Sex, drugs, and Carmelite nuns

One day after we got into Lima, Ross came down with a fever. We tried to ignore it, not wanting to make a big deal out of nothing, but pesky thoughts of dying of malaria kept popping up, since we'd just been a delicious dinner to ravenous mosquitoes in the jungle and, most likely, to deadly bacteria in the Amazon river. (Ross was secretly hoping it would be the plague, of which there has been a recent outbreak in Peru. It's the perfect disease - easily treated with penicillin, but bragging rights for the rest of your life.) Dying of malaria would be very inconvenient because we had plans to go to Bolivia after this, so we decided to go to a hospital to make sure that our plans would not be hampered by imminent death. I'm glad that we turned out to be in Lima when we were in need of a hospital instead of a more remote part of Peru. One guide told us that, in very rural areas, some indigenous people who don't have enough money for healthcare treat themselves using guinea pigs instead. In case you haven't heard of this method before, here's what they do:

They take a live guinea pig and rub it all over their body. (If you've never had anyone mime 'rubbing a live guinea pig all over your body,' you truly haven't lived. It's exhilarating.) The campesinos (farmers or peasants) believe that by doing this, their disease will be transferred into the guinea pig, so they cut open the guinea pig to diagnose themselves. If they find something wrong with the guinea pig, they believe that indicates what was wrong in their own body. (Only black guinea pigs are used as medicine. The other unfortunate souls are enthusiastically eaten all over the country as a dinnertime treat. Guinea pigs suffer so many indignities at the hands of the Peruvians.) However, for some reason, guinea pigs are not seen as a suitable treatment for children, so for children they do the same thing, but with eggs. This makes even less sense to me - how are you supposed to make a diagnosis using an egg? They don't even have body parts! The way the guide explained it, "They don't have enough money for medicine, but they already have guinea pigs and eggs, right?", with which I had to agree.

So I was pretty happy to find that we didn't see even one guinea pig scampering around the hospital. I did see an egg, but only in the form of my sandwich. The hospital was quite professional; in fact, the experience was quite a bit more enjoyable than a typical Emergency Room experience in North America. A+++, would visit again!! $300 worth of blood tests later, we discovered it wasn't malaria or the plague, it was just a regular old flu that happened to strike at the moment we'd be most paranoid about it. Damn sneaky viruses. 3 days later I also came down with a fever. We briefly debated going to the hospital for tests again, because what if we let our guard down, assumed it was the same flu, and at that exact moment, malaria made an ass out of u and me? How absolutely ridiculous would we feel THEN? But we're too lazy to be that paranoid, and I'm still alive, so I think we made the right choice.

Another happy coincidence was that we got sick in a hostel that is as cheap as it is bizarre. Our hostel is what would happen if you crossed an old Colonial mansion, a museum, and a zoo (Ross tried to capture some of the weirdness in his first ever youtube video). There is pre-Inca pottery lining the front desk. Roman statues hide in the corners, and every corridor is peppered with religious Spanish paintings. Getting to our room is like walking through a labyrinth. You walk up one long regular staircase, then one spiral staircase. Then you pass a rooftop patio in which you encounter several budgies, 3 turtles, a cat, a dog, a parrot, and what we have only been able to guess is a macaw. One more spiral staircase later, and you finally arrive at our room, where we spent a week in bed, trying desperately not to wake up when the macaw and parrot began squawking every morning ("Hola!" the parrot would shout hopefully, over and over again). Sleeping through all of that might have been possible except on top of that, every morning at 9am, the restaurant on the patio blasts music for their breakfast customers. And by "music," I actually mean, one very worn album of French love songs from the 50s, each song indistinguishable from the last, played over and over again until my ears would start to bleed. I spent every morning in a rage, wondering if the entire city of Lima was just some cruel, psychopathic joke.

In the last few days, I have finally been able to ascertain that it is not, in fact, a cruel psychopathic joke. Instead, it is simply an absolutely chaotic whirlpool of 8 million people squeezed into a city with the infrastructure for about 13 people and a llama. Areas of devastating poverty surround quite lavish neighborhoods filled to the brim with historic landmarks. Traffic is an unbearable mess - getting from one side of the city to another can literally take several hours during rush hour, as we found out while trying to get back from the hospital. Cabbies will routinely simply refuse to go to Central Lima during this time. Because many huge intersections lack street lights, cars just dart out into oncoming traffic with no understanding of "right of way" and honk angrily when they find that other cars are - surprise, surprise! - in their way. Not to mention the daily parades, which aren't actually an election quirk as we thought, but actually just a favorite national pastime, akin to reading or playing Backgammon. If the government spent half the money on street lights as it spent on parades, I think Lima would probably not have earned the nickname "Lima, la horrible" from noted Peruvian essayist Sebastian Salazar Bondy. (He was actually referring to the weather, but I'm sure he'd say the same thing about the traffic, were he alive today.)

Nevertheless, once we were healthy enough to say our tearful goodbyes with the parrot, we actually found that we enjoyed exploring Lima quite a bit. One of my favorite parts happened our first night out. Still in somewhat of a flu-y haze, we chose to go to dinner at a restaurant that our guidebook said was run by French Carmelite nuns. Walking up to its exterior, we were greeted by a closed gate, with a sign saying "We're open! Ring the bell!" Hmmm. We rang the bell and waited. Finally someone answered, "Sí?" I wasn't quite sure what to say. "Uh... para cena?" I stammered ("...for dinner?"). I suppose this was the right answer, as we were quickly buzzed in. Puzzling.

We were further confused as we were led to our table. "Bon soir!" they greeted us in French. Except my brain, which has been struggling to think exclusively in Spanish for the last 2 months, interpreted this as complete gibberish. She may as well have squawked at me like the parrot. The whole night, none of us could decide which language to speak in, so every conversation was conducted in a mix of French, Spanish, and English. The problem was that some of the nuns spoke Spanish but not much French, while others would address us mostly in French and a bit of English. I only speak some Spanish and no French at all, while Ross has no Spanish but a tiny bit of high school French. And everyone, trying to be polite, tried to speak the other person's preferred language, but nobody could decide what that was.

"Ready? Ça va?" approached a nun.
"Oui, merci," Ross responded, while at the same time I answered, "Sí, gracias!"

This continued the entire night, every interaction ending in laughter as the nuns tried to engage us in conversation and made fun of our stumbling around at every opportunity. I never knew nuns were so cheeky. (By the end of the dinner we started throwing some German and Russian into the mix, just for fun.) The food was outstanding - in fact, it was the only truly amazing meal we've had in Lima, despite our guidebook raving about this city as the "gastronomical capital of Peru." (I don't buy it for a second - even a gastronomical capital can't salvage the horror that is Peruvian food.) After dinner, the nuns gathered in the dining room to sing Ave Maria, all facing a picture of the Virgin Mary (which I'm sure the virgin appreciated). They handed out little cards with the lyrics printed in French and Spanish and invited everyone to sing along, but I didn't, because they sang in French, and it was a different version of Ave Maria than I was familiar with. (Neither of these things stopped Ross though. Perhaps his religious fervor was just too overpowering.) It was quite a touching moment and a perfect way to end a very bizarre, but absolutely lovely, dinner. The only better way would've been if I could've taken one of the nuns home with me to be my grandma. So cute!

To now turn in a completely different direction: Several weeks ago we promised that we would go to a museum filled with pottery made by the Moches, one of the most insane cultures that has ever lived. Artifacts that have been found from their culture suggest that the Moches were obsessed with sex and death (Freud's predecessors). For example, they would make 2 warriors from their culture fight it out to see who would be sacrificed. The loser would then be 'cleansed' for sacrifice by being forced to take San Pedro for a week straight. (Normally I would be all for that sort of fun, but to be on a hallucinogen for a week before being killed would probably be a bit of a downer.) Then he would be ritually anal raped and decapitated, after which (according to one theory) the priest would drink his blood. And that was only the beginning of the fun - their pottery frequently shows women being raped by pumas, women having sex with corpses, men with venereal diseases, and lots and lots of anal rape all around. So of course we were excited to go see this museum. And indeed, their pottery was more grotesque and fascinating than anything I've ever imagined. Observe:

Aaaand I think that is a good note on which to end. For more pictures of Lima, including many, many more pictures of pottery with cocks on it, click here.

Weeeeeeeee!

Wow, the last few days have been intense. Shit has been real up in here, as they say (or may not say anymore).

Right now Ross and I are in Iquitos, the largest city in the Amazonian jungle, only reachable by boat or plane. The humidity here is absolutely unbearable. It feels like you're trapped in a sauna that's been wrapped in llama wool, dragged through a forest fire, and then left sitting in a swamp. It's mildly uncomfortable. Fortunately we've decided that Iquitos will be the place where we splurge (because you have to have a good splurge every once in a while if you're going to survive a year of backpacking), so we got a hotel with air conditioning! Oh sweet, sweet air conditioning. Possibly the greatest invention known to man.

Past the heat and humidity, Iquitos is a difficult place to describe. It's the kind of place where, instead of driving cars, mom, pop, and 3 kids pile onto a motorcycle, sans helmets. Instead of squirrels hopping around the main plaza, there are giant rats. The marketplace offers sloths (as pets), larvae (as food), Valium, and Chicha next to the usual array of splayed chickens and fish (Chicha is a beer that is traditionally made by grounding corn, moistening it in the maker's mouth, and then forming balls to lay out to dry. In short, we've been calling it "spit beer," but despite that it's actually quite good). During meals, we've been approached by children begging for food, a boy selling quartz, and one drunk, overly enthusiastic waitress who insisted on hugging each of us on our way out (I didn't mind this at all - maybe we've been enjoying too much chicha). The people are beautiful and friendly, and the juice is so good it's like a smack in the face. It feels wild and unkempt, but also laid back and fun - completely removed from urban mores. Pictures would probably be a lot more successful at conveying a sense of what it's like, so I'll wait until we have those up instead of writing any more.

We've booked a guided tour into the jungle for 4 days. Tomorrow we take a motorboat down the Amazon river for 3 hours to our ENTIRELY SCREENED lodge. Ross's brother, Sean, just did a similar tour of the jungle last week, and was attacked by ants. ATTACKED BY ANTS. As in, one moment he was walking along being all British, the next moment there were ants down his shirt and in his hair, biting the shit out of him for committing the grave sin of brushing against their tree branch. He also reported that there is such a thing known as "sweat bees," which prefer to attack the nose and eyes. I'm slightly terrified of this aspect of the jungle. I completely flipped out when we had to sleep in a hostel that had a cockroach in it. Hopefully it will be like aversion therapy and I'll come back completely unaware that bugs even exist. After this is over I will laugh in the face of cockroaches! Ha ha! Or, alternatively, I will actually go insane and spend the rest of my life rocking back and forth, mumbling incoherently about screens. (We got nets to wear on our heads just to be sure this doesn't happen.)

However, according to Sean, the trip is totally worth the onslaught of bugs. Every day we will go bird watching at dawn. Then the afternoon will be filled with hikes to various regions to see monkeys, butterflies and hopefully bears or something. Those live in the jungle, right? According to Mowgli? We will also go fishing for piranha, and at night, do hikes to look for nocturnal animals like tarantulas and caimans. I'm excited - it sounds at once exhilarating and a bit nightmarish. I'm sure the reality will be something else entirely.

Today I had to go shopping for a long-sleeved shirt, because apparently those are somewhat handy in the jungle. It would've been good to have thought of that before actually being IN a city in the jungle. The fashion here, understandably, is to wear as little as possible. Store after store, people looked at me like I was nuts when I asked for shirts with long sleeves. When they did have one, all they had was one size, "standard," which may be standard if you're a petite, beautiful Peruvian jungle woman but was comically undersized on me. I felt like a big, pasty Godzilla, lumbering around their stores with pit stains bigger than some of their small children, scaring away all but the bravest of salesgirls. Fortunately everyone came out unscathed (except for my ego), and I managed to acquire 2 long-sleeved shirts. Huzzah!

Anyway, if we're not back by Friday, send help!

More pictures of Iquitos:

In which Marina learns that animals are scary

I probably should've waited another day before writing such a scathing review of Huaraz. Now I feel a bit bad. Oh well, at least they're all too poor for internet, so they'll never know! Joking.

To even things out, here is one nice picture of Huaraz:

We realized that because everything around here is so far away, and also because we are a teeny bit incompetent in the art of getting around rural Peru, that we should probably hire a guide next time we try to go somewhere interesting. That way we might actually be able to experience the scenery properly instead of coming home exhausted and bitter and rearing to leave the area as soon as humanly possible.

On that note, we got a guide to drive us to a rock forest called Hatun Machay, and it proved to be a fantastic decision. We got to learn fun little tidbits about South American culture from the guide: for example, there is a fierce rivalry between Ecuador and Peru. Peruvians call Ecuadorians 'los monos,' or 'the monkeys,' because during times of war they tend to hide in trees to shoot people. Meanwhile, Ecuadorians call Peruvians 'las gallinas,' or 'the chickens,' because during war they just run. Lovely.

Our guide was, no joke, the most talkative man in South America (strangely, that was listed in our guidebook), which forced my Spanish skills through an intensive bootcamp. During the course of the day I found out how to say such exciting words as "shrine," "carving," and "goat." That's the kind of thing you only learn in the school of hard knocks, baby. Of course, I can't remember any of them now except "goat" (cabra), but I think we can all agree it's still a success.

The rock forest was a massive collection of ancient rocks. Doesn't sound like the type of place that you'd drive 2 hours with a guide to see, I suppose, but it was amazing. It was finally a place that matched the natural beauty and weirdness of Icelandic landscapes. There are ancient carvings in some of the rocks from the cultures who inhabited them thousands of years ago. There are also several people who still live in little huts only several meters away from those carvings! Just when I thought it couldn't get any more rural, these bastards shatter my biases again. These huts are in the middle of the desert, many miles from any other people. How in the hell do people survive in these places? And WHY, for the love of god? Why live in a place where there are no people, no food, and no water? Of course, the scenery's great, but it's like... you could move to Huaraz and eat more roasted guinea pig than you could shake a stick at! Tempting, no? But of course, then you wouldn't be surrounded by rocks. Pros and cons.

Today made me realize how removed I've been from animals my entire life. (When we passed by a group of sheep, I shouted "Look, little baby sheep!" to which Ross responded "You mean 'lambs'?" Ah, yes. Those.) I've never seen donkeys, pigs, or cows in a wild environment before, and it was actually a bit frightening. You realize how incredibly big and strong these animals are, and how helpless you'd be if they decided they don't like the cut of your jib.

We kept a safe distance for the most part, but at one point we were both bent over looking at some pretty flowers (yes, we are tree-huggers) and I heard a slobbering noise right behind me. I knew it couldn't have been Ross, since he hardly ever slobbers, so I turned around to investigate, and I saw a cow (or a bull, I couldn't tell at that point - they both have horns! Who knew?) not 10 feet behind me! A possible BULL, RIGHT NEXT TO US, probably ready to eat us and everyone we hold dear. I was literally rendered speechless and just uttered a series of "Uh...uh... um...." in a terrified manner towards Ross. I suppose it's not often that I talk like that, because this made him realize something was wrong and he turned around. "What do we do?" I whispered. "Just back away slowly" was the obvious answer. As we backed away, we saw that it was merely a cow (I've never been happier to see udders in my life), and that she wanted nothing more than to chew some grass by where we were standing. Thank god. Near-death experience? I'm going to say yes.

Here is the cow that nearly killed us:

We've finally realized, at least, why everyone raves about this area. We probably should've just listened to reason and gotten a guide from the very start instead of assuming that we were cool enough to do it ourselves (we're not). We've been convinced to stay one more day to go see some ancient underground tunnels (woot!) and we'll probably be going with the same guide again, so expect more colorful Spanish words to come tomorrow.

The rock forest was an amazingly photogenic place, so we've added a lot more pictures to the album.

Huaraz: at least it's got oxygen

Okay, it's not often that a bus can be exciting enough to blog about, but today is one of those times. For our 9-hour overnight ride from Trujillo to Huaraz, we decided to splurge on the ultra-super-VIP, gold-covered, unicorn-fart bus. Not only did the plush, mattress-sized seats go all the way back, but we also got a blanket and a pillow, and not one of those static-y blankets that you get on airplanes, either, but a Peruvian, llama-wool cocoon of happiness. We were offered coffee and tea as soon as the bus started moving, and then they gave us a nectarine juice box and cake. CAKE. I half expected the stewardess to start offering everyone coke and lap dances to accompany the in-bus movie. (It turned out that I was not far off: as soon as we got to our hostel, after what turned out to be a TWELVE-hour ride, the host immediately welcomed us with mate de coca. Fortunately neither he nor his septuagenarian wife thought to offer us lap dances.)

If only the rest of Huaraz were so wonderful. The guidebook described Huaraz as a bustling metropolis next to ancient ruins, hot springs, and a gorgeous mountain range rife with trails, waterfalls, lakes, wildlife, and all that is good in the world. One of the peaks in this range is even rumored to be the mountain on the Paramount logo! Naturally, we found out the hard way that "bustling metropolis" is actually a euphemism for "tiny, rubble-strewn dump." And that "next to" actually means "3 hours away, down a dirt road, in a combi; Oh, and if you want to actually see anything before the clouds and rain roll in at 2pm, you have to wake up at 5am and be on your way by 6:30am. Have fun!" (We have since gotten a more specific guidebook.) We managed to do one day-trip to see one of the lakes, and found that although it was beautiful, it wasn't worth the excruciating pain in the ass (literally) of sitting in a combi for 6 hours to get there and back. (Perhaps Ross and I are a bit spoiled from the beauty of Iceland.)

Combis are a fascinating South American way of getting around. They're small buses that are meant to hold 12 people, but generally they stuff more like 20 in them. One guy 'drives' (I use the term loosely) while another, usually teenage guy hangs out the window, shouts their destination at pedestrians, and collects money when people hop on (and hop they must, for the combi will only stop for a maximum of .4 seconds to let people on). The first time we took one was quite intimidating. Ross and I were both shoved in with 2 other people in a 3-person seat, sitting right behind the driver on a bench facing everyone else on the combi, nervously guarding our pockets. Everyone was staring at us and we, in turn, were desperately trying to avoid eye-contact and communicable diseases while simultaneously trying to figure out how much and when to pay the prepubescent teen in charge of the fare. Directly across from us was a guy with a guinea pig in a bag on his lap. He was petting it and being somewhat affectionate, but because roasted guinea pig is such a common dish around here, we couldn't help but wonder if it was meant to be his afternoon snack.

(An interesting anecdote: When talking to one of our Peruvian guides about the combis, she asked us "What do you call the guy who hangs out the window and shouts?" as if it didn't even occur to her that this concept might not exist in Vancouver.)

By now, of course, we are nonchalant about it. We hail them from the side of the road like natives, palm down. We get incredibly annoyed if we're trying to hail one and it's already full. "They can still fit more people in there!" we shout with indignation. It's little things like that by which we proudly mark our progress from bumbling gringos to seasoned travelers. So it comes as no surprise that, while we felt comfortable enough to catch one up the mountain to see the lake, we quickly regretted our decision when we realized that 6 hours in one of these contraptions was about 5.5 hours too many. Maybe we're not so seasoned quite yet.

Our trip to the lake, although underwhelming, was a very good way to force some perspective on Huaraz. As the combi bumped along the dirt road up the mountain, we passed increasingly rural houses inhabited by increasingly poor locals. Many of the women were washing their clothes in tiny riverbeds... washing them as we went up, and 2 hours later, still washing them as we came back down. Damn. It made me appreciate even the cold showers we've had recently. Most of the houses lacked paint, fences, even windows; they were simply shelters made of wood or mud bricks. After that, Huaraz really did seem like a bustling metropolis.

However, perspective doesn't last. Today we weren't able to go anywhere because it's their election day, which means everything gets shut down, including the buses (and, delightfully, the infuriating parades). A gloomy mood came over us when we realized we were going to be stuck in Huaraz for the day ("Hey, at least there's running water" isn't consoling for very long), and we quickly started to crave any sort of distraction. It seemed like the perfect time to try the San Pedro cactus. This would've really turned things around and made for a great story, except that the cactus did absolutely nothing. I thought I was joking when I said that the guy probably sold us ground basil, except that the 'cactus' actually smelled like ground asparagus. So... there's that.



Tomorrow we're doing a tour of a rock forest 'nearby', and then making our way to Iquitos, a city in the middle of the Amazon jungle. That should provide a tad more inspiration. Perhaps soon you'll see a post about something other than cars and buses! That would be exciting.

Click here for more pictures of Huaraz and the 'surrounding' areas:

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Drugs, soup and witches

During breakfast, at the vegetarian restaurant across the street from our hostel (!) in Chiclayo, Ross noticed that there were bags of "coca" for sale behind the counter. We were surprised at first, but then remembered the guidebook mentioning that coca leaves are a legal and, in fact, important part of the culture in South America. (Which may explain the way people drive down here.) Natives chew the leaves or brew them into a tea to alleviate headaches, altitude sickness, hunger, fatigue, stomach pains, Kinda-Bored-Itis, and Not-Having-Enough-Fun-at-this-Party Syndrome. When we expressed interest in buying a bag, the waitress spent about 10 minutes offering advice and chatting with us about it. She spoke at great length about how she went to Cajamarca, had a headache because of the altitude, had a cup of coca tea, and BOOM! No headache. Had a stomach pain... Hey presto! Gone. (Incidentally, not a single person in Ecuador ever gave us advice or chatted with us. People here have been about 300 times friendlier than in Ecuador. They actually smile! And make jokes! And don't make me feel like I've raped their babies! Always a plus.)

To my parents and others who may worry: Unprocessed coca is about 100 times less potent than cocaine. It has roughly the same effect as a cup of coffee. So no worries, we probably won't turn up dead in a dumpster several days from now with an equally dead hooker and a donkey. (Although, somewhat relatedly, yesterday does mark the first day that I actually saw a man riding a donkey. Amazing!)

So we bought a bag of ground coca and took it back to our room to make a tea. Of course, because we have no way to boil water in our hotel room, we just mixed the coca with some bottled water and stirred it as vigorously as possible (which was not very vigorously). The result was a dark green, grainy, cold brew of disgustingness. We downed it anyway, just to see what it would be like, and eventually felt... absolutely nothing. Hmmmm. Not impressed.

Our main plan for today was to go explore La Mercada de los Brujos, or The Witches' Market. Because the next thing you want to do after trying coca for the first time is go haggle with some witches. (Un)fortunately, we had a hard time finding it because the guidebook's only 'guide' was that it was 'next to' the city's sprawling central market. And indeed, there is no other way to describe it except sprawling. Walking into this market was like what I'd imagine walking into the center of Delhi would be like. Local vendors had booths filled to the brim with every imagineable item, from bras and children's clothes, to pineapples and fish, to a metallurgy booth. The smells were, at times, overwhelming. People called out "Hola gringa! Gringa!!" trying to get my attention. Naturally. That is how I'd call a potential customer too. We even walked through a section of.... and here words fail me. Raw meat? Dead animals with flies buzzing all around them? Chickens cut open sideways so you could see all their organs? And that is when I had chicken blood squirted on my skirt as we walked. Mmm, yummy.

The "witch" part of the market was nowhere to be found (until we found it). Here people (or were they?) were selling herbs, candles, sacred shells, and shouting "Coca!" at us whenever we walked past. Now that is a better way to get a customer than "Gringa!!!!" (South Americans have a terrible affinity for shouting everything. On every corner there are people shouting what items they're selling. At the bus station there's guys shouting to advertise bus destinations. It's like, when I want strawberries I will come inquire about them. Likewise, shouting "QUITO QUITO QUITO QUITO QUITO QUITO QUITO QUITO" will not make me buy a bus ticket to Quito, it will just make me hate you a little bit more with each passing minute.)

Either way, we decided to buy some coca leaves to chew, since the ground coca that we'd made "tea" with earlier was such a disappointment that we were still curious. We read online that to chew coca leaves, you have to mix them with an alkaloid called "llipta" (pronounced YIP-tah) to release the coca more readily. When we asked for some, the lady selling it just poured some out into a bottle cap and handed it for us to try. Uh, no thanks. I'll take your word that it's good stuff.

The witches are my favorite people in South America so far.

One of the other herbs we decided to buy from the witches was San Pedro, a ground cactus that gives you mild hallucinations for about an hour. Hey, when in Rome, right? The man invited us into the secret back section of his booth to show us the product. We haggled him down to about $5, because if you pay any more than that for your hallucinogenic cactus then you're a sucker.

Armed with all our new goodies, we finally made it out of the market and went back home to try the loot. We watched several YouTube videos of people mixing coca leaves with llipta and chewing the mixture, just to make sure we weren't about to kill ourselves trying to do this. (God, I love the internet.) Finally we gathered the nerve to try it ourselves. The coca leaves had a nice, leafy taste to them, but mixed with the llipta, the whole thing tasted bitter and unpleasant. You chew the mixture a few times and then keep it in a ball in your cheek like a squirrel. After a few minutes, my cheek and throat started to go a bit numb. Ross felt nothing. After 20 minutes, Ross still felt nothing, and I felt nothing more than a mild deja-vu of being at the dentist. I have a suspicion the whole coca thing is a vast South American conspiracy on the gringos. Now I'm worried that the San Pedro we bought is going to turn out to be just ground basil. Damn Peruvians.

To finally switch gears from talking about drugs: for dinner we went to a restaurant where I was served cream of cream soup. I had asked for cream of asparagus, but I think they forgot to put in the asparagus. We decided to spice it up by adding some black pepper to it, since, hey, it doesn't get much worse than just cream for dinner. We added a normal amount of pepper, only to find that the soup tasted exactly as before. So then I added more. And more. We added what I conservatively estimate to be about 3 tablespoons of pepper and gingerly did a taste test, with absolutely no discernible difference. How is this possible? Is this soup another South American conspiracy on the white people? Does it actually have super-powers of creaminess? Is the pepper actually fake pepper, placed there to watch us squirm? (Travelling in places where we're the only white people for miles has started to make us quite paranoid. It seems like everyone is ripping us off or deliberately messing with our heads. Stop it, South Americans.)

Eventually the soup went from white to a dull grey color, but I still tasted nothing but cream. So the next logical thing was to chip off pieces of fried plantain (their version of potato chips) and make a little happy face in the soup. Sadly, the waitress did not appreciate our art and walked away with a scowl. We left money on the table and fled.

Dissatisfied with my dinner of 4 sips of soup, we decided to buy some fruit on the way back home. I was delighted to see that, among the apples, bananas, and oranges, there were also 2 fruits for sale that were new to me. Trying foreign fruit is one of my favorite things to do. It's so exciting having no idea what a food is going to look like when you open it, not knowing what texture it will have (usually it's fucking weird) or what it will smell or taste like. It's like a gustatorial adventure. I have never been disappointed doing this and tonight was no exception. Ross was just as excited, if not more so, because we were finally going to be getting to use the sporks that we bought specifically for this trip.

Overall a highly satisfying day in Peru, especially once I washed the chicken blood off my skirt.