A Maryland gringo in Humala's court

[Elok]

Hey, just checking in on you folks. I'm in Lima now, after a month of training/certification at a small institute in Cusco. Cusco was, I have to say, awesome. Sure, it's so high up that there's more dust than air, but the place has character, and character counts. This is going to be sort of a long post--just giving you fair warning.

Seasoned traveler's tip: if you happen to be in Peru and need help, consult an old lady. Peruvian abuelas are always looking out for the dumb lost gringo, and I believe they may be magical as well. You see them walking around bent over with loads bigger than themselves on their backs, wrapped up in big ol' striped blankets, and you wonder, how the hell is that physically possible? Are they part ant? It's hard to say. Also, there was one old lady who dressed in a full traditional cusquena outfit, with stripey red alpaca everything, then finished it off with a tall, white top hat. I kind of regret that I never actually met her, just saw her around. But I digress.

How does one begin to describe Cusco? It's a tourist town, of course, and people online recommend you go elsewhere for "the real Peruvian experience," but I say screw that noise. The secret of Cusco is that the tourist apparatus is just window dressing. If, like me, you don't have much interest in Inca ruins--if you don't feel like going to Machu Picchu with everybody else because you know you'll have to relieve yourself on the poor dead emperor's funeral estate due to the lack of servicios higienicos, and dammit, it's bad enough that his civilization was destroyed without generations of gawkers traveling thousands of miles to take a **** on his afterlife-party--if you don't care for that, the "real" Cusco is right there underneath.

Just step out of the hostel, ignore the gift shops along Avenida El Sol and go digging through side streets. There's a little shop out there with a bowl of chicken broth waiting for you. It has a dismembered, black-taloned chicken foot at the bottom, but trust me, it's a delicacy. Just don't look down when you feel the spoon scrape against something. To get to that shop, take a Cusco "bus." It's actually a refurbished, dented van with literally fifteen Peruvians stuffed in the back, crammed so close together that they can't move to look out the window during rush hour. But it's only sixty centimos a person.

Speaking of which, almost everything in Peru is dirt-cheap, at least if you dodge the "gringo tax." The currency is the nuevo sol, which equals something a little over $0.33, but not by much. S.\2.50 gets you a cab ride in Cusco, provided it's daytime and you're not going from one end of the city to the other. Seven and a half gets you a three-course meal at a lovely little creole restaurant (more about the food later, probably in a separate post) next door to an apartment the wife and I stayed at. It's funny how quickly you adjust; I decided not to go to a Brazilian rodizio my last night in Cusco because it was thirty-five for all you can eat. That's something like fifteen American dollars, FFS, and rodizio is good eating.

A better use for one's money in Cusco is El Molino ("the mill"), the city's gigantic black market. It's the size of a shopping mall, only all on one floor and every shop is a tiny little stall. I'm pretty sure that you can get absolutely anything below the size of a car, possibly including human organs, at El Molino. Three bootleg DVDs will set you back ten soles--it's the closest thing Cusco has to a movie theater. I saw the new X-men movie through the miracle of flickery Russian camcorder bootleg. I'm pretty sure it would have sucked even if it were a quality capture. Didn't anyone on set notice that The Beast looked like a character from Cats?

Coca is quite common. I stopped taking the tea after the soroche (altitude sickness) wore off, first because it tastes pretty gross and second because my wife said it gave me dog breath. However, there's no denying that the stuff is like spinach for one's inner Popeye, and if you can get yuppies to pay top dollar for that Indonesian weasel-poop coffee you ought to be able to create an American market for a cheap, safe little stimulant like coca. Sadly, our drug policy would never allow it. Alas.

I think that's about it for now, though I could yammer on for days, given the opportunity. Peru held its presidential elections while I was here. Actually, run-off elections. The first round of voting was a while back, and all the moderate candidates split the not-crazy vote, leaving a hard right-wing candidate and a hard left-wing candidate. Keiko Fujimori is the part-Japanese daughter of a former Presidente who happens to be in jail right now for human rights violations. Ollanta Humala is some sort of socialist who tried to oust Keiko's dad in a coup around 2000, and is/was a professed fan of Hugo Chavez. As somebody said after the first election, choosing between Keiko and Ollanta was like choosing between terminal cancer and AIDS. I think of it more as "daughter of the devil" vs. "friend of the devil." Anyway, the voters decided they preferred the friend of the devil, hence the title of this thread. There are a number of complex political reasons why he probably won't be able to make too many drastic changes right away, so that's something.

I'll write about the food next. Unless you beg me not too. Actually, probably even if you do.

[DanS]

Thanks for the travelers report, Elok. For some reason, the coca tea wasn't that much of a stimulant for me the first time that I had it, so I never repeated the experience.

[Elok]

I guess it's not really the stimulant effect that's the most valuable part; it's somewhat weaker than a cup of coffee. The real value is the boost to endurance. It knocks altitude sickness right out of the park, and it helped a lot when I got sick too. I can easily think of a few medical applications for coca back in the states. I even wonder if perhaps a derivative could assist with asthma.

[Barnabas]

The Inca period was a very short period of the History of the precolumbian Amerindian civilizations of the Andes. The Incas begun expanding less than 60 years before Columbus discovered America.

Some cool non inca ruins would be Chan Chan, which I would advise visiting if you want to do some tourism. The Museum of the lord of Sipan is good too. Lima also has good colonial architecture, it was the most important South American city during the Spanish Empire, the Capital of the Viceroyalty.
Lake Titicaca would be good too.

The beaches in Peru are not good, the water is cold because of the Humboldt Current.

On Humala, he presented himself in the past as a pro Chavez candidate, and he lost elections because of that.

He had to turn to the center and show, or at least pretend to show, that he is closer to a Lula da Silva (the ex president of Brazil, moderate modern leftist) and not a Peruvian Chavez in order to win the election.

I don't think he will become a new Chavez. The majority of the electorate is free-tradeish, Humala won only because Kimiko is the daughter of Fujimori.

[C0ckney]

cool man, nice to hear you're enjoying yourself and not paying too much gringo tax! it's rodízio btw.

how are you finding the lingo? have you started teaching yet?

[Elok]

I just finished certification in Cusco. I did some practical teaching--it ended with six Peruvians singing "As Tears Go By" along with me and Mick Jagger--but no actual teaching yet. I have an interview with a nice-sounding institute here in Lima tomorrow (I went to Lima because it has the country's only Orthodox church; otherwise I would gladly have stayed in Cusco).

[Elok]

Now, Peruvian food: actually a pretty complex subject.

Pollo a la Brasa translates to something like "charcoal chicken." Some people will tell you that ceviche is Peru's national dish, but that's nonsense. Ceviche might be a distant third on the most-popular-foods list. Wherever you go in Peru, from the jungles to the mountains to the coast, it's a safe bet that you will never be more than half a mile from a place selling pollo a la brasa, and generally you'll be much closer than that.

So, what is it? It's the best damned chicken I've ever had. They marinate it somehow, apparently for a long time since the flavor soaks down to the bone, and then roast it on a spit. I can tell you that the marinade involves salt and pepper somehow, but I don't know the details. It's lovely and greasy and the skin is always nice and crisp. There are places that sell nothing but pollo a la brasa with fries and a skimpy excuse for a salad: you go in, order an eighth or quarter of a chicken, and the cook pulls it off the spit, hacks it to bits with a huge cleaver, and hands it to you. Those places do very good business.

Fun trivia: Pollo a la brasa, according to Wiki, was actually invented by a Swiss cook in the fifties. There are two lessons to be learned from this. The first is that Peru's society is cosmopolitan, always willing to try out new ideas and make them its own. The second is that Peruvians love any approach to meat that involves spicing it till it begs for mercy. I believe some Peruvians would not recognize the taste of unspiced meat. They'd think it was some kind of bizarre vegetable.

Next in popularity is chifa, though I don't really get the charm. Chifa is just Peru's version of Chinese food, and here in Lima there's almost literally a chifa place on every corner. I've tried it at a bunch of places, but for the most part it seems to be a somewhat tame version of the stuff we get in the states. You almost invariably start with "wantan" soup (the wantan in question never seems to be filled, it's just a big wad of noodle), then on to chaufa (fried rice), tallarin (noodles), or aeropuerto (noodles with bean sprouts; they call it "airport" for reasons I cannot fathom). There's also about a dozen variants on sweet and sour. No fried dumplings, no crispy beef, not even cheap crud like orange chicken. Just a bunch of blah permutations on the stir-fry, plus sweet and sour. I'm going to keep trying chifa, in case I've simply been hitting dud restaurants, but it's not looking promising.

Ceviche is raw fish soaked in lime juice. I'd love to comment, but I'm allergic to fish and my wife, being pregnant, doesn't care to risk parasites. If you like sushi, but always though it could stand to be more sour, I guess Peru has you covered. Ceviche is generally sold in little seafood restaurants with squid and other fish dishes--cebicherias, they call them. They, uh, like it here, I suppose. Lord knows it's common enough.

Comida Criolla. Peruvian creole has a charm all its own. As a rule, creole food consists of a meat, a thick sauce and a mound of rice, though there are exceptions. Peru being the ancestral home of the potato, french fries are exceedingly common as well. Some notables:

*Lomo Saltado. Like chicken caesar salad in the states, you can get lomo saltado almost everywhere. Wiki lists it as an example of chifa, but you're far more likely to see it at a creole place. Certainly it appears to have a strong Chinese influence, though. It's beef, onion and tomatoes stir-fried, served atop a mound of fries and next to a pile of white rice. If I don't know what else to get and I'm not feeling adventurous, I order lomo saltado. It can be very good, and it's really hard to screw up entirely.

*Anticucho. The word looks Spanish, but it's supposedly derived from native Quechua words. Anticucho is a street food: meat on a stick. The most popular kind is cow heart, which can be good, but there's also a chicken-and-sausage mix. The latter is superb (they tend to overcook the heart, IMO). For some reason, they always skewer a whole potato on the end, but after being roasted on a little sidewalk grill the poor spud is so dry it sticks to the roof of your mouth. I have no idea how they can eat it.

*Tacu-tacu. I just had tacu-tacu this morning. I expected some kind of Peruvian taco, based on the name. Instead I got a colossal mound of rice, onions and beans fried together, then molded into a sort of loaf. A dimple at the top contains a mildly spicy green sauce which I think might have been aji, the popular garlic sauce. Not sure, though, since aji tends to vary a lot from place to place. Tacu-tacu is pretty bland by itself, but not bad if you make use of the limes and hot sauce creole restaurants provide as condiments with every meal. If a Peruvian meal ever seems bland, use the limes.

*Salchipapas. Ugh. A cutesy portmanteau of salchipa, "sausage" and papas, "potatoes," Salchipapas is a fairly popular, exceedingly cheap little fast-food concoction of fries and sliced hot dogs. It's not really creole, but I didn't know where else to list this. They sell it in every lower-end dining establishment, and it has all the appeal of a Taco Bell burrito.

*I did not try the cuy al horno (guinea pig roasted whole in an oven), because I used to have a guinea pig. Also, they serve the thing intact, with its little mouth stretched open in what looks like a grimace of agony. No thanks. I once tried alpaca as a substitute for beef in lomo saltado; however, due to the spicing I didn't notice a real difference in flavor.

For beverages, you have a lot of fun choices. They don't do coffee so much here, but they drink a lot of tea. A local favorite is black tea with cinnamon and cloves, as are a variety of herb teas such as anise and chamomile. And coca, they like the coca tea. Chicha (corn beer) is less common than you'd think, given its long heritage. Chicha morada is much easier to get--it's purple corn extract, cinnamon, and a bunch of fruit juices mixed together in a funny, but decent, soft drink. Given a choice, I'll often just ask for a nectar de durazno, which is sweetened peach juice. The stuff is incredibly addictive.

If you want hard stuff, the "official" alcoholic beverage of Peru is the pisco sour. Peru had some ongoing feud with Chile over which country invented the drink, but its primary ingredient, Pisco, is from the Peruvian town of the same name. It's fermented from grape must, the stuff they use to make balsamic vinegar, IIRC. Mix that with bitters, simple syrup and lime juice, add ice, and you've got a pisco sour. I've only had it once, since I don't drink often. It's not bad.

Okay, that's enough for now. My fingers are going to fall off.

[Elok]

Holy farglesnot, that's a big post. I wonder if anyone will read it?

[Provost Harrison]

I was in Lima last year with work for a few weeks. Very good seafood. But the weather is weird. Desert, yet always foggy or cloudy. None of that water ever touches the ground. I did get a visit to Cusco and Machu Picchu for a weekend. Not really enough to do it all justice, but such is travelling with work. Would like to do it properly again.

[Provost Harrison]

Speaking of food, I remember eating "anticuchos". It was very nice. I looked closely at the menu and noticed it was "corazon" which was a bit of a surprise. Very nice though

[Dinner]

The Inca period was a very short period of the History of the precolumbian Amerindian civilizations of the Andes. The Incas begun expanding less than 60 years before Columbus discovered America.

Yeah, but Andian civilization had been going since before agriculture was independently invented there (one of the few places in the world which independently came up with agriculture) because coastal fishing was so productive there. Sadly, each Andian group tried to destroy the evidence of the groups which came before it and the Incas were no different so they either destroyed evidence of previous groups (like the Moche) or they modified stuff they left behind so that the Inca could claim credit for it. That sucks from an archiological perspective as it makes learning about pre-Inca groups a lot harder. Still, it is amazing they were as advanced as they were (in some ways the most advanced part of the Americas) even though they only had crops which weren't all that productive (well, some where and some weren't but it wasn't a complete package or as highly productive as Asian, European, or even African agriculture), they had only four domestic animals none of which were used in farming and who didn't provide much meat, and which lacked things like currency or even writing. They did have copper and bronze working though which makes them unique in the Americas in that respect.

[Dinner]

Elok, tell me about the potatoes. I hear there are many varieties of potato which are grown only in Peru and no where else but which are common in most markets. Supposedly taste, color, size, and shape are all different while some are soft and others hard so they can be used differently in cooking. Lastly, tell us about the roast guinea pig.

*Tacu-tacu. I just had tacu-tacu this morning. I expected some kind of Peruvian taco, based on the name. Instead I got a colossal mound of rice, onions and beans fried together, then molded into a sort of loaf. A dimple at the top contains a mildly spicy green sauce which I think might have been aji, the popular garlic sauce. Not sure, though, since aji tends to vary a lot from place to place. Tacu-tacu is pretty bland by itself, but not bad if you make use of the limes and hot sauce creole restaurants provide as condiments with every meal. If a Peruvian meal ever seems bland, use the limes.

The green sauce is probably Chimi Churi.

[DaShi]

Hey, just checking in on you folks. I'm in Lima now, after a month of training/certification at a small institute in Cusco. Cusco was, I have to say, awesome. Sure, it's so high up that there's more dust than air, but the place has character, and character counts. This is going to be sort of a long post--just giving you fair warning.

Seasoned traveler's tip: if you happen to be in Peru and need help, consult an old lady. Peruvian abuelas are always looking out for the dumb lost gringo, and I believe they may be magical as well. You see them walking around bent over with loads bigger than themselves on their backs, wrapped up in big ol' striped blankets, and you wonder, how the hell is that physically possible? Are they part ant? It's hard to say. Also, there was one old lady who dressed in a full traditional cusquena outfit, with stripey red alpaca everything, then finished it off with a tall, white top hat. I kind of regret that I never actually met her, just saw her around. But I digress.

How does one begin to describe Cusco? It's a tourist town, of course, and people online recommend you go elsewhere for "the real Peruvian experience," but I say screw that noise. The secret of Cusco is that the tourist apparatus is just window dressing. If, like me, you don't have much interest in Inca ruins--if you don't feel like going to Machu Picchu with everybody else because you know you'll have to relieve yourself on the poor dead emperor's funeral estate due to the lack of servicios higienicos, and dammit, it's bad enough that his civilization was destroyed without generations of gawkers traveling thousands of miles to take a **** on his afterlife-party--if you don't care for that, the "real" Cusco is right there underneath.

Just step out of the hostel, ignore the gift shops along Avenida El Sol and go digging through side streets. There's a little shop out there with a bowl of chicken broth waiting for you. It has a dismembered, black-taloned chicken foot at the bottom, but trust me, it's a delicacy. Just don't look down when you feel the spoon scrape against something. To get to that shop, take a Cusco "bus." It's actually a refurbished, dented van with literally fifteen Peruvians stuffed in the back, crammed so close together that they can't move to look out the window during rush hour. But it's only sixty centimos a person.

Speaking of which, almost everything in Peru is dirt-cheap, at least if you dodge the "gringo tax." The currency is the nuevo sol, which equals something a little over $0.33, but not by much. S.\2.50 gets you a cab ride in Cusco, provided it's daytime and you're not going from one end of the city to the other. Seven and a half gets you a three-course meal at a lovely little creole restaurant (more about the food later, probably in a separate post) next door to an apartment the wife and I stayed at. It's funny how quickly you adjust; I decided not to go to a Brazilian rodizio my last night in Cusco because it was thirty-five for all you can eat. That's something like fifteen American dollars, FFS, and rodizio is good eating.

A better use for one's money in Cusco is El Molino ("the mill"), the city's gigantic black market. It's the size of a shopping mall, only all on one floor and every shop is a tiny little stall. I'm pretty sure that you can get absolutely anything below the size of a car, possibly including human organs, at El Molino. Three bootleg DVDs will set you back ten soles--it's the closest thing Cusco has to a movie theater. I saw the new X-men movie through the miracle of flickery Russian camcorder bootleg. I'm pretty sure it would have sucked even if it were a quality capture. Didn't anyone on set notice that The Beast looked like a character from Cats?

Coca is quite common. I stopped taking the tea after the soroche (altitude sickness) wore off, first because it tastes pretty gross and second because my wife said it gave me dog breath. However, there's no denying that the stuff is like spinach for one's inner Popeye, and if you can get yuppies to pay top dollar for that Indonesian weasel-poop coffee you ought to be able to create an American market for a cheap, safe little stimulant like coca. Sadly, our drug policy would never allow it. Alas.

I think that's about it for now, though I could yammer on for days, given the opportunity. Peru held its presidential elections while I was here. Actually, run-off elections. The first round of voting was a while back, and all the moderate candidates split the not-crazy vote, leaving a hard right-wing candidate and a hard left-wing candidate. Keiko Fujimori is the part-Japanese daughter of a former Presidente who happens to be in jail right now for human rights violations. Ollanta Humala is some sort of socialist who tried to oust Keiko's dad in a coup around 2000, and is/was a professed fan of Hugo Chavez. As somebody said after the first election, choosing between Keiko and Ollanta was like choosing between terminal cancer and AIDS. I think of it more as "daughter of the devil" vs. "friend of the devil." Anyway, the voters decided they preferred the friend of the devil, hence the title of this thread. There are a number of complex political reasons why he probably won't be able to make too many drastic changes right away, so that's something.

I'll write about the food next. Unless you beg me not too. Actually, probably even if you do.

Was this your writing assignment for your training?

[Zoetstofzoetje]

ceviche ftw, that's good stuff yo

[Elok]

Elok, tell me about the potatoes. I hear there are many varieties of potato which are grown only in Peru and no where else but which are common in most markets. Supposedly taste, color, size, and shape are all different while some are soft and others hard so they can be used differently in cooking. Lastly, tell us about the roast guinea pig.

Well, there are indeed a crap-ton of different varieties. You can go to a market and find a number of them--the Mercado Virgen Assunta in Huancaro, for example, has an entire quarter of its area devoted solely to potatoes. You can tell at least a few varieties apart by color and shape. Sadly, we only got to cook one variety; our apartments weren't really set up for proper cooking, just a gas range and a few rickety pots. With that and the drinking water problem it was a pain in the ass cooking anything, so we mostly just ate out. The fries you get in restaurants all seem to be of the same variety fries in America are made of, or else a very similar one. Maybe that's an affect of American culture rubbing off or something, I don't know.

Cuy (the Peruvian name for guinea pig) is a somewhat common dish. They usually just roast the things whole, like real pigs at a luau. You can go to the market at Plaza Tupac Amaru in Cusco on weekends and they'll have a whole mini-restaurant set up with stacks of roast cuy on spits. The hair's gone, but they're sitting there with their faces scrunched up and their mouths gaping open, piled like cordwood. A wee piggy holocaust. They're all reddish. I'm told the meat is rather sweet, but like I said, I didn't touch the things. Sorry I can't be of much help.

PH, it's actually been raining off and on the last couple of days here. It might just be that you visited at a different time of year? Funny thing is, this is supposed to be the start of the dry season, or so I thought. It was certainly dry in Cusco--didn't rain once the whole month. Who knows? The temperature is certainly nice, though. I hear it's like May in Maryland, year-round.

The best anticuchos I've had so far were sold at the Lima airport, believe it or not. This little shop in the food court was selling them, and those were the only anticuchos de corazon I've had with decent-sized hunks of meat, with a little red in the center. Juicy and delicious. Of course, that might mean they modified the recipe to suit my bozo American tastes, and proper anticuchos should be little ribbons. Oh well. Also at the airport food court: a restaurant called Manos Morenas, which translates to "black woman hands." I'd assume my dictionary was at fault, except it has a 'do-rag wearing cartoon mascot beside the name. It appears to be something of a chain. I believe they'll have problems if they try exporting it to the Estados Unidos, where more than one person in 1500 is black.

BTW, if any of you live in the D.C. area, there's a chain called Perchi's ( www.perchismd.com , I think) that serves Peruvian food. I went to the one in Glen Burnie before I left, and it was pretty good. Pollo a la brasa, lomo saltado, bisteck a lo pobre...no anticuchos, though.

DaShi, if it was such a wall of text, why did you quote the whole thing? Sheesh.