Thought Terrarium

The trip into the heart of Bolivia was fast and strange. We spent less than twenty-four hours there, and then we were gone. My impressions are vague and almost dreamlike. Now we're back in Peru, in Cusco via one night in Puno. Walking through this city one can't help but be struck by the history of this place. We are staying in the center of the city, not far from the Plaza de Armas. The street plan, and foundations of many of the buildings are pre-conquistador. Only a few blocks from our hostal is a street lined on both sides with Inca masonry, one piece of which is the famous 12-sided stone. Many of the stone faces are the size of a dinner table and at least three feet thick. On top of the amazing Inca stones are the square and very linear mortared Spanish walls. One sees in these very stones the succession of civilizations, and something of the change of pardigms that occured. When Pizzaro defeated the Quitan army at Cajamarca in 1532 he took the Inca emperor, Atah...

I may have talked about how big and impressive Lima is, but I hadn't been to La Paz yet. I don't know how many people live here or the elevation, or really much about it at all. You'll have to excuse my lack of knowledge. And I'll try to forgive myself, because it's already gotten us into trouble. When we arrived in the city yesterday afternoon, the conductor stopped us before we got off to give us a stern warning. "Don't trust anyone," he said. "Don't take any taxi that only says 'taxi,' don't follow strangers, take much caution," and again, "don't trust anyone, it's a very dangerous city." We caught a very legitimate taxi, and took it to the center of the city, which is I guess where tourists usually go. We had a few ideas of hostals that we'd like to look at from the guide book, and we'd met a couple fellow travellers on the bus. One was a fellow from Juneau named Matt, and the other was a ...

We've been in Puno for five days now. It is the main Peruvian city on Lake Titicaca. We didn't plan on being here this long, but Cassandra was sick and she visited a doctor here and needed some rest, or at least a break from travel. We've spent a lot of time wandering around, looking for restaurants, and various other little places where we can get the things that we need. A couple days ago we visited a small menu place. It is a common type of restaurant in Peru. There is a soup, a choice of entre, and a drink, almost always a sweet purple colored liquid made from corn. The whole meal costs between 2 and 4 soles, or 65 cents to $1.30. This place that we went gave me yet another reason to admire the resourcefulness of Peruanos. Unfortunately I was unlucky enough to be party to this habit directly. I accidentally ordered a plate of beef tripe and potatoes in a yellow sauce. It was served on rice. I'm afraid if it wasn't for the assaultingly spicy sauce sup...

We tried the beach but it was too cold. And there was a minor fiasco trying to get there. We passed it, and made it almost all the way to Arequipa, but decided to try our luck with a random smaller bus going back the other direction. It didnt take long, and there was a very friendly english speaking guy at the restaurant where we were dropped off. Thank goodness we didnt get stranded there. It was a small place in the middle of nowhere. We had traversed probably one hundred kilometers of completey barren dunes between there and la Punta Camana. These were severly impressive, massive, mountainous wastes of sand. That it is habitable to humans defies my imagination. But we made it out of there. It turns out that la Punta Camana, and Camana proper are two different places. It is noticable on a good map, but not in the Lonely Planet. La Punta was the beach. It was warm outside, but the water was cold. Too cold for C. So we went into the city proper and have been here for th...

Yesterday as Cassandra and I walked throught he Central District of Lima we came to a bridge across el Rio Rimac. When we got to the other side we found a bunch of fruit vendors, and what appeared to be a much poorer area of the city. We walked for a couple of blocks, not really knowing where we were going before we were stopped by a policeman who told us it was dangerous for us to continue in that direction. He looked at the bag I was carrying and made a gesture to show that it was going to be snatched if we continued on. He escorted us back to the bridge. I wish I could blend a little better here. But when you are a foot taller than everyone, blonde, and walking around witha girl that has tattoos all over her body, you cannot help but draw attention.

Everything has become very pragmatic in these last few weeks. I realized that if I didn't actually work on the things that I needed to finish before I leave for South America that they'll never get done. So I've been doing more work activities, and less writing, and a lot less reading. I'm almost ready to go, but I don't know if I'll have a bed ready to sleep on when I get back. boo hoo

I wouldn't normally dedicate an entire post to a single link, but this is one of the most amazing things I have ever seen. This is death-defying action. This is the future. These are urban ninjas !

It's less than a month and a half now until I head off to Peru, and things are starting to change. At first there was no intensity of emotion about the trip itself. My heart jumped at the thought of seeing my girlfriend there (she's been there for a couple months already), but Peru itself seemed an odd choice of travel destinations. Hadn't I been contemplating a trip to Australia for much of the time that I was in Alaska? And hadn't I already been to Peru? The answer to both is of course yes, but they have proven themselves mostly irrelevant now that I have a ticket in hand so to speak. They were obvious questions in the face of my new decision, but they have faded as the new trip comes closer. And as I prepare more thoroughly than I ever have for any trip, the excitement grows enormously by the day. My excitement largely stems from what my reading has begun to show me. A power shift is under way now in South America. With Hugo Chavez leading the way, most of...

For some r eason anonymous commenters have been taking issue with my blog lately. Actually, there have only been two, but it's a little disconcerting. There was of course the absinthe issue. I to ok that up in a post a couple slots down. Now there's someone who doesn't seem to understand the humor in the phrase "floppy a." Anonymous Commenter II claims that there is n o such phrase. I beg to differ. If AC II cares to look three sentence back, I think he/she/it will find a phrase of interest, surrounded by quotatio n marks. The notorious "floppy a" in effect. I know for a fact that there are now at least three documented cases of use. Sure they're all on this blog, and all the undocumented ones are in my head, but lets not nit-pick the details here. My question in the previous post was not asserting that "floppy a" is a phrase that people actually use. It was merely associating the phrase with a floppy disk drive, commonly referr...

If you look, loyal reader, at the archives to the right, or below to the post called "Absinthe," you'll discover that I've included a descrpiption of how we consumed the drink. It had to do with flames and a big spoon and a sugar cube. There are pictures. I'd never consumed the stuff, and had little knowledge of it, but an anonymous commenter took issue with the method that we employed, apparently concerned that we were trying to get high from the hallucinogenic properties of the constituent herb, wormwood. I had indeed heard the rumor that the stuff had more than just the normal alcoholic effects, but hallucinations were not the intended result. I can't speak for the others, but I did it out of a sense of irreverance. The stuff is illegal after all, and if a trip had been what we were after, I wouldn't have been very satisfied. Our commenter says that the burning of the sugar cube is an invention of the Czechs, and that all Czech absinthe is fake a...

Who doesn't chuckle to themself at the phrase "floppy a?" Really.

Check out Moondog's pee poll post . Please read and leave comments. We're very curious. bayareablues.blogspot.com

I was barely over a wicked case of strep throat, and not as well rested as I should have been, yet nevertheless participated in a night of absinthe drinking on New Years Eve. It arrived with my friends Max and Moritz, brothers visiting from Germany and Switzerland, respectively. In the pictures below you can get a feel for the interesting method of preparation. There is a special perforated spoon with a wrinkle between handle and head that keeps it balanced on the edge of a glass. The spoon goes on top of your glass, an d a sugar cube on top of that. Absinthe is poured over the cube, and then the alcohol-so aked sugar is ignited. It's not entirely clear to me why this is necessary, but I was told it has something to do with carmelizing the sugar. The melted sugar is then dumped into the liquid in the cup and stirred in with some water. Bot toms up. Tastes like licorice.

This is the big bend in the river that I wrote about in the Artic Trek entries. I just stitched all these photos together for the first time. I think that the picture is rather huge, but I like it.

The top one is fourth grade test scores and the bottom one is free lunch in New York City.

Thinking about my middle school brought me to a website called "great schools" which will show you statistics about pretty much any public school you want. It has an option to compare schools as well. Interestingly, the only real criteria for comparison are test scores, and percentage of the student body receiving free and reduced lunch. If you look at the comparison of schools in this area, there is a loose correlation between high test scores and low free lunch numbers and vice versa. Notably, the top scoring school has by far the smallest number of poor kids eating free lunch, and down in Rochester over half the kids are eating reduced and free, and wait a minute, they've got the lowest test scores. Hmmm.

Last night I dreamt about running around in my underwear. It wasn't a self-conscious dream at all, as one might expect. In fact, my most vivid memory involves using a pocket knife to cut my boxer-briefs down to size. I guess I wanted to have that traditional brief look. So I cut the legs up high. It was a little ragged, but I'm sure it was pretty hot. Then for some reason I was at Jefferson Middle School, as a student I think, but in my current body (sans pants and boxer legs). Escape was obviously the only option, but I had to find a path away from the school where there was always something between me and the office windows to obstruct the principals view. I got away no problem, but the dream gets fuzzier from there. A swingset, a pretty girl with a wad of toilet paper stuck to her shoe walking down some stairs. I don't know.

Four years later I'm planning another trip to South America. This time I'll be heading down to meet my girlfriend Cassandra. She's there studying abroad as a grand finale to her Evergreen education. We don't have a set plan, and our travel priorities are rather different, but one crazy itinerary involves heading south into the Chilean Atacama and then East and North through the Bolivian altiplano, across lake Titicaca, up to Cuzco and the cordillera, then finally down to the coast for time on the beach. We'll see.

Don't worry. I don't fancy myself a poet. I just liked the way those words sounded when I wrote them, and I thought the rythm might be accentuated by breaking up the lines. The intended meaning is probably totally unclear. But whatever. I'm sure what I was talking about is impossibly opaque and ridiculous anyway.