Dayarrhea, With a Spectacular Finish

An old lady picks up a brimming crockpot and totters back and forth as she tries to walk across the room. Liquids, equidistant from poles of homogeneity and emulsification and littered with hunks and flecks of matter varying in color, size and structural-rigidity, slosh perilously in a single wave that breaks constantly and barely seeps out from under the clear glass lid before dribbling over the sides and onto the floor. The old lady remains oblivious to the slosh and the drips of multi-colored steaming slush she transports, and carries out her practical task of moving with no regard for the way in which age has tightened some of her bolts and loosened others and generally distorted a once-graceful glide into a frenetic, animatronic lurch....

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I woke up in the Stop and Drop bed, iPod alarm sounding insistently, and found that the old lady from my dream had my guts. Yesterday’s lunch was now preeminently influencing my consciousness. This was awful. Miriam was also quite unwell, though not so fiercely as I. She made the trek upstairs and retrieved our morning rations on a tray, and I decided that I’d better give dry bread half a chance, and so slowly dissected my crusty roll. We debated simply taking the day off, a reluctant first up to that point in an otherwise busy journey. We didn’t take the day off, but we waited until the afternoon to return by bus to the old city and check out the official black market. There are exactly zero photos from this day, because we were warned (by Footprints and Lonely Planet and, I think, our hostel proprietors) that carrying too many goodies might be a bad idea in this part of town. However, all of the discomfort that we felt during this outing was digestive, and I wouldn’t give Polvos Azules the distinction of a particularly dangerous part of Lima, unless you’re in charge of copyright enforcement.

This time, we exited our bus toward the end of the great big park that signals the approach to the old city. From here we walked to the edge of that park and back along another massive road to one of the largest intersections that I had ever seen, where police officers were stationed in the road to direct the traffic and also in elevated boxes on the street corners wrapped in yellow vinyl
Inca Cola signs. We crossed two streets and began to see vendors selling metal implements, vicious looking knives and knuckles and a handgun or two generally with smaller items and jewelry sprinkled around. It seemed like we must be getting close, and in two more blocks we found ourselves in the shadow of the vibrant blue concrete structure we sought.

Entering Polvos Azules is just like going to a run-down mall only, unlike the case of run-down malls that I’ve encountered in this hemisphere, this mall is disproportionately alive compared with spots in the U.S.A. that feature its crumbling facades, permanently fused escalators and unkempt stalls. This place and the shoppers and vendors therein showcased a wonderful divide between the desire to have these properly prestigious artifacts of current media and fashion (at least insofar as they were reasonable facsimiles) and the indignation that most main-stream urban consumers in the U.S.A. would feel at having to procure them in a space that has no interest in sharing in this sparkling, consumptive aesthetic. We moved from overcast afternoon sun into the dim fluorescence of the great, blue box-cave, which smelled like frying oil and dusty cardboard rolled in sugar. The whole thing had the feel of something between a warehouse and a parking garage.

Aside from simply wanting to see the market, we had the idea that we should pay special attention to the offerings from the knock-off clothing vendors for especially witty instances of Engrish. We’d seen a few good shirts up to that point on our journey, though I don’t recall specifically what they said. The first stalls on our end of the first floor we visited in Polvos were skater/surfer/generally-male themed, then there were the girlie dress shops, the video-game shops with a couple of young guys each playing futbol or shooting zombies, the movie shops, the tool shops, the camera shops, the cellphone vendors, the poster shops, and some shops whose theme was anyone’s guess and that seemed to carry a little bit of everything. We made one pass down the length of one floor before we realized just how gigantic this box actually was.

Miriam decided, or more precisely was selected, to undertake the job of reviewing the facilities, and we followed signs to a weird shanty on the roof guarded by a wizened man at a card table rolling two sheets of toilet paper into little bundles and also selling some assortment of unmarked productos higenicos para damas. I fished out fifty soles and some extra napkin wadding from one of my pragmatically overstuffed pockets, Miriam paid the old man and I waited, gazing out off the roof into the sea of buildings. I was beginning to feel unwell again, and pulled a cracked pink bismuth tablet from my pocket before slowly chewing it and working pieces of it loose from my molars. I had no lust to fully confront my errant plumbing on this rooftop, and kept it to myself for the time being.


Miriam came back out, not too impressed, but at least somewhat relieved. And we went back in to take another look at potentially hilarious shirts. Miriam may dispute this claim, but I don’t remember coming across too many really exceptional examples, and the Engrish generally lacked the spontaneity of stereotypical Japanese examples where the object is to arrange spatio-aesthetically acceptable combinations of English words. The shirts we found in Polvos often seemed to be constructed by making screen-prints based on actual designs of shirts sold by major labels transposed from some kind of degenerate source material like a low-res online preview image or an out of focus snapshot. Images came through this process perceptibly unscathed, but text was rendered retarded through the use of what seemed like attempts at applying OCR to the fuzzy source text.

This was the kind of stuff that they’d counterfeited. The large, messily aligned letters of “Abercrombie and Fitch” or “American Eagle” or “Rip Curl” or “Billabong” were clear enough, and then all the half-faded gibberish writing that is (was?) frat-boy fashion catnip du jour made little to no sense and often contained obvious algorithmic garbage characters. It’s difficult to understand all that effort undertaken to loosely copy something so cheesy, but once you’d stuck your head into this locus of fashion, it was impossible not to notice the fact that nearly everyone who had any business trying to look hip on a budget in Lima was sporting this swag. I was beginning to come unglued, something that I will admit is regularly a part of extended encounters with retail that I undertake without a clear enough goal. Miriam took her time, and I progressed from the slumped shuffle of the overshopped to the tighter, more erratic, gait of someone who feels as though they might void their bowels arbitrarily.

Eventually, we just gave up, not sufficiently enchanted with any one piece of Polvos Azules, but reticent to leave such a grand oddity without some official talisman. Back on the street, the air was still hot and oily, but the breeze felt good, and I bought some kind of coolish fizzy liquid from a woman with a cart. Early field reports from the pink molecules I’d sent in to civilize and organize my sub-esophageal riffraff suggested that perhaps my intrepid chemical strike force (this is a bad metaphor, I assume they’re really more like a specialized hugging brigade) was making headway in its campaign. We crossed back along the great intersection and entered the park alongside a museum surrounded by temporary fences, apologetic signage, and construction flotsam. The evening was coming, though how fast exactly was hard to say. I sipped soda and Miriam and I tried to decide what was to be done next. We’d been told that it was essential that we go see the lighted fountains display (http://www.circuitomagicodelagua.com.pe/), a major spectacle that happened a couple nights a week, and we determined that we wouldn’t have enough time to return to Miraflores and grab cameras before the show. Instead, we went straight to the park and got in line.

The sun set shortly after we paid our five dollars each and walked toward a towering, multi-colored, triangular grid formed by wide, high-pressure jets of water. The magic water circuit sprawls within a fenced park, and passes under a road by way of a tunnel lined with a giant (highly political) photographic essay on the impact of the construction of this park on the surrounding community. The park was an amazing place to watch people of all ages, and by the time we emerged from tunnel they were beginning to pack-in tightly. Without really trying, we found ourselves in a throng waiting for the exposition of the fantasía fuente. The fantasy turned out to be a pretty amazing combination of laser and digital image projection onto screens of flowing water, set to a number of generic classical masterpieces (when isn’t Beethoven an appropriate selection? no, really, I’m asking) and numerous repetitions of El Condor Pasa. Luckily, the crowd was mostly armpit tall, so it was very easy for me to see what was really an incredible visual feast. I had a good view of the lasers blasting through the plumes of water and right into the windows of an adjacent apartment building, whoops!

After the fantasía finally burned itself out, we wandered the rest of the circuit in the increasingly brisk darkness. It was fun, and the air in the park was weird and highly variable: sea breeze meeting city heat meeting cool mist meeting dense crowds. Any sadness we felt at not having brought our cameras along for the day’s outings, was allayed seeing nearly everyone snapping copious photos and videos on all manner of devices (google it, see every fountain in detail). We made sure that we’d checked all the fountains, and then circuited fully, out to the street. We hopped a bus and squeezed together for the loud, windy, bumpy ride.

First Entry: Friends

That night after we got back from watching the dancing in the park we went up to the common room to see what was happening and do some writing. The room was busy, full of people drinking máte and sitting around on every flat surface. Miriam and I sat on the roof for a few minutes and wrote in the low glow of the Lima night before we were joined by one of the guys from the front desk, with whom we spoke at length concerning the United States and English and surfing and Lima and soccer and a great variety of other topics. If you've been following this day through the last several posts, you'll believe that we were spent following this latest exercise in trivia and Spanish conversation. Overall the day had been very fine, hell even incredible, albeit with a couple of outstandingly low points, this is what I wrote about before we turned in that night:

February 28, 2010
Stop & Drop Backpacker Hostel
Miraflores, Lima

Today's most ridiculous cultural discovery has got to be the international appeal of the program "Friends".

Right now, I'm sitting in a room with a bunch of Argentinians who could easily be providing a laugh track just a raucous as the one dubbed down by NBC. I suppose I should note a few things with respect to my feelings about this revelation.

First, I have remained, remarkably - I'm told - and perhaps woefully ignorant of the "Friends" phenomenon since hearing its theme song on the radio back in '93. Even ten years later, (eleven?) when the show was winding down, my freshmen companions were in disbelief about my inability to identify the primary cast members, each of whom was pulling a cool million per episode.

It was around this time that I was corralled into watching bits and pieces of the show, with which I was, admittedly and perhaps with too much attitude, not at all impressed. Even then the show seemed like an awful relic in a number of ways. Schlocky jokes, unrelateable characters who seemed to be artificially stagnant in that they were dealing with the same group of people for an interminably long time in a world that had changed a great deal over the course of the show's run, and a laugh track so consistent as to remind one of every single sitcom, lame or not-so-lame, that had ever existed. I can no longer watch Seinfeld either, and having its Thursday timeslot buddy around seems somewhere between very premature nostalgia and outright televistic necrophilia.

Third, and perhaps the oddest aspect of this alien-enthusiasm for the amigo show, has to be the fact that the humor comes across via subtitles that are astonishingly un-nuanced in a show that is already heavy-handed in its comedy.

Nevertheless, here we are chortling confusedly, and my well-tanned companions guffawing unabashedly as they pass their máte around the room. Its hard to tell who is the crazy asshole in this equation. Is it those amused by this poorly translated, limply-acted look into a banal, cushy, TV-New York, or is it me who cannot seem to appreciate this sort of tranquil pleasure of an easy day-to-day where social relations of the lightest variety can come to the funny forefront of what people do, rather than all the baggage that seems to be a part of our real lives?

Sunset Hunting

After exiting the bus, we walked along the sidewalk across from the park and turned right to re-enter our hostel. The Stop and Drop staff, consisting usually of two guys with similar hair, dress and height and of a similar build, didn't seem to have any problem with us retracting our checkout and sticking around for a few more days, and we took the opportunity to look into transport to the airport for our flight to Buenos Aires, and also arranged to spend our short hop between plane from Chile and bus to Ecuador at the hostel.

Flopping onto a bed was a notably comforting activity throughout the trip, and today was no exception, but we left again before dark to see the shore as the sun inched into the pacific. The trail that led down toward the beach was something we'd noticed the day before, walking the park paths along the cliffs. We followed sidewalks beside streets that eventually broke from parallel and split, revealing a great gorge that opened to the water through a crack in the smooth green hillsides. The gorge contained, among other things, a large fitness club with pools and tennis clubs that passersby could easily observe from above. This was, I supposed, especially true and probably appealing for all the hip folks living in the tall, modern apartment towers that filled this part of Miraflores.
Passage between the paved sidewalks of the city streets and the dusty trails that snaked toward the water could be made at any of a series of little breaks in the old stone retaining wall. At these points, wood plank stairways lead down through otherwise unbroken swaths of clinging green hillside flora.



The changeover to the bottom of the ravine was first noticeable due to the diminution of ambient light and the color moving from from lighter pinks and oranges cast over gray to deeper reds striking green. Before my eyes had adjusted to this difference my ears were filled with the realization that here were lots of birds down here, trees full, singing and chirping at one another. Aside from these avian companions, there were a few other people walking. After spending all day on hard streets, it felt good to be gently padding on the springy, light-colored earth of the path.

The trail lead eventually to the a bit of what I thought of as classically beachy infrastructure, a pedestrian bridge over busy highway that was all two-by-fours and plywood with awkwardly scaled stairs, lots of carved tags and the first hints at the sand that lay on the other side. We made our way through this installation and watched the waves at the beach for a while. The water was cooooold, and every so often a large wave would outdo its companions by tens of meters. The surfers were excited, the fishermen were terrified (we were later informed), and though we had no real basis for comparison, the prevailing sentiment seemed to be that this would be the most noticeable signifier of our proximity to the great shake that had occurred that morning in Chile. I think it's hard for the casual observer from U-S-and-A to get past his or her respective memories of countless images of death-defying surfer feats and really feel the impact of these somewhat weirder than average waves the way that surfer-locals do. If I hadn't known about the earthquake, it's unlikely that I would have noticed.
We tarried a while, examining the sand and rocks, watching brave souls charge in to body-surf and then return with a look that confessed wordlessly the extent to which their testicles had fled up into their torsos, and then we decided that the ravine was no place for gringos in the immanent proper-darkness. The dusty trails were more congested now as people left the beach, but we made our way back up quickly.
I don't remember what time it was, but when we reached street-level the sky was dark, the wind was cool and damp and we were surrounded by headlights moving at speeds that were difficult to estimate. We talked about what we should do next and, being rather non-committal as to whether either of us needed or wanted food we went toward the park, which seemed to be full of people. By the time we got to the edge of the park, Miriam had decided that she was interested in food, and I had decided that I certainly was not. My stomach was behaving in ways that I was forced to ignore in the hope that these increasingly noticeable signs were red herrings and not true foreshadowing. We went back to the cafe across from the park where we'd eaten the the night before and then returned to explore.
The park was an amazing flurry of people of all ages running around, eating things, and trying to sell things to one another. Tables full of trinkets, tools, and general ephemera structured space into rows, and contained a range of antique instruments that were often as unrecognizable to me as hypothetical artifacts from an alien spacecraft; I wished we were traveling by steamship. Beyond the tables, we found rows of art. We got bored with that pretty quickly, and then we started to hear music and we found perhaps the coolest thing that we'd seen up to that point: