NvEoUlMkAeNrN

Long Time No See

Ok, so it’s been a while… bouncing around hanging around different people, reuiniting with others. it’s pretty fun.

So, a summary on Pimentel, Peru. It’s located just outside Chiclayo which has a pretty neat market of magical items and is apparently one of the faster growing cities of Peru. Hanging out in the park we ran into a few local kids in their early twenties who where out from college at the time and were just hanging around so I spent most of my time bouncing around with them.

Arturo was the one who was the most, uhm, persistent, in spending time with us and it was actualy pretty hard to shake him at times when you just wanted some chill time to hang out and not constantly be invited to his house, not that being invited into someone’s house to meet the family is a bad thing.

I think it was the first night that we where hanging out in the park drnkin wine that I got to talking to Arturo, he’s studying airplane mechanics in Lima and has gotten into the hip-hop scene there a bit so the whole crowd we had in the park ended up evolving into a little freestyle-beatbox party. Pimentel, Peru. Who’d a thunk it. I copied Arturo some music a few days later. He doesn’t have any means of playing mp3’s so I just made him normal music CD�s.

Then there was Vicente whom I liked. He had a good mellow disposition. A kind smile. Reminded me of my old teammate and friend, Jay Bolin a lot. His aunt sells Chicha, the home-brew alcoholic drink that tastes a bit like stale champagne or a dry white wine with a bit of a cloudy look to it. An aquired taste I think, but it was very enjoyable splitting the bottle with Vicente. I copied him some mp3 CD’s of reggae. Poor kids, it’s so hard for them to get exposure to music and then it’s even harder to get any money together to buy it.

Beto was fun. He’s the third-in-command on a fishing boat and was really enthusiastic about sharing his experineces with that. He had a video that was filmed on his boat of which he proceeded to make me a copy, we watched it at his house later and he insisted that I take it with me. I reckon it will be in my next package home. I gave him some jazz and blues mp3 cd’s. :)

Watching a local futbol match was fun, Eating the Ceviche (fresh fish in lemon sauce, kinda) was awesome. The hostel we were in seemed to rent rooms out by the hour on the weekend, that was entertaining. I bought a ring that I still can’t get off my finger.

Jason learned a bunch of wire jewelry making from the artisan, Fanta, who had his blanket out on the beach every day.

On Sunday morning I met Lars, the Swedish artist who was living in a house along the beach, trading his artwork for rent and working teaching English and German at local institutions. He was having some students over to practice english as a group and he flagged me into the house to see if I wanted to join. There was already one girl there and no more students showed up so we just yapped for two hours, and he offered me some food. Good guy. He mentioned a book that had a bunch of listings for travellers that wanted god families and places to stay with and I was turned onto US SERV AS a cool program to put travellers in touch with resources to meet like-minded people to stay with. I looked up Floyd and found Ed and Randye Grallah, nice. I showed him the glass pendant that their son Eli gave to me for my birthday.

Lars invited me to go teach German with him on Monday night as his German wasn’t all that strong. He even paid me 20 soles, his pay. One of the girls in the class showed me back to the bust station after the class, and used the opportunity to show me off to a few of her friends at the shopping center where she apparently worked. Such a novelty. Big white redhead boy. Chiclayo doesn’t get a huge amount of tourists.

Tuesday we were off to start heading for Huaraz. Jason was by my side. We’re hoping to meet up with Martijn and Loes again, they were fun to hang out with. Arturo was gonna show us where the bus terminal in Chiclayo was but when he showed up in the morning he had his bag packed and was telling us that he was coming to Trujillo with us (a town that’s on the way). His uncle lives in Huanchaco just outside Trujuillo so we cruised there and stopped by at his uncle’s house. We found out later that we could sleep at the house for 10 soles a night,… uhm, ok, hanging out with Arturo has been a lot like that. He’d kind of come along to lunch and then have us foot the bill. Bring us to his uncles house and tell us that we’re staying there. He’s a good guy. I think he means well. He’s ust a little overbearing. I don’t mind paying for him from time to time, I just like to make a choice ahead of time and not just have him expecting it. He was starting to feel like a leech after a while.

And then there was the point where we were sitting around the street in Huanchaco and he was whistling and cat-calling at girls walking along the other side of the street. We should have never though him how to say ‘pretty girl.’ Now he’s just constantly yelling it at them and then giving me or Jason an poke and we’re autimatically drawn into his web of on-the-street harassment. Luckily the ladies here are pretty desensitized to it. Some probably thrive in it. It’s just not my style. Nor Jasons. And we don’t much appreciate being drawn into getting the dirty looks. Different world. We’ve had many conversations about this gender ralations topic here.

I tried surfing on Wednesday and with sore arms from paddling we said our godbyes and Jason and I took a cab to Trujillo to catch a night bus to Huaraz. Well, it’s Semana Santa here and travel is all kinds of booked up. We went to four different bus companies and they were all sold out. The better of them for 3 days. Pleading with the last company the guy told us that we could ride up top in the bus for about 3 hours but after that they were sold out so we’d have to go underneath. Uhm, that usually just store baggage underneath,… OK. I asked to see and sure enough in the back of the bus one of the baggage compartments was set up with a mattress and space for a few people to lay down. We really didn’t like the prospect of staying in Trujillo another day so we hopped on the bus and were shuffled underneath 3 hours later. It would have been fine if there were 4 people under there, but the 2 guys that showd up in the last minute pretty much cramped us up to the ponint of spooning with strange Peruvian men. The door was left a bit open so we could get oxygen. We had a light switch that we were told to keep off or the cops might notice. We had an emergency call button in case we really needed to get out or something.

I slept some. It was uncomfortable. I think I slept better than I would have in a seat though. We got to Hauraz at 7am.

Gotta go now… change some clothes before a night on the town…

Posted by volker at April 9, 2004 08:07 PM