route along the ocean to a part of the city called Barranco. This is a very old part of the city and it has that colonial feel that people like so much. It is also known for it's raucous nightlife. We went down into this sort of maze of old streets and followed along until reaching an old restaurant made of wood and stone. We were there to eat anticuchos. This is a Peruvian specialty that the people here are very proud of. I was very excited to try them, as I always am with localities such as these, but I felt a bout of Travels With Anthony Bourdain coming on when Ricardo looked at me and winked and told me that I was going to love beef heart! Huh? Oi! They slice the heart into slices about 3/4 of an inch thick and skewer them on brochetes, and then grill them over a hot fire. They are served on top of boiled and seasoned potatoes and then topped with choclo, which is corn on the cob like what we have in the states, except the kernals here are giant. I ate them, and they tasted good, but I have to admit that I had a hard time getting over the idea of it being beef heart. We also drank a bunch of Pisco Sour which helped a good bit.

The next day was saturday, which is family day here in Peru. By noon the house was crawling with grandchildren and filled with laughter and the smells of the kitchen. Two of Silvia's five children live here in Lima and they were there with their kids. Ricardo Jr. is a journalist here and his sister Rafaela is the editor of a major periodical here called Somos. It was really neat to talk to them then and later that night because they know all about what is happening here, and have a good sense of global perspective. I did a lot of horsing around with children that spoke Castillano better than me and then we had a big meal and then everybody spread out to pass out for the much awaited Saturday Siesta.

Later that night I went with Ricardo Jr. and Rafaela to a bar in Barranco called La Noche. There was going to be a well known band playing there that night called La Sarita. La Sarita, evidentaly, is the saint to which prostitutes, thieves and all manner of other 'tipos oscuros' pray to. Let me just say, that this band rocked the house!! They played a mixture of rock, cumbia from Columbia, cumbia from the Selva of Peru, punk and traditional music from the Sierra. It was a rad mix like none other that I have ever heard. A few of them were dressed like the usual rockers, old t-shirts and long hair; but then they also had these older fellows dressed in traditional mountain garb, playing traditional instruments. They had a guy playing an old squeeky violin, a man with a huge harp that was made out of wood and sat on his shoulder, and then a panpipe player. The guitar player played a detuned and distorted electric that added a cool edge to the music. The singer had a punk voice and stomped all over and wow, they left a real impression. You should have seen the crowd getting down to it too...I think that cumbia could possibly be the grooviest music on the planet. (Also, as an aside, I confidently put forward that this could be said of the world: The fellas just want to be cool, and the ladies just want to shake their bodies. It is hilarious, just about wherever you go, there is a room full of girls dancing and a line of guys by the wall or sitting in chairs acting unaffected and cool. It is a strange modern trend to not allow the rythme of music to move you. It is 'cool' to be able to be indifferent to the rythme of music. It is clear that this phenomenon covers up all sorts of insecurities, but watching it happening on all the continents cracks me up! The chicas usually end up near each other, smiling and wiggling around and having a grand old time. Guys spend the night trying to appear 'cool' to each other and to the women in the place, and the women just get down! Sure this is a generalization and sure there are guys who dance too and sure there is more too it than just this, but it's true.)

Sunday morning I was awakened early by the barking of my little homie Pito, or as I now call him, El Comandante del Corredor. (The Commander of the Hallway, for this is his turf) We had a quick breakfast and then towed our sleepy eyes and bodies into a couple of cars and headed for the mountains. They weren't messing around when they made the Andes!! These are real mountains. In Vermont and New Hampshire and Massachusettes they claim to have mountains, but they have anthills and nothing more compared to this place. I have been known to boast of my own Rocky Mountains out and about in the world and here I hold my tongue. These are pretty damn formidable. Leaving Lima into these mountains is like leaving the city in exchange for another planet. Crazy, grainy sand dunes give way to giant rockslides and a landscape as vast and arrid as any other. Climbing in elevation from sea level everything changes. To me, it seemed as if we were going back in time. The pavement ended and soon we were stopping to allow flocks of sheep and goats to be shepharded across the trail. Before I knew it we were rumbling around coarse gravel corners, clinging to the edges of sheer cliffs. All was brown and gray and cactus, save for the bottom of the steep valleys which housed small rivers that provided for some greenery. We drove for two hours in this manner and eventually arrived in a small mountain village called Antiochia. This place is some kind of anomally. It is normal in most aspects, but for some reason it was recently painted in all sorts of pastel colors with images of birds and flowers and other local designs. It struck me as being the answer to the question: What would happen if we painted a mountain village like an easter egg? We walked around and MDN tasted ALL the local culinary delights. No joke, Pilar kept rushing up to me from different directions with spoonfulls of this and little parcels of that. The vilage grows Membrillos and apples and makes all sorts of jellies and candies out of them. They make juice and cider and vinegar and various alcohols. It is quite a thing.

After an nice lazy sunday in the village, we left to head back down to the city and had the inevitable case of car trouble. I swear to Dios that this has to happen frequently! Now when it does, I just say to myself, "Right. I was wondering when this would happen." This time it happened to be a water leak. I was riding in the afflicted car with Juan Jaime, the husband of Rafaela, and Rafaela herself. The heat guage would creep up to high and we would have to stop the car and put water into it. Soon we used all the bottled water that our small army had collected and had to coast down the cliff-clinging roads waiting to come to some small pueblo where we could ask for more water. To simplify a potentially long story, it was harrowing. The car would frequently just die and we would be rolling along downhill with limited steering and brake capacity. I was convinced that we were done for on three separate occasions as we would careen around corners and whistle past pedestrians and various farm animals. Somehow we made it to a town called Nieve Nieve and got yet another batch of water to keep us heading onward. The going was slow but eventually we made it back to pavement and then limped and panted into the city. No lack of adventure in the Sierra!

Today I was back to school which am enjoying quite a lot. I am learning more and more advanced stuff and my brain is getting pretty good at dealing with life in Spanish. Aside from a random few words to others and a decent bit of rambling to myself, I haven't spoken english in about two weeks. It is a strange and humbling experience to be buried up to the neck in a different langauge. "Lento, lento..." they all say, but in the heat of conversation you just wish you had the use of your normal vocabulary!!

A couple more bits of culture...Ricardo Sr. says that driving in Lima is like driving on Jupiter or Mars, and he is right. I have never seen such chaos. I know I keep talking about the traffic, but it's nuts. People use thier horns almost constantly for a plethora of different reasons and they don't stop for any reason accept the occasional traffic light. I have watched people literally take running leaps into microbuses. I have watched grandmas literally dive for the curbs. I have seen children playing soccer amongst it all as if there was nothing to it.

It is really interesting to see how much religion is a part of life here. It is hard to describe by our standards because in america, religion is, for the most part, aligned with right-wing/conservative politics. Here in South America, on the whole, it is a very left-wing, "of the people" place. They have no trouble organizing large scale protests or riots. (For example, the other morning a huge mass of people blocked the freeway near Pisco for seven hours to protest the lack of government aid since the earthquake that devestated the region in august.) And at the same time the rate of Christian belief here is upwards of 90%. A tough place to be gay or lesbian, and for that they claim to not have many gay people. Many women dying from abortions gone wrong because it is illegal and not easy to find a real doctor to perform the process. A lot of population growth problems because the Pope says it is wrong to use birth control. Thanks Pope. (Maybe the pope should go to South Africa and have sex with a woman who "might" have AIDS and then raise the kids himself and we'll see what he thinks of condom use then!!! Oh the blasphemy!!) But anyhow, here a large percentage of taxi-cabs have quotes from biblical scripture written on the back and sides of them. Proclaiming their faith for Jehova and Dios and the Baby Jesus. Lots of images of saints bobbing and bouncing from the rear-view-mirror. In that respect it is just like Thailand! (See, we aren't so different after all...) When you are stopped in the car at an intersection a group of people referred to as Cruceros descend on the cars. Most of these people are fresh out of jail and not able to find "clean" work to do, so they deal in any quick turnaround contraband. Not drugs but rather cheap goods from China; watches, sunglasses, cellphone holders etc. Last night as we sat at an intersection watching the river of autos pour by, a pretty young girl walked out in front of our car and commenced to swinging around two fiery poi balls in the style of the Maori in New Zealand. She was really good. You never know what you will see on the streets of this planet called Lima.

I have been befriended by a lady named Flor in a local Chifa which has been cool because she really hooks up the food for me now. I was in there the first few days I was here and it was slow and seeing as I am a bit of a cultural curiousity for these folks, I always have a conversation starter, so we chatted. Like I said, the people here are very proud of their food and love to talk about it. They take a lot of pride introducing new things to foreigners. I am learning a lot about the chinese/peruvian fusion at this resto.


Damn there is so much more, but I am out of time for now. I gotta do a better job editing this thing, and that takes a little time too. I have problems with the e and i of the word their. I always have for some reason. Just one more thing to work on...until next time, que te pases un buen dia o noche!

Strong Memories, Other Ways Of Looking At Things, And Bad, Bad Santa (Warning: This Blog Contains Themes Which Have Been Deemed Politically Incorrect

Its funny how you generally don't think too much about how the rest of the world percieves you. You walk around the streets thinking that people see you pretty much the way you see yourself and when something happens to make you realize that it is different you are surprised. I feel like this travelling thing is a good way to be aware of the effect that you have on other people. I was walking to my school this morning and I got a couple of the usual curious glances. This really does not bother me, and usually I ascribe nothing to it, but other times, like today, I think about what I must look like to others. What does my skin tone mean to them. When I think about myself, I think about being open minded and generally kind to whomever I come across, I think of being interested in the lives of others and the histories of all parts of our globe. I am aware of the differences in social class and skin color but I think that generally I do a pretty decent job of treating all people the same way; a consistent way. That said, I feel that it is important to remind myself from time to time that other people, when they look at me, don't see these things immediately. They don't just assume them.

Here in Peru, and also in a lot of other places like Africa and Asia, having the white face, red cheeks and light colored hair is an instant and glaring reminder of a difference. Unfortunately, this difference isn't always one that has happy memories and/or associations for one or both of the parties present. Sometimes I have to remind myself that my skin color has, at times, been the color of cultural destruction. A color synonymous with evil things, deadly things, oppression, slavery, cruelty in myriad forms and the soul destruction of millions of human beings throughout time. Think this sounds too harsh? Is this thought upsetting you during your morning latté before leaving your nice first world house in your nice first world neighborhood? Well, billions of people in the history of the world may beg to differ. All of the continents of the world have been conquered and exploited by white Europeans at one point in time or another. The imprint of which is still seen in all of these places. Why do you think travel visas to countries that used to be controlled by predominantly white cultures are so expensive for those same travellers. In India, Australia, Africa, New Zealand, North America, and countless other places, english has become one of the main local languages, if not the only recognized official language, but not because the original residents of these places thought it would be a fun idea to learn english. Spanish is the language here in South America but not because the Incas and Mayas thought it would sound cool to speak spanish. Portugese is spoken in Brasil and many parts of Africa too. Why? Because the Portugese colonized them. This may not seem like such a big deal in the US in our day. Or in Australia, but that is because we are the ancestors of the oppresor culture so we teach our children that what we did was to help the poor local people who wouldn't have stood a chance without our generous intervention. It is the same in all parts where colonalization is happening or has happened. In Australia the whites who came were "trying to help" the "poor" aborigines out by breeding out thier "savage blood" and then educating thier young in white boarding schools. Kidnapping children to teach them english and to cure them of backwards earth-based religious leanings, and to give to them the gift of Jesus. And what a gift this has turned out to be. Even now we sell these lies. Not to get too far into current politics, but the "gifts" of democracy and western culture are not as simple as they seem. Why do you think there are Bin Ladens and terror cells and various forms of "blowback" in all parts of this ever-shrinking world? It is because this ongoing caucasian domination invokes all sorts of strong and angry feelings of reprisal.

I can remember the first time that this was really, concretely inserted into my understanding. I was in Spain, and I had been walking the Camino of Santiago in the north of the country. I ended up dating a young Spanish girl named Carmen and when I finished walking the trail I went to stay with her in Madrid for a while. We both loved ice cream and so we sort of did a tour of the "great ice cream spots of Madrid". This is not on your usual tourist map. One night at about 10:30, we went to this place on some small side street and sat down and were immediately approached by a smiling man with a big black mustache and the kind of hat old men in Spain often wear. I didn't speak much spanish at all at that time and Carmen and the guy were carrying on in a friendly conversation for about five minutes before we ordered. He kept looking at me with smiling eyes, he obviously liked Carmen and so he liked me too. I was OK because she was OK. He took our order and walked off to get the ice cream. Carmen told me that he was from Chile and had a funny accent. I thought that was interesting, and how interesting it was to come across a Chilean in the middle of Spain. He brought our ice cream and smiled at me as he gave me mine. "Gracias." I stammered and he smiled wider. Carmen started to talk to him again and I understood that she was telling him about me. Who I was, how we had met, where I was from. Then a strange thing started to happen. His smile slowly dissolved into a look of neutrality, and then his neutral mouth crept down into a deep frown and then his face drew tight and he turned his head and looked me dead in the eye with a look of such hatred like I had never seen before. It was like a big dark stormcloud had rolled in over his head and it was starting to rain. Hard. He said some things to me in a loud voice in a language that I didn't understand. I am sure I looked surprised, and probably a little bit scared. After a few seconds of this he pushed my spoon onto the floor and walked away quickly behind the counter and then through the curtain that led, presumably, to an office or back room. Carmen looked at me with concern. I was in the process of beginning to ask what had happened when the man came out from behind the curtain and continued with his assault. The other four or six people in the restaurant were gazing, wide-eyed, at the spectacle that was unfolding. Unfortunatley everyone there understood what was happening besides me. Carmen pushed her chair back and began getting up and as she did so she began to cry. The man was speaking very quickly now and his face was dark with anger. I started to stand up and as I did Carmen grabbed a fistful of my shirt in her hand and pulled me out the front door, leaving behind the fury of this Chilean and two bowls of melting, untouched ice cream. It was about a block or two of fast walking before Carmen would begin to tell me what had happened and I swear to God that until she did, I had no idea of what had gone down. Well, it turns out that there was a fella that ran Chile for a while by the name of Augusto Pinochet. Maybe you have heard of him, but probably you have not, and even if you have, you probably don't know much about the evil that he perpetrated in his country and you probably know even less about the aid he recieved from the government of who? That's right, us. The government of the good old US of A gave a good hand to a dictator. This, of course, was not the first or only time our government has done this. But in the case of this man, he had lost not only his wife, but both of his children to the hands of the Pinochet strongmen. He knew explicitly of the US involvement and his hatred was so strong for those that had killed his loved ones that many, many years later he would scream at a clueless American that sat dumb in his restaurant in a land far far away. Carmen kept apologizing to me for the things that he had said. She didn't need to. I was not in the least bit aware of the details of what he had said, but his sentiment had gotten through to me loud and clear. That was one of the earliest moments that kindled my distrust for governments and inspired in me an interest in knowing about the lives of others cultures and countries. I was ashamed, in that moment, of not having a clue about the behavior of my own country. It is indeed a shame that American foreign policy shapes the lives of so many of the world's people. And we, as Americans, enjoy the luxury of being able to ignore it, of never needing to learn about any of it, of being able to pretend that it doesn't exist. We shape so many factors of the world at large, and yet we have a populous that couldn't find Mexico City on a map. I was ashamed to not know much of the world, and I was ashamed, as I still am, of the government that constantly perpetuates global suffering and claims to speak on my behalf, and on the behalf of "the people". To conclude the story, it turns out that there is a large population of Chileans in Madrid and elsewhere in Spain. People who fled the terror inspired by Pinochet and his devils. (A start to understanding the Pinochet years in Chile can be found on Wikipedia under Augusto Pinochet.)

So this morning I was walking along in a good old mood. I saw an old man on the sidewalk, just standing there looking out from his driveway. As I passed I said hello, knowing that he probably wouldn't reply, knowing that I was something from far away. I looked into his eyes and they were not hateful, but they held something that reminded me of that man in the ice cream parlor in Spain. The memory I had wasn't a bad memory, but rather a quiet reminder of the lives of others. So many others, who we pass and see in our everyday lives without any thought to what reality in thier eyes looks like. Sometimes we need to be jolted in order to think about life outside of white-world. It can only be good for the world to do this. Good for the world, and good for us individually, if we can only act with selfish motives. If not for reasons of selflessness, then empathize with the world for selfishness. Either way, things get better.

In order to not end on a heavy note, I read a couple things in the news that made me laugh recently. First one: evidently there are a lot of people in America who are lobbying to try to pass a law okaying the possesion of firearms by students on American college campuses!!! Ha ha ha! I am probably opening myself up to second amendment criticism by discussing this, but can anyone think of a worse idea than this one? Let's bring a bunch of other guns into classrooms so that if a guy walks in with a gun, everyone can open up and shoot at him. Is there any way that this is a good idea?

"Well, Matt, we have the right to defend ourselves! If some crazy person comes in shooting I'll rope 'im with my lasso and then put 'im down with my six shooter!"

Good one. It must be related to the juvenile American conception of "killing a lot of people to achieve peace." And you wonder why the whole world is laughing at us!!

"Well, Matt, again you misunderstand...the world is laughing at us because everyone out there is just jealous!"

Aha. How could I not have seen this.


The best, and indeed lightest, is this. In Australia "they" are trying to change the law as to what Santa Claus (that's right, Santa Claus) can say when he is doing his thing in public. "They" are trying to stop him from saying "ho ho ho" and to start saying "ha ha ha" because the former is insulting to women!!! I am all for women and the rights and power of women, everyone knows this. But I don't think that one woman I know would think that this wasn't the stupidist thing they had ever heard of. Political Correctness is quite an entity. I can't wait until some interest group tries to get us to stop urinating!!!

"From now on people must not urinate because the smell is offensive to all humans, and this we can no longer tolerate!!"

"Yes, but if we don't go pee every now and again we will die, this is impossible!"

"Well, all you urinators are just going to have to find another way to rid your bodies of liquid waste. And if you can't figure out a better way than urination then maybe you deserve to die, you human haters!!"

Ok, I am being silly, but a silly question deserves a silly answer right? (Plus kids love potty humor, adults love potty humor. Who doesn't love a good pee joke!?!?) Ho ho ho. That ho ho ho shit is aimed at kids as it is. How, in any way, could this kind of innocence be insulting. Dumb. I'll probably get stopped in customs somewhere for this "anti-PC" view. Well, I'm stickin' to my guns on this one. Don't mind the Second Amendment pun there. Anyway, thanks for reading this, if you made it to the end you deserve a gold star...that is if we are still allowed to give gold stars to good kids. That may be unfair to silver stars...and that wouldn't be nice. Or gold stars for you good kids may make the bad kids feel bad about themselves and we can't have that...

Last thing, the fruit in Peru is out of this world. No joke. They make these strawberry milkshakes from fresh berries that are unlike anything I have had. Last night I had a pineapple that made me weep. Yesterday I had ice cream made from a fruit called Lucuma, I have a hard time describing it, but it was terrific. Yay for fruit...yay for Peru.

Good Cookin', Blue Skies and Everybody Knows The Alien...

I must admit, at this point, that Lima is really growing on me. For a couple hours yesterday the whiteness of the fog parted and in came the sun and made it a different place altogether. Shortly after I wrote that last blog about the chinese restaurants, I was wandering the streets and I poked my head into a little restaurant with a chalk board in front. I am not sure why I did this, but I am glad that I did because I ended up having one of those really great culinary experiences that people such as myself live for. I must say that the food scene here is quite something. Talking to as many people as I have, I am impressed by the constant pride that is exuded by these folks when talking about thier food. At this particular "hole in the wall" they were serving a set menu, so that is what I had. The two servers were both older and had long pony tails. One was what we might call "a potential sanitation hazard," but what he lacked in hygiene he more than made up for in personality. For me, he invoked the Lord Of The Rings Trilogy. (No I didn't have any gastro-intestinal fallout, despite my concern on the subject.) The other struck me as some sort of quiet protagonist from a Marquez novel. His smile was full of compassion and his eyes betrayed an intelligence inherent more often in philosophers (where do these people hide anyway?) than waiters. At once they brought me a glass of purple liquid that I mistook to be sangria. Then I thought it was mulled wine after I smelled it. It was neither, but similar, in ways, to both. They call it 'chichamorada', and it is a local drink that is made, originally from corn. They add cinnamon and cloves and then steep in it, dried and fresh fruits like apple, peach and piña. Man was this stuff good! I now seek it out! Mine was without alcohol but evidently there is a version that contains it. Very refreshing drink. It was a chilly afternoon so I didn't really need refreshment as much as warmth and that I got in the form of Sopa a la Criola. A flavorful, spicy orange broth filled with noodles, fried strips of beef, ají chilies and onions. Wow, was that good. The second course was called Tallarines Con Pollo Saltado. Tallarines are noodles, and saltado is a dish that they make with all sorts of different meat by sauteing the meat, in this case chicken, with chillies, tomatoes, chinese onions, and finishing with fresh julienned red onions, so that they retain thier crunch and original flavor. They tossed in the noodles and deglazed it all with some dark and flavorful stock and called it good. Wow, that was really good too. They have very soft bread here and you always get more than you can eat. They finished me off with another couple glasses of the goodness and a slice of this homemade dulce de leche cake. Super good. The 'service', if you could call it that in its informality, was really good too with these guys taking turns explaining with pride, how things were made and where they came from. I payed just under three dollars for this meal, and left a happier human being. It really is amazing how good food can make you feel so good about the world.

My host mother here, Silvia, is also quite a cook. Last night she made a chicken dish that tasted almost asian. Sort of curried. She said there are influences here from all over the world. Criola is a style of food that is originally from Spain. You see that all over the place here. Today, after my classes were out, I wandered near the center of town and found this cool little "hole in the wall" place that was serving lunch in a manner similar to a lot of the Mexican restos in our fine city of San Francisco. You walked up and they scooped you out some rice and beans and potatoes and meat. I had Pollo Seco which was basically a long-braised chicken chunk with a pile of fragrant stewed potatoes, herbed rice and an onion slaw. Topped with a dollop of cream and a shot of bright orange chili sauce that tasted a lot like fire. This cost just over a dollar and truly, this may have been the best meal I have had yet on this trip. It is just the kind of thing I like to eat, so full of flavors, sour , salty, creamy, spicy. Yummy. Picture me there in the open dining chairs on the sidewalk watching the cars whiz by and the people bustle about in the middle of thier days...with a big shite-eating grin on my face, just digging the scene, life is good! There is a maid where I am living from the Selva, a region of Peru that is very close to Brasil, and legend has it that she is a great cook...I am hoping she will show old Matteo Del Norte a couple tricks of the Peruvian trade!

The family I am staying with is quite a bit different from my peoples in Buenos Aires. Silvia and Ricardo have done well for themselves and she is an award winning architect so you should see the house they are living in!! It is phenominal. My room is giant and quiet and quite dark in the night when it should be dark. Stark contrast to living on the racetrack in BsAs! She has five children, most of whom are grown and live in Europe and America. One of her sons still lives at home, he is a journalist, also called Ricardo. It was funny, this morning I was fast asleep when I woke up and heard Silvia hissing a whisper at something in the half-light of dawn. I wasn't sure what was going on, my door was open and she sounded a little bit worked up. It turns out that I have a new little buddy!! Her dog, a Jack Russell named Pito, had pushed open my door and made himself a little bed on a pair of my jeans; a buffer to the cold stone floor of the house. She didn't want to come into my room, she being proper and me being a guest in her house, but the dog simply refused to leave the comfort of his roost. He wagged his tail and looked at her like, "what are you gonna do, huh?" It was hilarious. I guess he usually doesn't like strangers but sometimes something occurs between a human and an animal and it makes a friendship possible. I liked little Pito from the moment I saw him. He has character. He is a little macho bastard and for some reason I like that. I don't feel this way about all dogs, even though I like dogs more than most other pets. But this little dude is rad. I was happy that he felt at home in my room.

I guess this is just a mini blog about some occurances of little importance. Mostly to say that Lima, Peru is really frickin cool. I think I judged it a little early due to this damn white sky, and the whole living-in-the-void type of feel!! That still trips me out a bit, but I am coming to understand why people like it so much here. My teacher in my new school is no Guillermo, but he is really good all the same and I am learning a lot here. It is a young campus, this one, and I am one of the first students! That is a cool thing too, they are trying hard.

I want to finish with a little tribute to my boy Chris Whitley, who died two years ago tomorrow, november 20th. A few excerpts of his poetry. These are picks I have made of his words alone. Most of his magic was in his delivery. The words certainly, but it was more how he sang them. His music is an incredible playing out of polarities, often existing in the same short time frame. The pain of the world mixed in with the unexplainable beauty of it. The burden of seeing too far into the incredible void and vertigo that is "the truth". His music is the exacting of zen, the rough edge of his voice conveying, so well, the reality of existence, while his lush melodies swirl around from focus to periphery, following the course of his well stated "bliss to breakdown". My own humble descriptions do no justice. To the average listener of bubble gum pop music his sound would be off-putting. And I must say that I am more than a little glad at this. His stories are for the person who is not afraid to look beyond the facade that we are shown on the day to day...if you listen, and you are intrigued, then you will know just exactly what I mean. If you are not intrigued then you will wonder what the hell I am talking about. I know many who have found this meaning. What a sad thing that he died at such a young age, old enough to sing the blues, but young enough to cling to the coals. Enough of my continuations...

From Wide Open Return off the Hotel Vast Horizon Album:

No time lost for passerbye, lonesome transmission the miles decide
Everyday departures loosen from the land, all the wide open returns in your stride
Other lifetimes may graze your sleeve, the lonesome panorama don't decieve
Faithful revolution blinds you to the ground, in the wide open return you leave

City of God, transverse homes, palace of dust, kingdom come
Renegade weed, vagrant wire, heretic seed, named desire

Blurring lines and burning speed, into the lonesome future you recede
Strained to transvision beyond the laws that blind,
To the wide open returns you bleed...

From the song Living With The Law, from the album of the same name:

Well I come down from the country, find the lesson in the draw
There ain't no secrets in the city, it's hard living with the law...
They got machines and mama I can't figure, the got a romance made for doin' time
Send me out child, running outside, out along a world of crime

Gonna swing my scythe got a hand upon the handle, gonna shade my children ways I understand
Milk the trigger, kill the hunger, staring down this broken land...

From the song Alien, from the album Terra Incognita:

Everyone come out, got shades for the shadows of doubt,
Get blind when it's most too clear, get killed by beauty and fear,
Porcelain face on a steal device, mind of glass 'neath a mask of ice,
Someone is a million years from home, someone is a stranger and is never alone...
Because, everybody knows the alien...

This is the music that made music as honesty make sense. From him I learned the most important lesson in creating good 'art'. "Just deliver a gesture, an impetus."

A postscript: There is this odd young woman a couple seats away from me having something like a panic attack. She talks to herself and lets out these crazy little yips and shrieks from time to time, she fans herself constantly with her hands, breathing hard, and she is driving the guy who works here crazy with all her questions. She gets so worked up that she runs into one of the phone booths, slams the door and has to calm herself down. Whew. I guess we gringos aren't the only neurotic folks on the planet!

A City Perched Above The Sea, Pale White Skies and Pale White Me...

Lima, Peru is a city that plays with the mind a bit. I arrived here after getting only about two hours of sleep the night before and so I was in an altered state of mind anyway. I was picked up at the airport by a guy who used to be a narco-traffic cop for about eight years so the introduction to the city was through the experience of this guy. He was a nice guy, spent 2 years training in Quantico, Virginia so he had an idea of what the US is about. He has three kids, loves soccer, loves cumbia music and Cristal Beer and loves the ladies. He told some interesting stories from his 20 years as a cop and got me in one piece through the racecar style driving-course that is Lima's streets. They have even less regard for the law here and the horn is in thier hand as much as the maté mug is in the hands of the cabbies in Uruguay. A city full of Mario Andretti's! I told him about the law that was passed working against the taxistas in Buenos Aires and he just laughed and said that that would never happen here. Graft is such a big thing already. As an example of the technique at work here, last night I was walking along the street looking for my dinner and I saw a group of police with whistles just pulling people over at random and giving them the 10th degree, "you could go your way if only..." What a stressful thing that is!

So the guy got me to my hostel and I crashed for a bit. I woke up after dark and went out to see what there was to see. A sliver moon peeked out from the thick billowing clouds that I was to learn more about later. It was leaning back so far in the night sky that it looked like a wineglass with no stem. I ended up having my first Peruvian meal in a chinese restaurant. They are all over the place here and are called chifas. The food was amazing. No lack of vegetable here. The plate was a glowing mass of just cooked vegetables of all kinds. Out on the streets I recognized quickly that this was no Buenos Aires. Fruit stands on every other corner, boticas had replaced the kioskos, the avenues had a much more north american feel compared to the european feel of both Montevideo and Buenos Aires. Oh yeah, and then there is the fact that I am now the whitest person in all of Peru!! If you can find a whiter person than me here I'll buy you a plate of ceviche and a papaya smoothie!! It is a little like it was in Asia, the people look at me with a giggle in thier eyes. Who is this tall white person with hair that isn't jet black? I think they get a kick out of my accent too. They are polite but there is a curiosity in thier glance. I am happy to provide a little entertainment in thier days.

The seaside fog is one that evidently lives on top of the city for the bulk of the year. It is called garúa. It is almost never sunny until after december. Here and now it looks like if you took all the people and cars and buildings and cut them out and pasted them onto a perfectly white background. You pretty much have no idea what time of day it is, or what time of year it is just by looking around. It is a bit surreal because it is also very bright, but not sunny. Nor is it warm. I though it would be at least warmer than Buenos Aires because of proximity to the equator, but it definately is not. It is a humid cold that is not really cold per se, but it isn't warm either. You can smell the coastal humidity, and yesterday I went to the edge of the huge bluff on which Lima is built and looked out over the beaches and port activity on the ocean. You know, actually this place reminds me a bit of Hanoi. When I visited Hanoi I had been in Saigon before that and there it was screaming hot. Hanoi had almost the exact feel as here. It felt like suddenly I was transported to a completely different time of the year. I am glad to have warm blankets on the bed and the fact that the advertised "warm water 24 hours" is a false statement makes for good survival stories with fellow guests over breakfast. (Here, over breakfast, I met my first dyed-in-the-wool conspiracy theorist of this trip. I am not naming names on here but I have to admit that I am awed by the dedication that this person has to the cause of digging up hidden "facts" and information implying and implicating all sorts of people, places and things. This person is certain that all sorts of these stories are just about to "break" and that it is too bad that the media doesn't have the desire to understand the details of the things that they are reporting because they are just going to make things worse. As much as we share in common in the way of political leanings, and as much as I would like a lot of the same things to happen in the political arena, I can't help but feeling that this person is shouting into the wind and I hope that they don't go off shouting about anything too volatile while passing through US Customs! Full cavity search over here!!) Nothing like a cold shower in a place that isn't warm. But it is all good. You gotta expect that kinda shit from time to time.

Tomorrow I will move into another family stay and I start new classes on monday. It is a cool thing these homestays. You speak spanish all the time and that is the thing you gotta do to get the language down. TV is also really helpful. Just to practice listening to people talk and figure out the way to say things locally. This campus here is from the same school I went to in BsAs but it is a relatively new location for them so I don't think there are as many students. We shall see. I had a great final birthday dinner with some of my compañeros from the BsAs school the night before I flew here. Some great malbec and syrah and 600 grams (over a pound!) of grilled tenderloin for each of us. Those are some fun people, now we scatter in all directions and will never all be in the same place at the same time again.

And finally, we are coming up to the anniversary of Chris Whitley's death so if you are drinking anything, say a toast to the most important musician of alltime! Most probably you don't know who this guy was, but if you are intersted, check out the Dirt Floor cd first. You can download this or just buy it, it is amazing. He died at 45 of lung cancer and the world lost some of the greatest musical potential it has ever seen. If they get too good, they gotta die. It seems like that sometimes. Anyway, that is all for the time being. I hope that your lives are going swimmingly!

Riots, Sitars and Malaria I Can Afford To Avoid...

So the other morning I got into a new little rowboat and pushed off from the shore of my twenties, into the waters of a new decade. Ever since then things have been happening like crazy! Another week full of things that I will barely manage to collect for the blog. I had a good time in Colonia in Uruguay. It is a small town that was the original Portugese settlement in Uruguay. It is a peninsula that juts out with old, cobbled, tree-lined streets and a white lighthouse at the end of the point. It was used for a long period of time as a port to smuggle things in and out of Buenos Aires. Now it is really nice and well preserved but it is also really touristy and where there are a shit-ton of tourists, things usually cost way too much, so I didn't stay for too long.

Back here in Buenos Aires I have had a lot going on. Birthday meals and a lot of running around to get ready to go to Peru tomorrow. On the afternoon of my birthday, I happened upon my first bit of South American Revolutionary Spirit! It was really quite intense actually and the police had roped off the area so I couldn't get very close which is for the better I am sure. I ended up watching most of it later on the TV, it was pretty brutal. Essentially it was a small riot. What happened was a result of a law that was recently passed making it harder on professional drivers of buses and taxis. The law created a point system that would be used to punish drivers with. If a driver commited an infraction he would lose one point and had twenty points to lose before he would lose his license and have to take a driving class to get it back. Miguel says that if this was in Belgium or Denmark it may work, but that this is the third world and so it won't work here at all. For a normal driver it doesn't really matter because the 20 points are more than they will ever need. But for a taxi driver, who spends 8-12 hours on the streets a day, that will add up fast. (And you should see this traffic! It is like one huge, moving infraction!) At a certain point, the police who are giving these citations can start soliciting bribes. If a driver loses his licence, he loses the ability to feed himself and his family, so it is easier to just pay a little bribe. Essentially the law that was passed is seen to be creating a situation where graft is encouraged and supported. So the drivers held a march to protest it and they ended up in front of the Parliament building here in downtown BsAs. I happened to be looking for a bookstore nearby, and there it was going on. The protesters where carrying black and yellow flags on long wooden poles and they were jabbing at the cops and lancing them like spears from a distance. They were throwing rocks and huge chunks of concrete and there were "officers down" here and there. The cops, who were decked out in full riot gear with sheilds and visors were responding with superior (obviously) firepower...batons and guns with rubber bullets. They were also spraying something that looked like mace or teargas. There were a number of protesters who were laying still on the ground or against the walls of businesses with blood running from thier heads. Later, on the TV they showed over and over a beating that made Rodney King look like he got it easy. It was incredible. The way Miguel put it was, "the police didn't take it as a job, they took it personally." Claro. Who cast the first stone? No one is saying. What will be the outcome? As of yet, no one knows. Definately not something that would happen in the states though.

Yesterday I went to get my malaria medicine. In the US, they wanted to charge me
280$ for the consultation visit alone, then more for the medicine. The consultation visit is essentially this:

Doctor: So, ah, Matthew, it says here that you are going to be travelling to South and Central America.

Matthew: Yep.

Doctor: They got mosquitos down there and in certain areas that means you gotta look out for Malaria.

Matthew: Yeah, I know, that's why I'm here.

Doctor: Ok, sure. You're gonna need some doxicyclene pills.

Matthew: Yeah, I know, I've used them alot before. That's why I'm here.

Doctor: Hmm, well, ok, you know what to do then. Go to a pharmacy and pay a shitload more for the pills then alright?

I was probably looking to pay 350$ for a few pills to get me through the equatorial part of my trip. So I told them to eat poop. And know, I am really glad I did because yesterday I had a consultation with a doctor down here and picked up my pills all for 30$ dollars!! Yay! Yay for a medical system that doesn't rape its countrymen!! Ha ha! Imagine being a lower income person and being able to go to the doctor to get treatment for something minor (or major) and not having to get a third job and a bank loan to pay for it!! But, you say, but Matteo, if we give the people more fairly priced medicine then we will be compromising the quality of the doctors and services in our hospitals. Blah blah blah you capitalist one-track-minders...again I bring up the "we are smart people" argument. People on the moon. Probes out by Pluto. Atoms split. Missiles that can hit the front license plate of a Land Rover from 3000 miles away. Ok? So let's reform the goddamn medical care!!!! Spend a couple fractions of a percent of the "defense" budget to actually think about the people of our own country as humans and not prospective market targets. Seems like a no brainer to me, but then again, I am on a continent famous for its leftist values. The values of the everyday people. Oh well, we all know what ended up happening to Che. But I am glad I can go ahead now and not get malaria and at the same time save enough money in the transaction to live for half a month down here! And I am not even a poor citizen!! Ha ha! What a fine mess. Goguen said, "Whadda mess!" Fyodor said, "Ah what terrible tragedies real life contrives for people."

Last night I went with Alba (my argentinian mom) to an "Espectaculo de Dansa" from India. It was really cool. One of her nieces was one of the four dancers and it was really quite something. The style of traditional dance in India is tied to the Hindu belief system which is incredibly, fantastically, phenominally intricate and nuanced. While buddhism is a system that is approachable to outsiders, Hinduism is not. Almost all the details of traditional Hindu life are dictated by that system of belief. Alan Watts paraphrased that buddhism is hinduism packaged for export. Anyway, I would have thought it impossible to get any where near authenticity with this kind of dance and when I heard that it was a bunch of latina girls performing it I was a tad bit skeptical. Wow, was I schooled! It was really good stuff. And there where two Argentine guys who played tabla and sitar just as well. At the end of the show the Indian Cultural Ambassador got onto the stage to give her praise and to note how difficult it was to pull off correctly. This is a sidenote, but anyone reading this who is into music simply must check out the artist named Karsh Kale. His music is so incredible. I thought of him a lot during the show last night. He has dual citizenship in America and India, and his music reflects both east and west. His latest cd was recorded with Anoushka Shankar, daughter of the famous sitar legend Ravi Shankar. It is truly phenomenal. Listening to the traditiionial musical arrangements of India last night I could hear tones of his music, things he had extracted and built upon. Things that he had quoted as cultural statements. That album of his and Anoushka's is called Breathing Under Water. You can check it out on iTunes or buy it almost anywhere. Check out the songs: Sea Dreamer, Easy, A Perfect Rain, Abyss and both the Oceanic tracks. It is great stuff.

My last cultural observation of the day today is regarding something that i have witnessed in many parts of the world, but even more so here. And that is the way that people behave in the streets and in public in general. People are much more relaxed about things like romance and the behavior of thier children. I think it has to do with the degree of control that we seek to execute upon our lives in america that I notice this as being so different. In america we try so hard to be "safe" all the time. We think about security and insurance and worry all the time about what we might be losing and who we could possibly sue to get it back. No smoking in bars, no drinking in parks, keep your dog on a leash, put a fence around everything and don't do anything "crazy". In Uruguay I had to suppress my giggles when I was walking along a sidewalk and this lady had her little 2 or 3 year old daughter in her arms with one arm under the little girls knees and the other around the back of the girl. The mother was holding her up and away and an impressively long, golden arc of urine was shooting from the little girl into the well of dirt around the base of a tree that grew there next to the street. No one was even looking at this. It was as if it was totally normal. (I was thinking that this would be a great weapon for the war on terror!) Naked kids roaming around here is not uncommon either. Not in central Buenos Aires, but on the outskirts and in the country. In the city it is not uncommon to have little kids playing, more or less, in the street though!! I overheard one North American say in passing, "Oh my god, I would have a leash on that little kid!" Another time I overheard, "Now there's a lawsuit waiting to happen..." But not here. On monday, I was walking around the central part of Buenos Aires and there in middle of the sidewalk was a 2 by 2 cardboard box with a fire burning inside it. There was no one sitting by it or cooking anything over it, it was just sitting there by itself, and it was getting bigger. I and a couple other passersby stopped a little ways off and watched it burn for a minute, but no one ventured to put it out. It burned itself bigger and then it went out eventually. When I passed by later there was just a pile of ash and the next day it was gone. It is that way. I mentioned the McDonald's love scene in an earlier blog. That, I would now say is totally common. It is a nice thing really, to see people loving each other out in the streets everyday. In parks, on street corners, in parking garages, in doorways, in malls, in restaurants, in the middle of the street...people are doin' some making out. One of my travelling compañeros ventured this as a possible reason at large..."they are so open in the streets because they have no room to be open in thier homes." That speaks to the nature of family living here, with grandma's and grandchildren sharing rooms and common areas at all times, and also to the fact that most people live in relatively small spaces here. But that is the subject for some other blog. It is just something I observe on a daily basis and it makes me smile. If you want adventure in the third world, just walk around the streets for a while and you will find it. That is all for this time 'cause I gotta go.

Final notes: Patricia beer in Uruguay is terrific! Raviolis made from homemade dough and fresh mushrooms are worth writing home about! The Simpsons in spanish just isn't the same! Beer from the tap is called Chubb! Hot dogs are called Panchos!! Street lights that turn yellow in between red and green are a great idea!! People here love Hugo Chavez because he is "hilarious"!

Great Vino From Off The Map, Young Uruguayos, And The Big Three O...

So this will be the long awaited "matteo del norte turns thirty" addition!! Yay for aging! I want to start this one with a passage from a favorite book of mine:

"When I was very young and the urge to be someplace else was on me, I was assured by mature people that maturity would cure this itch. When years described me as mature, the remedy prescribed was middle age. In middle age I was assured that greater age would calm my fever and now that I am fifty-eight perhaps senility will do the job. Nothing has worked. Four hoarse blasts of a ship's whistle still raise the hair on my neck and set my feet to tapping. The sound of a jet, an engine warming up, even the clopping of shod hooves on pavement brings on the ancient shudder, the dry mouth and vacant eye, the hot palms and the churn of stomach high up under the rib cage. In other words, I don't improve; in further words, once a bum always a bum. When the virus of restlessness begins to take possession of a wayward man, and the road away from Here seems broad and straight and sweet, the victim must first find in himself a good and sufficient reason for going. This to the practical bum is not difficult. He has a built-in garden of reasons to choose from. Next he must plan his trip in time and space, choose a direction and destination. And last he must implement the journey. How to go, what to take, how long to stay. This part of the process is invariable and immortal. I set it down only so that newcomers to bum-dom, like teenagers in new-hatched sin, will not think they invented it. Once a journey is designed, equipped, and put in process, a new factor enters and takes over. A trip, a safari, an exploration, is an entity, different from all other journeys. It has personality, temperment, individuality, uniqueness. A journey is a person in itself, no two are alike. And all plans, safeguards, policing and coercion are fruitless. We find after years of struggle that we do not take a trip; a trip takes us. Tour masters, schedules, reservations, brassbound and inevitable, dash themselves to wreckage on the personality of the trip. Only when this is recognized can the blown-in-the-glass bum relax and go along with it. Only then do the frustrations fall away. In this a journey is like a marriage. The certain way to be wrong is to think that you control it. I feel better now, having said all this, although only those who have experienced it will understand it."

This is the first chapter from Travels With Charley In Search Of America by the great John Stienbeck. I cite it as a small fraction of the reason that I am still travelling and living abroad, ten years after my twentieth birthday, at the beginning of a decade that has gone on to be so amazing. It is such an addictive way of life. So simple with its lack of possesions and so open by necessity. Also in this passage is a concept that I have come to embrace...that of the inability to control things, occurances, and other people. When a 'bum' comes to realize that these things are uncontrollable, he allows them to be what they are, and these things in thier truth are all the more important and rewarding. This is not to say that one is to give up the course of one's own trajectory, on the contrary, by accepting the process of life as it is, one is all the more in the driver's seat of one's own actions. It is with this frame of mind that I look to pass my thirtieth birthday in Uruguay, not in the fall this time, but in the spring.

It is funny how your headspace works in relation to other things. A year ago I was looking ahead to the ominous arrival of '30' with a little bit of dread, a sore back and a pair of knees that popped and crackled more and more by the day. I saw the doorway to thirty the way that many people do. A 'Goddammit' type of moment. Thirty really isn't such a big deal at all, except that it has been made into a milestone over time. In Brothers Karamazov, Ivan Fyodorovich says to his younger brother Alyosha, that he will drink from the cup of life's vitality until the day that he turns thirty, and then he will begin to succumb to the burdens of the world. In our cultural speak in america, we refer to someone as pushing thirty and when we say this, there is a built-in sense of impending gloom. There are many ways and reasons to think that thirty is the beginning of the end...or maybe even the end of youth itself. But since that last birthday, I have strangely seemed to lose that feeling altogether, and I seem to have traded it in for a new sense of vitality altogether. The Stienbeck quote is so keyed in to the intangible allure of the world around...about the desire to be on the move, to not stagnate, to be aware and in tune with other people and lifestyles. If we move into our thirties (or at any age, moving into our futures) thinking only of jobs we don't like and routines we wouldn't have chosen, then we are indeed lambs to the slaughter of the banality of our modern existence. We have the choices to make our lives the way we want them to be, despite how we convince ourselves that we are trapped. We are smart people, we have put men in space and split atoms and dreamed up method after method of cruelly destroying other people's cultures...so it should be no stretch of the brain to come up with ways to live happier lives, where growing older isn't a curse, but more an accumulation of experience and understanding. I have already gotten the best gift I could have for my thirtieth birthday; a clean conscience and a continuing sense of wonder about the world we inhabit and the people we inhabit it with.

I also realize how lucky I have been this whole time, and for this I am thankful. I once spent a bit of time with a really interesting woman from Austria who was obsessed with the concept of individual fortune. In ways karma, in ways a biblical reference, in ways an athiest's sense of plain old luck. 'Darlings of Fortune' she called us. I have thought about that a lot. When I speak about fortune, especially my own, I mentally knock on wood almost constantly. I knock on wood a lot. Is it because I am supersticious? Maybe a little, but what does it hurt. At any point a darling of fortune could get runover by a truck, crossing for milk at the grocery store, or be the victim of some natural disaster. All I am saying is that I aware of all the good things that have been in my life, I am not sure how or why all these things have happened, but I am thankful for them nevertheless. My twenties have been full of great things...this is just a drop in the huge bucket, or maybe ocean: the fear and loneliness of leaving my Montana home in the rear view mirror a decade ago; hearing a man's body land and die on Jake's front steps in New Haven after he dove from the thirteenth floor of his apartment above; the cold, early mornings heading into the kitchens of cooking school in Vermont; the late-night agony of my lucha de amor with Triple P; the open heart of Boston and those great older cooks who showed me how to handle the pressures of the Big Boy Way Of Cooking; the long journey across france, the restaurants, the chefs, the violence, the misunderstanding of a new language, travelling with my father there, the beautiful Brazillian revelations I encountered in Bordeaux, the love for wine that was born in the vineyards of Burgundy and the Rhone; the sultry, steamy nights in New Orleans playing the guitar and drinking Abita Amber, the beignets and chicory coffee and the pizzas at Angeli on Decatur, the night in the pirate bar; the crashing of a car, my brother Jake staying cool despite incarceration, the fire in which my life started over again; the witnessing of death in my own Big Sky Country; the escape to Spain and the therapy of walking El Camino de Santiago, the vast sunrises in the Meseta, the muscle cramps and voice of Chris Whitley; the confused and stupid things that I did in New York; the return to my Big Sky Country, the Sweet Pea girls, hunting for morel mushrooms in the mountains with Charlie, drinking wine and playing air guitar with Scottie; the red sands of Australia, the green eucalypts of Margaret River, the bungy diving in New Zealand, the bus trips, the mountain treks, my attempts at writing prose; (Ha ha! Oy! Stick to what your good at dude!) the return again to the Big Sky, I was the chef of a restaurant!!!, my crew, my guys and gals and the things that we were able to overcome and accomplish, I am so proud of those people; the fruit smoothies of thailand; the burning sun of Cambodia; the bodies missing limbs and smiling faces of Laos; the buddhist welcome of vietnam; the bed bugs of Malaysia; the noodles of Singapore; the wide eyes and brilliant smiles of the people of Africa, quite possibly the most radiant person on the planet Mr. Sydney Sinkamba, the roaring water and perfect skies of Zambia, the horror of AIDS rates in Swazilnad and South Africa; San Francisco, with the beautiful and crass honesty of the Cups, the ethnically rich jobs I had, the people there that are missed in this moment, the evaporation of a love; the marriage of John, and then now, these adventures in south america. And music!! Such music...the euphoric crescendos of so many bands that I love...the long slow road to building my Vacant Process, the Subsiding Rust and the Grey Tree Stories. The life and sad departure of the greatest musician the world has seen. (Probably only a few of you know who I mean and most will disagree with me!!) My brothers (Ty and his Biotrekking, Bamfer, Adam, Jake, Bulldog, Jeremy)and sisters and all the incredible women I have been around. My giant group of such great friends! And my father!! And my mother!! And my second father! Great parents I have!! The tao te ching that was given to me at such a young age...the seeds that were planted by so many, the books I have read. And this is all just a tiny beginning!! How could I be sad to turn thirty!??! If my fortune ran out right now, it would have been a terrific ride! No doubt. Have there been shitty things? Oh yeah. Lots of people lost in the fray. It seems like all around there were near-death experiences, lost brotherhood, encarcerations, drug and alcohol problems, love gone wrong, disarray of a general nature and lots and lots of questioning of things. But it seems to me that the ladder we climb must be made out of both the good and great things and the bad and shameful things. At thirty I can look down at the ladder that has supported me during this climb and smile on those shitty times right along side the good ones.

As you know, I can ramble on. I, in my twenties, was described on one website as being didactic, which to me means: 'talks to much'. Sometimes this is true. Other times I am quiet as a tomb for days. Here though, on this blog, I am blabbering on. I should have just said, "I am fine with turning thirty." If this seems to be an overindulgent rant about myself then I apologize. If I was with any of you right now I would raise a glass to say thanks for being in my life, your lives mean a lot to me. Anyhow, thanks for indulging me that, you can consider yourselves to have given me a birthday gift already...thanks.

So here I am in Montevideo. I must say that I really do fancy this joint! It is a really down to earth place...and the wine!! Dios mio the wine. I am a lover of the lesser known varietals, the grapes that don't get reviewed in the press, and this is the place for those varietals. I had a terrific visit to a winery called Bouza the other morning and we tasted, among other things, an Albarino!!! And an albarino/chardonnay blend, a tempranillo/tannat blend, and a tannat/merlot blend. They make these in 100% bottlings too. In stores I have seen gewurztraminers, reislings, sauv blancs, viogniers, shiraz, tannat and all sorts of other random varietals, all the ones I have tasted have been terrific. Oh to be a tannat farmer!!!

On that same trip to the counryside, I got to see where the garbage people and thier horses go when they have a full wagon from the city. Again, it is a sad thing, but it is the way that they survive. I feel like the day to day of poverty is difficult for us to understand in the first world. It isn't a college student who needs to only eat ramen noodles to get through the semester with beer money. It isn't the 'trust-a-farians' that busk on the street in the Haight. It is something that has an old presence in the Big World, it is as old as our history, and it is vast in the world outside of our luxury. I am humbled by it, and I have love in me for these people who rummage through the dumpsters. What more to say...

Yesterday I met some young tattooed guys on the street and hung out with them for a couple hours. It was interesting, and humbling in another way. That of my language ability here! Young people always speak slang and they almost always talk really fast. I must say I had a tough time following the local tongue of Uruguay. The tv I can follow pretty well, and older people are no problem, but this was sorta rough. I could generally follow the conversation, but it almost seemed like another language. Made me think now hard it would be for a young chinese transfer student to understand a valley girl in LA. These guys were cool though and it was funny how 'cool' I seemed to them just cause I was from america. We talked music mostly. There are a huge number of guitar stores here and it seems like every young tattooed or pierced person is in a band. I listened to these guys music and it was good. It reminded me of my teens and my love for early metallica and testament. They had that Che thing going on that I discussed a few blogs ago.

Mate is the thing to do here. (Pronounced Mah-tay) In the street like two out of three people are carrying the wooden cup in one hand and the thermos in the other. Here and in Argentina it is not a coca derivitive, it is made from a local herb, and it is definalety, by our standards, an acquired taste. They either have it sucre with sugar or amargo (bitter) with no sugar. Most will consume between one thermos and two each day. I have been intrigued by its presence. The news lady on tv is drinking it during the broadcast. You can buy the cups alongside plates and pots and pans in housewares stores. Taxi drivers somehow maneuver the streets here with cup and thermos in hand. Heck the guy behind me working the desk at the CiberCafe has one going now.

It is a rainy day today. And again, just like blues music, everywhere you go, it is what it is. A hot cup of mate sounds good right now. I have been walking around and i have passed numerous faces peering out steamed up windows with that faraway look in thier eyes. Rainy days are rainy days. When I see these faces and moods, they make me think of a many things, today it is a line from a Neruda poem that I tried to memorize once. It is from memory and you have to remember that I speak like a little kid around here, but here it goes.

Todos estabamos esperando,
Como en las estaciones en las noches de invierno,
Esperabamos la paz,
Pero llegaba la guerra.

All of us were waiting,
Like through the seasons, the winter nights,
We were awaiting peace,
Instead, there came war.

It's just a metaphor, but it stretches out a long way. Thanks for tuning in...by the next broadcast, my twenties will be over!!!

A Bus Called Rocinante, A Gaellic Philosophe, and Slanted Sunshine In Worn Down Streets

So much has happened since the last post...it's hard to know where to begin. ...On sunday I walked a really long way to the rendezvous for the futbol match. It was immediately a comedy because it was quite an operation getting us all to the concha (stadium) and back. There ended up being a big group from my school and then I think from another school too, cause there were a ton of us. There we were, a big posse of whities speaking all manner of english, in Junin Street waiting for something to happen, we knew not what. Then emerging from a black puff of exhaust not at all uncommon on the streets of Buenos Aires, came a big orange bus that was about as rickety as they come. It reminded me of the kind of buses that crash on the highways of South Africa and kill everyone on board. Our leader, a River Plate-flag clad little woman from the city, herded us on the bus and by the time we were all packed on there I thought we may share the fate of those lost lives in South Africa!! Early on I named our bus Rocinante and no one got it. (It was Don Quixote's trusty but ragged steed.) They drove us through Barrio Norte and let us all off to gorge ourselves on pizza and Brahma beer. It was in a hall that had a table set for all of us and a peanut gallery that was getting it's money's worth of sunday afternoon people watching. This feast was included in the price we all paid. My crew consisted of the hilarious Tay-Hota...(that is TJ in english, but phonetically, here, it is just what I wrote and it is freaking hilarious cause since he is an american too we both say his name like that of a thug-rapper and no one gets it. They can't understand what he is saying at all, "Tay-Hota es mi nombre". And they look confused and then he'll write it and they go "¡Ahhh!", and then they get it, sort of.) Sabrina from Switzerland, Nicole from Germany and two people from Holland, Alex and Inez. We pounded as much beer as we could and mowed down a bunch of mozzarella pizzas with green olives and then we were herded back onto our somehow even more full bus. When we got to the match we were ready for anything. There were police in riot gear and firefighters with hoses ready to disperse the hooligans. As I explained a little bit last time, each team has a group of hardcore followers called a Barrabraba. They are known to drink copious amounts of alcohol and intake equally as impressive amounts of cocaine and Mary J. So, you add in the unquantifiable passion for futbol and you've got quite something in front of you. We made it through all the security pat-downs and other formalities and filed in towards our seats. I am sure that we looked like a kindergarten field trip to the zoo. All of us gawking around and taking fotos of shit and oohing and ahhing. The seats weren't built to seat americans or europeans. At least not full grown ones. It was an uncomfortable couple hours in those metal little holders. I think they planned it for people to be standing up all the time. I was happy each time something exciting happened and we all stood up. So, I think I mentioned last time that there were Braveheart style battles going on during play. That is wrong. There was no battling going on during our game, or after it. I should say that there is the possibility of Braveheart style violence at certain games. The River vs Boca matches are the ones that are really nuts. That isn't to say though that the barrabrabas weren't really cool to watch. It is really something to watch thousands and thousands of people all jumping in unison and singing and chanting songs as though thier lives depended on it. They throw confetti and drape flags all across the stands and it is as though the whole place is moving like the big body of a serpent. 70,000 people in there, singing and clapping all in unison. It was intense. The game ended in a tie, 1-1, which we americans wished would have gone into extra innings or found some sort of winning and losing outcome. I think that is one of the reasons why soccer isn't that popular in the US. Not enough scoring. Even though it is basically non stop action, a 1-1 tie is a little bit of a letdown for our culture of gratification. (Yeah, those of you citing golf and baseball as slow boring sports, we can spar on this one later, cause I do have a position on that.) Anyway, after piling back into the appropriatley named Rocinante, (I thought so anyway.) we lurched through traffic back to Recoleta and me and the gang had a terrific dinner at some famous old BsAs restaurant.

That ended up being a late night so the next day I was pretty chill up to the time of my departure from Buenos Aires to Montevideo. I met this cat from Ireland reading Moby Dick in the chair next to me in the terminal. After years of doing this backpacking gig, I, and most others, have a certain radar for what you might call compañeros. I saw this guy from a far and knew that he was probably from the UK, that he was a thinker, and that he had been out on the trail for quite sometime. My radar turned out to be on the money (yay me) and we ended up talking for the whole journey across the Rio Plata. He was a really interesting guy. Living now in Sydney, or had been until he left a little over a year ago to seek whatever we all seek in the world. He has been travelling for thirteen months and he looked a little bit worn. He is a philosophe, just the kind of person I really like to talk to, and his ideas were really interesting. He had sort of broken his existence down into a set of guidelines and tendencies that pointed in a general direction. He didn't know what was in that direction, but it was obviously the right way to be going, and so he was going. It is hard to sum up what three and a half hours of conversation yielded, but I came away feeling as though the things that I think and feel everyday had been underlined and identified with. He had studied politics and our world views on these things were almost identical. He had lived in Boston for two years and understood well the american system of politics. We agreed that it was a shame that the ignorant masses of the empire could more or less blindly elect a leader whose actions would affect the lives of those same voters less than they would the lives of a large portion of the world's population. His idea was that the americans could vote on domestic issues and then there would be a global election to decide which american candidate would dictate our foreign policy. You can bet the results of that election wouldn't yield another George W.! Too bad it will never happen. Anyway the guy had a great way of looking at being a part of the solution and about taking the little time that we have and using to do something good. Plus he had a cool accent. Ha ha.

When we arrived in Montevideo and went through customs I realized that the only ATM on the pier did not accept visa, which is an odd and frustrating thing. Thus began my education as to the differences between BsAs and Montevideo. This guy with a genuine smile on his face and mug of mate in his hand pulled over his cab and seemed to know just what was up. He took me to my destination with out any trace of money to pay him, dropped me off with my bag and then took me to get some dough, all without ever setting the mate mug down for a second. This isn't anything spectacular, you just get used to people saying "it ain't my bitch." It was a cool thing. Another thing here is that when you ride in a cab, they open the front door for you and you sit in the little front seat right next to the driver. This makes for certain conversation. The guy last night grew up in the countryside outside the city and knew a lot about the wine scene in the country. The guy I rode with this morning told me straight out that Uruguay was basically just another star on the american flag. In my head I said "Uh oh, here we go..." but he was thrilled about it. He explained that Argentina and Brasil were bullies and this way if anything went down with either of those guys the Uruguayans could just call up Jorge Bush and tell him to send down 'three missiles', and voila! no more Argentina!! I laughed nervously and moved to towards the door handle...I was ready to bail out at 35 mph, but he turned out to be a good guy too. He was a fan of the states and he was really proud of his country. I wondered where his mate was.

I checked into a little place with an old man at the front desk that I swear moves in slow motion. Nothing wrong with this, seeing as he is ancient. But I asked to see the room and immediatley felt terrible and was prepared to be the witness of his last movements and subsequent coronary arrest...he made it...though not without a lot of heavy breathing, and I liked the place so that is where I live now. I had a great meal of raviolis and beef last night and read Stienbeck and watched things happen on the nighttime streets of Montevideo.

This morning I got out and about and walked all over the place. I arranged to go to some wineries and then ordered 'pieces' of pizza that were about four times the size of a normal piece of pizza, then I went to this trippy mausoleum underneath this giant statue of a guy on a horse. There where two gaurds standing on either side of a big black urn and they just stand rigidly at attention while you look at it. There is no fee so there is no one there to monitor or guide you and I have no real idea what it was all about. I just stood there trying to decifer the writing and looking at the guards. What a day they must have. Standing at attention in a candlelit hall beneath the city for eight hours. I walked into the Ciudad Vieja and checked out the National History Museum which was really rad. Full of old oil paintings and swords and treaties and stuff. Then I went to the oceanside and watched an old guy fish. I watched as he slowly walked across the big stones and collected one as big as he could carry and then walk back, cast his line, and then use the rock to prop the pole standing up against the bigger rocks. After a time there was a pull and instead of walking to the line, he walked back to the tide pools and collected yet another stone. Then he walked back and began to reel in the line. On it was a modest looking fish. When he got it up on the rocks he slowly took his rock into his hand and with one confident stroke, he killed the fish and then put it into his pouch. I could tell he had probably done this his whole life. His old, wrinkled, shirtless torso was darkly bronzed and it looked like old saddle leather. He moved slowly, but with a familiarity that I admired. I walked back to my habitacion, tired from the many kilometers I had walked.

A couple things about Montevideo that interest me. 1.) Montevideo is on a peninsula and so from certain spots you can look down streets in three different directions and see the sea at the end of them. 2.) One of the first things I noticed were horse drawn wagons mixed in with the cars and trucks on the city streets. These are without fail, manned by people with dark, sunburned skin and soiled hands and dirty clothes. At first I wasn't sure what they were about, but soon it became clear. They are the garbage people. They climb inside the big dumpsters on the street and take out what might be usable. They load it onto thier flatbeds and then crack the reigns on the horses backs and move on to the next street. The horses are not pretty creatures. They are scrawny and have strange patches of hair here and there. They are blinded by black patches of cloth so that they don't spook. I can't bring myself to take a picture of these folks, despite being very interested in them. Poverty sucks. As Guillermo from Cuba says, "Poverty is a life that is hard. It is partly hard because there is no comfort, and mostly different forms of pain. But the source of most of the difficulty is that it is a life without dignity." Think about that. Rough stuff. 3.) Montevideo is a strange contrast of nice things that look fairly new, and old things that look very tired and rundown. For example, there are nice minivans in the streets. The women are dressed with style and a lot of the restaurants have real tableclothes and nice wineglasses in the windows. There are beautiful fountains in the parks that are surrounded by lawns and palm trees. But at the same time, there are whole buildings that have collapsed onto the sidewalks. There are segments of sidewalk that have been mud patches for years. The colonial buildings are beautiful, but mostly they are falling apart. The old stone balconies are coming down peice by peice and the streets, for the most part, are not labelled. It is the rugged little brother to Buenos Aires and most of the young people from here escape across the water to be cool and hip. Maybe it is my dislike of hipness that makes me tend to like Montevideo better. The people here are more open and relaxed. They smile when they look at you and will happily give you the time or recount a story in the street. Many people walk the streets with thier wooden mate mugs in one hand and thier thermoses of hot water in the other. In some places mate is a ritual, but here it is just what they do. I walked to fetch my laundry a little while ago and had to fight my welling glee as I looked down the slow, wide, leafy, car and horse filled streets and watched the slanted golden rays of the sun as they fought through the late afternoon woodsmoke haze. It really is a beautiful place. A place that is real and would be a great place to call home. The cooler little brother, despite the hand-me-down clothes and the bruises from scrapping in the yard. Yet another good place.