Its been a long time since I´ve written anything here, funny how settling in one place (Cochabamba) makes things seem more banal and less worth writing about. Getting stoned and watching The Yellow Submarine seems much more exciting just because it happened in a brand new city, La Paz. Which was an amazing city, I will really have to come back and get to know it better than I did staying in a grigo punk rock crash pad apartment for 3 nights and wandering around the city a bit.
Never was able to get my visa extended without traveling great distances and paying large sums of money, which doesnt seem worth it right now. It worked out though, after 3 months I was ready to leave, hard as it was. I loved the work I was doing; the more I got to know the kids I was working with the more I liked them. I had made some good friends, and really liked the city itself. I even met lovely lady (a Smith college graduate by coincidence) in my last week there, who I would have loved to get to know better (and hopefully will some day). But I had realized something during these 6 months of traveling: I really love circus; acro and juggling especially, and that means that I need to be somewhere where there are people far better than me to learn from. Cochabamba is not that place.
Luckily, in Cochabamba I had met Carlos, a teacher and performer from La Tarumba in Lima. La Tarumba is a circus school with over 25 years of experience, and judging by photos, videos, and seeing Carlos´stunning corde lisse act and taking his trapeze workshop, very high quality. And, get this: their 3 year professional program is free. Unheard of! I don´t know if i´m ready to live in Lima for 3 years, and besides, they're next class doesnt start until 2011. So i´m hoping i´ll be able to work something out to do a residency or something, for maybe a year. Not sure how flexible they are yet. But I´m pretty excited about La Tarumba.
So that´s why, after a few days in La Paz, I blew straight past the "can´t miss" tourist spots at Lago Titicaca, Cuzco, Machu Pichu, and came straight to Lima. I can always go back. I´m going to stay here in Lima for about a month to get to know the city and the school, spend another few weeks hiking the Cordillera Blanca, then head back to the states. I'll visit as many of y'all as I can in a couple months, replenish the bank account, then see about coming back to South America...
Monday, June 29, 2009
Inca Road
I´m reading Rob Gifford´s China Road: A Journey into the Future of a Rising Power. I expected a dry account of China´s economic and political policies, but its actually a fascinating and engaging account of a 3000 mile journey across Route 312, China´s "mother road." The author talks to everyone he can, taxi drivers, farmers, engineering students, immigrants, Taoist monks, and communist party members. From all these anecdotes, put into the context of thousands of years of history and culture, you get a great feel for the Chinese psyche.
In Lima, i´m meeting tons of people through couchsurfing.org. Right now i´m staying in a spare bedroom of a family that I would otherwise probably never exchange words with. Besides other travelers, young liberal activist types and circus folks, the people I would normally hang out with, I´m meeting upper middle class families, military types, adventure sport guides, etc. Reading China Road makes me realize what an opportunity this is to get a feel for the Peruvian outlook on their country. Unfortunately, I don´t the encyclopedic knowledge of Latin America that Gifford has of China, so its harder to put things in context and ask the right questions. I never was much interested in history in school, and hardly learned a thing about Latin America. Maybe because the United States is so stable, history never seemed so important. The political situation in South America, in contrast, seems much more raw and young. Peru is on its 5th constitution since 1900, and there are clamors for a new one; Bolivia´s current constitution is 5 months old. And though they´re all technically democracies, its a lot less "civilized" than the US. In the last couple weeks, demonstrations protesting recource extraction in the amazon left 50 dead (23 of them police officers), but did succeed in repealing 2 contraversial laws. It seems much more important to have an understanding of history to be able to sort it all out. Unfortunately, just as I start to learn a bit of the history of the country i'm in, I then move to a new country and have to start from scratch. Of course that is also what is fascinating about South America: there are so many countries side by side, sharing (to a greater or lesser extent) a cultural history, but with so many different models for governance and development. My reading list is huge, the availability of books in English is one thing i´m really looking forward to when I come back to the states. (Of course I should be reading more in Spanish, but its so slow right now i´m sticking with newspapers, novels, and other easy reading.) So much to learn!
In Lima, i´m meeting tons of people through couchsurfing.org. Right now i´m staying in a spare bedroom of a family that I would otherwise probably never exchange words with. Besides other travelers, young liberal activist types and circus folks, the people I would normally hang out with, I´m meeting upper middle class families, military types, adventure sport guides, etc. Reading China Road makes me realize what an opportunity this is to get a feel for the Peruvian outlook on their country. Unfortunately, I don´t the encyclopedic knowledge of Latin America that Gifford has of China, so its harder to put things in context and ask the right questions. I never was much interested in history in school, and hardly learned a thing about Latin America. Maybe because the United States is so stable, history never seemed so important. The political situation in South America, in contrast, seems much more raw and young. Peru is on its 5th constitution since 1900, and there are clamors for a new one; Bolivia´s current constitution is 5 months old. And though they´re all technically democracies, its a lot less "civilized" than the US. In the last couple weeks, demonstrations protesting recource extraction in the amazon left 50 dead (23 of them police officers), but did succeed in repealing 2 contraversial laws. It seems much more important to have an understanding of history to be able to sort it all out. Unfortunately, just as I start to learn a bit of the history of the country i'm in, I then move to a new country and have to start from scratch. Of course that is also what is fascinating about South America: there are so many countries side by side, sharing (to a greater or lesser extent) a cultural history, but with so many different models for governance and development. My reading list is huge, the availability of books in English is one thing i´m really looking forward to when I come back to the states. (Of course I should be reading more in Spanish, but its so slow right now i´m sticking with newspapers, novels, and other easy reading.) So much to learn!
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