And so we come to the end

Our last few weeks in Peru went really quickly. We finished our artisan stories and photos, sent them to the appropriate clients, and saved them in a place we hoped Yannina and Christina would remember to access when looking for stories. We finalized our last few “how to do this specific computer task” documents and sent them a massive email about where to find all of the items we’d worked on, all now in one folder on Christina’s computer. 

The staff of Manos Amigas took us out for a goodbye lunch at everyone’s favorite place - La Pollera, where else?! - which was really kind and unexpected. 

From left: us, Mamita (Yannina & Roberto's mom), Yannina, Maria Esther (one of the quality control/packers), Mario, Giuseppe, Roberto, Christina, and Sheila (the other quality control/packer). The only person missing is Dieuwe.

On the whole, as positive of an experience as we had, as helpful and non-difficult as we tried to be, and as much as Yannina appreciated our work and Manos Amigas liked us as a family, I don’t think we changed their minds about volunteers and how difficult they can be to work with. Not all organizations are equipped to handle volunteers, of course, nor do they have to be, but I wish we had been so fabulous and essential to them to have changed their outlook on volunteers.

We tried to be pretty deliberate about fitting in some of our favorite things before we left, but of course, you never end up doing everything you mean to do. Time just runs out. And so, after 18 flights, 2 overnight bus trips, approximately one million city bus rides within Lima, 40 artisan visits, one earthquake actually felt (among the dozens that happened), countless cheap, delicious and intensely strong El Pan de la Chola cappucinos, and 25 different places where we ranked pisco sours on our extremely scientific rating system, our time in South America came to an end.

In some ways, it’s nice to be home. For as busy and frantic a street as we lived on in Lima, we practically live in the country by comparison here. A car drives by and all of us neighbors look out our respective windows to see who it could possibly be. I like hearing the owls hoot overnight. As I type this, I can see a gorgeous pileated woodpecker peck away at the redbud tree just outside our window. I really like being able to go to the library and check out books! We are so fortunate to have wonderful friends here. I’m glad that we all now can wear functioning seatbelts when we are in a car, I don’t have to dig toilet paper out of my backpack when we are using a bathroom not at our apartment, and that we don’t have to pay to use public bathrooms. Drinking water straight from the tap is pretty fabulous, and so are water fountains, one of Simon’s new fascinations.

But otherwise... coming home has been hard. Starting with the bluster and belligerence and swagger of the US airport employees didn’t help. It was harder than I expected to leave behind the things I loved about Lima (like living in Spanish, walking one block to our local mercado every day for fresh fruits and vegetables, riding the bus anywhere and everywhere, having some time every day that I could work) and adjust to needing to get in the car for absolutely everything and becoming Simon’s primary caregiver again. While our time in Peru wasn’t all fun and relaxation, we have both commented on how hard it is here to not to get really tense and rushed while driving, always late for something. I much preferred just being on a bus or in Gustavo’s taxi.

I suppose part of my adjustment in returning stems from my uncertainty about what my future looks like. For about ten years, we’d discussed our dream of living abroad. And so much of the last few years was filled with our plans for the sabbatical, making it happen, living the experience. Now it’s over. Sam knew exactly what he was returning to - running Global Gifts - and is really excited about that. I knew that I would spend several weeks or months starting to find my way around an Indianapolis I don’t know well, the Latino Indianapolis, trying to figure out what the organizations are that serve the Latino population here and, at the same time, trying to figure out what sort of role I could carve out for myself within that community. I want to keep improving my Spanish, and I want Simon to keep his. But what does that look like? Hopefully I’ll have some answers in several months.

I feel like I’m in a speeding car, staring in the rearview mirror, panicking as I watch Lima quickly recede into the distance. I’m not ready to be done with it, I’m not ready to move on from it. I know my thoughts about our year there will morph as time passes. But this is where I am, now.

However, I’m happy to say that I am the only one with transition issues. Sam is pumped to be back and really excited to return to Global Gifts, full of energy and new ideas. He officially goes back to work full-time tomorrow, although he’s been happily going to meetings, working part-time, and generally getting back into the swing of things for several weeks now. Simon has started preschool one morning a week at a co-op close to our house, and he loves it. He still talks about Dieuwe and Giuseppe often, and the kids even Skyped one afternoon, a funny five minutes of making faces to each other on the computer.

Simon has also spent a lot of time catching up with old loves (like his bike helmet. Not the bike, mind you, just the helmet.) and started up new affairs (like “driving”). He heard me say “Hallelujah!” in response to a friend saying she was coming over, and that has quickly become a favorite word of his. He likes to exclaim it in the funniest and most random of situations, like when I get him second helpings, when he’s allowed to help grind the coffee, when he realizes he gets to go to Sunday school or preschool. “Hallelujah!”

The bike helmet is always a great fashion accessory.

The helmet adds flair to a harmonica/giant ball bounce session. 

Just in case Simon falls off of Sam's lap, we know don't have to worry about his head!

Behind the wheel, obsessed with the hazard lights

Simon has easily solved the problem of not being able to see out the window while "driving".

A perfect example of the difference in our living situations - in Lima, in never rained and if it did, we wouldn't have anywhere to go puddle jumping. Plus, the ick factor of the black pollution in the puddles would have given us pause. Here, it poured one morning. Simon pulled on his new boots from Lucy and spent a ton of time getting thoroughly soaked!

Such concentration!

We hope to return again to Peru, this time just as visitors, of course. We’ve even tossed around the idea of leading a tour to Peru in a couple of years. It would probably be a mix of visiting different parts of Lima and artisan workshops, then probably going to Cuzco for a coffee tour through one of Equal Exchange’s suppliers and then on to Machu Picchu. Let me know via email if you are interested; we can decide if it’s a viable idea based on the response.

And so the year of magical traveling has come to its end. While I’m sure our year would have been amazing no matter where we had ended up, I feel so fortunate to have spent it in Peru. It has truly been a magical year! I am so grateful to have had the opportunity to do it, from the Global Gifts board and staff giving Sam the time to do it, to Manos Amigas opening their doors and families to us.

Thank you for being part of this year, too! It has been such fun to write this blog and share random experiences with everyone. Thanks especially for sticking with me through the long and longer posts - I genuinely meant to keep them short but somehow I always found there was so much to say.

I ran out of time to tell various stories that stayed in my head, wanting to be recorded but other stories took precedence. So I’ll leave you with a medley of images instead.

In Piura, we were staying at a crappy and slightly sketchy hotel with a shared bathroom for the four rooms on our floor. In the middle of the night, someone stole the lone light bulb in the bathroom.

In Lima, our trash was picked up not once every night but TWICE! If you missed the 10 pm-ish pick up, you could put it out again for another pickup around 3 or 4 a.m. But if you put it out too early - before 7 pm or after the second pickup - you were subject to a fine.

Our Santa Cruz neighbors were pretty invisible and unknown to us until they - random people, I thought - started commenting on Simon as we would pass on the street or at the mercado. “I work in that building over there. I see him pass by every day. He’s getting so big!” Little kids I thought I had never seen before (and vice versa) would stop me on the malecón and say, “Is that Simon?” Surprised, I’d say yes, how did you know? “I see him all the time!”

The cobradores, the guys (occasionally a woman) who collected bus fares, helped direct traffic via hand signals out the window, and generally acted as the bus driver’s assistant, are on their feet for 12 hours a day. They hustle back and forth on packed buses, making change, remembering who has gotten on the bus through both the front and back doors in the last 10 minutes and who still needs to pay. And for all that, they make just 30 soles per day, the rough equivalent of $12 or $13. That is what a 30 minute taxi ride to the Lima airport costs!

In northern Peru, the Conga mine protests have forced delays in an extremely controversial mining project since December. The project has finally been put on indefinite hold. I resented reading in the Wall Street Journal that the protesters were characterized as radical and extremist but I suppose that is to be expected in a newspaper focused on business interests. I don’t think any Peruvian wants or expects the mining industry to completely cease in Peru, but this specific project has so much local and indigenous opposition that I am glad for them that it is on hold.

We were always so out of place that we were therefore not able to use that as a reason to not go to an event or do an activity. For example, we trekked to Lima centro to attend an event billed as an urban street arts festival. There was lots of skateboarding, hip hop, beatboxing, breakdancing, spray paint/graffitti art, etc. It was a lot of fun and we were glad we went. While I would like to think I would go to the same event in Indy, I know my uneasiness at being too obviously out of place would tend to keep me away.

As we walked on a busy street near the square in Arequipa, we passed a group of three young men standing on a corner. I glanced at them briefly as we walked by, saw that the man in the middle was wearing a hospital mask and was being supported by his friends, and then read the sign hanging from his neck. “I have leukemia. Please help me pay for my treatments.” My heart leapt into my throat. That could have been my brother. How could he have stood outside, even held up by friends, in this cold? I shuddered, remembering how much pain Jared was in and couldn't fathom how truly awful it would have been for him had he needed to stand and beg on a corner. The three were a portrait of misery. Was the beggar really a cancer patient or was he simply playing to our sympathy to earn money? I decided I didn’t care and that I’d prefer to err on the side of giving money to someone who didn’t need it than to ignore someone who so desperately did. We turned around and walked back to the corner. They were gone. We walked around for a bit, trying to see if we could spot them on a new corner, but we never saw them again. I assume they were chased off for begging in a popular tourist area.

There were so many stories there, there was so much to learn about and describe. We’ve just scratched the surface during our year there. Now we start the next adventure, this one formed by our life here, finding stories and enjoying exploring Indianapolis with new eyes.

¡Vaya con Dios!

A window into another world

Our final artisan visits were in Ventanilla, far on the northern side of Lima. Ventanilla is a relatively young district, formed in 1969 initially to relieve overpopulated areas in downtown Lima and nearby Callao. Apparently Ventanilla was attractive a couple hundred years ago to pirates off of the coast of Lima who could see that there were a number of caves and grottoes in various rock formations nearby, and they thought those would be good places to hide their treasures. The concentration of rock “windows” from their ocean viewpoint led them to name the district after “little windows” = ventanilla. Later, people were attracted by the lore accompanying the buried treasure, wondering if they could find anything. In summertime it is said to be a popular place to go to the beach, handling up to 40,000 people at once.

Many of Ventanilla’s current residents either arrived as part of land invasions (a group of homeless families squat on an undeveloped or undesirable piece of land, hoping that eventually the government will include them in city planning with services such as water, sewers, and electricity) or were moved here by the government to relieve crowding in other districts. (And, in fact, a week after we visited, I read in the news about a violent confrontation between squatters and police in yet another undeveloped place in Ventanilla - land invasions are not just a part of “old” history but very much part of the present.)

By this point in our artisan visits, Simon had clearly communicated to us that two hours on a bus flying and screeching and bumping through traffic, followed by a long-ish artisan visit, plus two more hours for the return, was unacceptable. The fact that he was also getting carsick with some frequency on the buses made us rethink our strategy. We realized that we just weren’t going to be able to visit all of the artisans we’d intended to interview due to the distances involved, and decided to hire a taxi for our last few days of visits. Gustavo, a friend of Manos Amigas, had quickly become our go-to taxi driver when we needed airport drop-offs or pick-ups. He readily agreed to transport us around the outskirts of Lima for an hourly rate. 

One of the reasons we liked Gustavo over any other driver was that he drove pretty slowly and cautiously, given crazy Peruvian traffic. Everyone else we’ve driven with tended to ride the accelerator, then slam on the brakes, over and over and over. (See Simon, carsick, above.) Add free-for-all turn “lanes” (if you don’t want to wait in the line to turn left, then just dart out in traffic and create your own lane), mix in buses, combis, and cars careening between lanes at will and you have a recipe for stressful driving. Except it all seemed to work just fine; I saw the results of just one accident during our year in Lima. But Gustavo did all of the above much more slowly and cautiously, and Simon did well as a result.

I was really thankful that we drove with Gustavo to Ventanilla, since the traffic, impossibly, was crazier than we had ever experienced. After we passed the airport, mayhem broke loose. Apparently the highway was being ripped out and redone without traffic being stopped or redirected in any way. So this meant that six lanes of traffic flowed in various directions, not always on a surface intended for driving and not always flowing in a direction you’d expect. We narrowly missed encounters with semis and dump trucks. Two brave souls were driving on their motorized bicycle cart, their cart stacked with fresh vegetables, weaving between semis, buses, and cars like ours. Drivers created shoulders where I didn’t realize there was space. Sam said, “This is Lima traffic on steroids!” It took us over two hours to maneuver through this mayhem and get to Ventanilla. How long would it have taken us on a bus? I’m not sure we ever would have made it!

While Gustavo is a cautious driver by comparison, he definitely drives Lima-style. Here we are nonchalantly cutting in front of a semi. 

We drove parallel to the ocean, passing mile after mile of giant container yards, with thousands of containers ready to be loaded onto ships. Later we passed the funky rock formations that drew the pirates’ attention. Eventually we arrived in Ventanilla, which at that point looked like many other districts, which is to say, crowded, paved, full of businesses and mototaxis. It didn’t appear impoverished at first glance. Gustavo asked around for directions to our artisans’ neighborhood, and we drove still further north, but much closer to the ocean now. We drove up, up, up the giant sand dune, seeing the ocean on one side and the increasing poverty on the other.

Our first visit was to Mario Nolasco. I’d actually interviewed Mario months before, in the Manos Amigas office, before we’d embarked on artisan visits. He’d come to the office to deliver a muestra, a product sample, and Yannina asked me to interview him before he left. Since I had my interview notes, we just needed photographs of his workshop to complete his materials. While I’m glad we visited him, in hindsight that was a long way to travel just for a few dozen photographs! Mario was proud to have us visit, though. He told us that we were just his third set of visitors in five years: Yannina had checked out his space when she was doing her due diligence before they started working together; another Manos Amigas volunteer had come to interview him 3 years ago, and now us.

I was really impressed with Mario’s workshop. He is young, just 24 years old, and has an immaculately kept workshop that he’s built by himself. Compare some pictures from 2009, with ours from 2012; the changes he’s effected since then are striking.

2009: interior of Mario's workshop

2009: sign on his door with his address & advertising that he does ceramics in the style of Ayacucho, his hometown

2009: exterior of his workshop/home

2012: interior of workshop

2012: entrance to workshop. I love the artful iron lettering of his workshop name, Moya Wasi, which is Quechua for House of Seeds. I also love that he has a tree! His place is nicer and more carefully tended to than some places in our neighborhood.

If you look closely, you can see that the arrow points to "Moya Wasi" spelled out with pebbles. This is the entrance to the workshop.

Mario with some of his products

The second oldest of eight children, Mario comes from a line of artisans. His parents couldn’t afford to buy him toys, but there was always ample clay around. Mario would create his toys out of clay and his father would later fire them in the kiln along with his items for sale.

His opportunity to come to Lima came when an artisan asked his older brother if he’d help him out at his workshop for several months. Mario’s brother wasn’t interested, but 18-year-old Mario was. He had never been to Lima before. “I’m from the jungle. I only knew places with lots of plants and animals. I had heard lots of stories of the big city, the ocean, the cars, and the buildings.”

June is wintertime in Lima, and Mario wasn’t used to the cold. “I didn’t like the weather at all and didn’t plan to stay.” But after his month of work was over with and Mario was making plans to return to Ayacucho, another artisan asked him if he would work with him until December. Mario agreed. Once December rolled around, Mario had slowly gotten accustomed to Lima. The artisan offered to pay for Mario to return to Ayacucho and spend Christmas and the New Year with his family, if Mario would agree to work with him for the next year.

By that point, Mario decided that if he was going to spend this much time in Lima, he might as well open up his own workshop too. He had friends who knew of available land in Ventanilla for his future workshop. “But it was just sand; there wasn’t an existing structure to build onto.” Mario spent 2007 working at two workshops, his friend’s and laying the groundwork for his own. He’d work for one week for his friend, followed by a week working on his own workshop.

Since his land was just sand, his weeks in his workshop were spent sinking posts in the ground and building walls with thin wood. He used woven mats for his roof. As Lima is a desert, it rarely rains, so woven reed mats were sufficient as well as typical of his neighbors’ homes as well. But they are not very strong or permanent. “I lived in the workshop too, of course. You have to guard your stuff. People would say, ‘finish your floor; how can you work with a sand floor?’ But, if your pottery piece falls off of the table and onto the sand, it doesn’t break. If you have a floor, it does. And if you are painting it and it falls into the sand, even though the sand sticks to the paint as if it were glue, you can just rinse it off and start again.”

He strengthened his workshop in 2010. Mario now has a cement floor, reinforced and painted walls, a stronger roof. His home is now in back.

This hallway runs from the back of Mario's workshop, past his living quarters, and out to the bathroom.

The door to Mario's bathroom

As we found out on our way there, the time involved in getting to and from Ventanilla is significant. I asked him how long it takes him to get to Manos Amigas. “I spend three hours in a bus to get to Manos Amigas on time. If I have to bring a big order in, I take a taxi, which would normally take less time, but right now there is construction on both roads in and out of Ventanilla, so it’s about the same amount of time.”

Due to the distances involved, he always makes sure that he has scheduled different days for merchandise to be due and transported to his clients, so that he doesn’t have to trek to more than one place in one day. On the day we visited, for example, Mario’s brother left Ventanilla at 4 a.m. to take an order to a client in Lurín, far on the southern edge of Lima. He arrived at 7 a.m. Because of the normally heavy and insane traffic which is Lima, I can only imagine how long it would have taken him to get to Lurín if he had waited to leave at a more normal hour of 8 or 10 a.m.

Mario’s main plans for the future are to keep growing his business, of course, and to obtain the title of his land. “The government has the title. I am working on getting the title, but it will take time. You have to keep asking for it.” Getting the title to the land is tricky in areas where land invasions have been frequent and the government has relocated people. Back in the office, I asked Christina about Mario’s quest for the title and whether he’d actually ever get it. She told me that it was possible, but that only the people who keep asking for it and are persistent - over years - are the ones who eventually are granted them. I hope Mario is one of the lucky ones.

Mario sticks in my mind. I’m not exactly sure why. Perhaps it’s because he was the first artisan I interviewed. Perhaps it’s because he is so young. Perhaps it’s because he is trying so earnestly to be successful in a tough market, doing something (and doing it well) that so many others do too. (Product plug: Global Gifts is currently selling one of his products, a tealight for $16.) Perhaps it is because he is doing the absolute best he can in a poor area, taking such care with the appearance and upkeep of his workshop in an area where few can or do pay attention to those details.

After talking with Mario, we walked down about 12 shacks until we arrived at Jacinto’s home/workshop. 

The building next to Mario's

The view of Ventanilla and the ocean from Mario's workshop

At first I was surprised by their proximity - Ventanilla is huge! - but later I found out that Mario introduced his neighbor to Yannina, thinking that perhaps he would be a good fit for Manos Amigas.

Jacinto is from Huancayo and produces mates burilados, carved gourds. He and his wife, Vasilia, both learned to make mates from their parents. Each has been working since they were 7 or 8 years old. This was a common story we heard from the mates artisans who are over 40 years old: they all were working, some of them full time, by age 8. 

Jacinto welcomes us to his workshop

Simon, as usual, finds friends to play in the dirt and sand with

Jacinto and Vasilia have five children ranging in age from 16 to 27. They moved to Lima in 1998 for better work opportunities and lived in Villa El Salvador, on Lima’s far south side. But in 2000, the Peruvian government moved him and 10,000 others from Villa El Salvador to Ventanilla.

When they arrived, there was nothing but sand. There were no existing structures, no services. “They moved us in giant trucks. We slept in the sand with plastic and cardboard boxes for protection. Not many people stuck it out. Life was rough. There was no water, no electricity, no access to transportation, no nothing.” While they have electricity now, 12 years later, they still do not have water. “They promised us that we would have water by 2008. But administrations change and don’t always fulfill previous promises.”

I can’t imagine living so far from the heart of Lima, without any access to transportation, let alone water and shelter. I suppose that is an example of how desperate they and others were for a home. While Jacinto and his family have obviously come far from the days when they slept in sand, they still have a hard life. They must bring in water for everything: washing clothes, dishes, drinking, cooking. Sand is everywhere. As we talked, a dusting of sand blew down on my notes from crevices in the roof.

Jacinto outside of their workshop/home. They have come a long way from sleeping in sand, covered by plastic.

After we finished our interviews, we thanked everyone and piled back into Gustavo’s car, bracing ourselves for the ride back home. Slowly our scenery changed from ocean and shacks to dusty construction and planes, to frantic streets with everyone jockeying for position, back to Miraflores where parapentes were sailing above the ocean and among the high rises. Parks, filled with greenery in this desert, are pretty much everywhere in Miraflores. During the week, many of those parks are filled with niñeras, nannies, and their charges. While not all of the niñeras are from places as far away as Ventanilla, few are from Miraflores.

What a contrast. On the ride back, I kept thinking about what people like Mario, Jacinto, and the niñeras think when they trek in from their neighborhoods and arrive in the relative luxury of Miraflores and see the wealth everywhere. The luck of having green parks and playgrounds patrolled by security officers, safe places to play outside, the ocean as a backdrop for daily activities: that felt luxurious after days on buses seeing the rest of Lima. As such, Miraflores can be such a contrast to the rest of Lima, and a lot of the expats who live there wouldn’t dare set foot in many of those areas. I remember being that afraid, so I can’t fault them, but I am also thankful I got past my fear.

Once, when we were driving with Yannina through a dusty district far past Lima’s downtown, she commented, “We [in Miraflores] have the ocean. What do they have here? Dust.” So many different worlds, all in the same city.

Patriotism or Pay Up

Fiestas Patrias, Peru’s Independence Day holidays, was two weekends ago, July 28-29. Being in another country for their independence day celebrations was fun and yet another cultural experience to participate in.

At the beginning of July, the city put up eight enormous Peruvian flags at the óvalo a block from our apartment.



After that, Peruvian flags popped up on buildings everywhere. The supermercado Wong wrapped up its large building in a giant red and white ribbon, and the unfortunate male baggers who work there had to wear a ridiculous straw cowboy hat/white poncho getup for the week leading up to the party.

On one of my near-daily trips to our mercado in mid-July, I checked out one of the puestos. This particular vendor changes her puesto’s look constantly, depending on what special occasion is coming up. When I bought yellow underwear from her for New Year’s, her stand was 100% yellow. For July, it was a sea of red and white.

Tacked up in the corner of her puesto was a news article announcing that any building not flying the Peruvian flag for Fiestas Patrias was subject to a fine of S/1800 (about $700). She had the sign up to encourage sales: since you have to buy one somewhere, buy it here!

That explained why Christina and Roberto had hung one on the top of our building, and why Manos Amigas had one flying too. It also explained the flags on construction sites, tiny newspaper stands, even the snack carts on wheels.

I asked Christina about it and she nodded, surprised that I was surprised. “It’s the law for the country. It used to be that you had to paint your house for Fiestas Patrias.” “You had to paint the flag on your house?” I asked, shocked. “No, no, you just had to put a fresh coat of paint on it so it would look nice for Fiestas Patrias.”

Flag waving in the US makes me uneasy, as the flag is a very loaded symbol and I have baggage accompanying it. Here in Peru, I have no similar baggage. So we showed our Peruvian spirit by wearing our Peru shirts and waving our little (free) Peruvian flag during the Fiestas Patrias parade.

I even tacked onto my backpack the Peruvian flag pin that the puesto vendor gave me when she heard we were leaving the country soon. None of those things - wearing a USA shirt, waving a US flag, or wearing a flag pin - am I prone to do at home. I suppose the more you know your country, the more you are apt to have conflicting feelings about it.

Still, I do think it’s kind of nuts to mandate the flag display. I appreciate that, back home, I have a choice whether or not I fly the flag on July 4, and that choice won’t cause me to break the law or my bank account.

Sunday afternoons on the malecón

One of our standard Sunday afternoon activities is to walk along the malecón, the walk along the cliffside parks overlooking the ocean. It takes us about an hour to leisurely make our way south to where the parapentes take off and land.

We aren’t the only ones with this idea. I learned from a very cool photo exhibit called Lima Más Arriba that, on a typical Sunday afternoon in summer, there are half a million people along the six-mile-long malecón. While it’s never felt too crowded, it’s definitely been hopping.

The park on the malecón closest to our apartment, late afternoon on New Year's Day

People are always in the parks along the malecón, but it explodes on Sundays. Families bring picnics. Parents and kids ride their bicycles in the bike lane. The canchas are always in use with a fútbol game, with multigenerational teams playing all day long. The D’Onofrio ice cream bicycle vendors are stationed every 100 meters or so, just in case you changed your mind in the last few steps.

I’ve been taken with how participatory families are. Parents don’t just lounge around and watch their kids play (as I might want to do); they are active! Moms and aunts hit volleyballs with kids, dads and uncles chase and tackle the kids too. It’s so fun to see everyone so active and engaged.

Adults and kids alike roll down hills. There is apparently an art to it. Giuseppe tried to teach it to Simon one day when we “borrowed” Giuseppe for the afternoon. 

Rolling down hills, a favorite pastime

Giuseppe gives Simon a lesson in how to roll down a hill. You start at the top...

Simon tries to put Giuseppe's instructions into practice.

After all that effort, Giuseppe is exhausted. Simon's ready to try it again.

There is a dirtbike course right next to the skateboard park, so if there are little kids practicing or, super exciting, an actual race going on, we have to stop and watch that too. Once, when we watched a race, we laughed at the loudspeaker material. It had hundreds of nonexistent people cheering the bikers on, and later when the announcer read out the names of the winners, Queen’s “We are the champions” played over and over.

The skateboarders don’t just use the skate park; some of them take over the long sloping sidewalks to test out dramatic finishes, calling out “¡permiso!” to anyone that might be in their way before they start. Avid athletes, as well as women in skirts and heels, use the exercise equipment scattered everywhere. Dogs have birthday parties. Once we saw a flash mob of 100 people having a pillow fight.

If the wind is good, there is a long line for the parapentes. 

Kids run races through the bushes planted as mazes. Tightropes are strung between trees, at varying heights, for anyone to try inching across. Bubble vendors stop off at the more populated playgrounds and blow rounds of bubbles, to the delight of the kids playing. 

Bubbles never lose their appeal... and they have usually been good ways to start playing with other kids.

Couples make out pretty much anywhere and everywhere, but one particular park along the malecón, the aptly named Parque del Amor, is a good place to avoid if you don’t want to get in the middle of teenagers kissing. It’s anchored by a giant statue of - what else? - two people making out, hovering above the ocean. It also has a very long, very cool mosaic tiled bench with love quotes from literature spelled out with the broken tiles. I was wandering along it once, stopping every so often to read the quotes, when I realized I was inadvertently staring at a couple going at it. Moving on, then!

Capoeira groups stand in a circle, chanting as they practice their unique martial art/dance to their unique music. Hare Krishnas gather on a cliff overlooking the ocean, and more than once we’ve stopped on our way back to watch the sunset there, with their singing and drumming our auditory backdrop to the dramatic orange sun dropping into the haze just above the ocean.

Simon decided to try out some of the moves he saw the capoeira guys practicing.

This was one of the weirdest sunsets we saw: the sun first set into a cloud haze above the ocean, disappearing completely. Then we saw it slowly drop out of the cloud, reappearing before finally disappearing into the next cloud haze.

Not far from the malecón is Parque Kennedy, and the sunken circle there is usually filled with something fascinating to watch, if we can elbow in on the crowd and see in: older couples dancing slowly, cheek to cheek, younger couples salsa dancing, and my favorite so far, an afternoon of tango, with ever-changing partners and really amazing dancing from regular-looking people in the audience.

Last Tango in Peru

One of my goals upon our return to Indy is to start venturing out on Sunday afternoons to different parks in Latino neighborhoods. Perhaps that will be a good way to begin figuring out where and how we might get involved with Spanish-speaking communities. While we’ll have to swap the exciting parapentes for a kite, we’ll be well-equipped for the adventure with our bubbles, fútbol, picnic, and Spanish. Too bad there will be zero hills for Simon to practice his newly acquired skills on.