Burning books in Arica

I made a detour through the north of Chile after visiting the salt flats and lagunas in southwest Bolivia. Two days and one night in Arica, a surfing hot spot and beach destination for Chileans. Even in the [South American] winter!

I stayed with Brian at the Doña Inés hostel.

"Roberto and his staff look forward to welcoming you at the Arica hostel, one of the HI network of hostels in Chile, which is located 2km away from the city center of Arica. Make the most of your trip - with outdoor BBQs, paragliding, surfing and paintballing - you'll never be short of things to do! The laid-back hostel hosts late breakfasts, kitchen facilities, a common room, a ping-pong table and hammocks for relaxing days! Hostel rooms include mini-refrigerators, TVs and private bathrooms."

(From the hostelling international website)

(Photo from my bedroom)

The Doña Inés is a special place. Aside from having hosted the 4 Lesbian Princesses (see above), it is the main residence of one Don Roberto, owner and chief reprobate of the Doña Inés domain. Roberto prescribes activities and drinks to his guests like a Doctor of Fun; no one departs the hostel without leaving a tangible mark, be it on the wall of photos behind the reception or the graffiti that encrusts every available surface. The lucky ones acquire nicknames (see again the 4 Lesbian Princesses).

I've met fellows like Roberto before: older party animals that can talk up a door knob (so long as there's liquor). So what stood out wasn't the fact that he has a Brazilian girlfriend 20 years younger. Or that, in spite of his girlfriend, he still seemed lusty enough to shag the cute, blue-eyed, and very male British apprentice he'd hired in the last month (Robert, aka the Gay Roberto). What I took away from my time at Doña Inés was a story Roberto shared with me and Brian over Piscolas.

It seems Roberto is a keen observer of reading habits, especially amongst today's youth. (Can't say that I blame him - I consider myself privileged to live in a city where I can pretend to know someone on the subway based on the book they're reading, since two out of three Boston commuters actually read...!)

It also seems he once came across a German guest lazing on one of the hostel's hammocks and thumbing through a German copy of Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code.

"When I saw this, I said, this fucking guy. You have to be fucking kidding me. This fucking guy, he's German, he can read Goethe, or Kafka, or Herman Hesse, or Thomas Mann. And he's sitting here, in my hammock, and he's reading the fucking Da Vinci Code. So I said no way, man, I said, no fucking way."

What did you do? Brian and I asked.

"I'll tell you, I took his book from him. That fucking Dan Brown bullshit. I took it outside, and I took my lighter, and I burned it. I burned that fucking book in front of that fucking guy."

Oh, the horror. Oh, the admiration.

Trashy thoughts

Vix is a thirty-something year old Mexican sculptor. He lives in Lima. Before Lima, he lived in Valladolid. He loves women. He also loves kids, and he teaches a series of art workshops for children near his home in Barranco. He is lean. He isn't short, about 5 feet 10 inches. He has brown skin and a mop of brown curls that spill over his forehead and veil his sharp, black gaze. His whole body feels primed with a restless, anxious energy, and when he laughs his voice leaps to an unnatural pitch (think Tom Hulce in Amadeus).

He is one of the more interesting people I've met in my life.

This isn't going to be a long post about Vix, his life story, his work, his philosophy, whatever. Vix was kind enough to take me and Sergey out for a night in Lima. We drank Cusqueña beer and ate beef hearts (anticuchos). We traded conversation about our own hearts, their frailties, their deceptions, their power to contract and to expand, to break and to mend. We went to a local bar, drank pisco, and called it a night. The end.

Instead, I want to share a simple but intriguing observation. Vix works with what most consider to be trash. Trash is his medium. He walks the streets of Lima in search of junk, debris, and scraps. A piece of a tailpipe. A discarded light bulb. A flat rubber tire. A metal pole. He harvests the excess bits and pieces of daily urban life and turns them into art.

Vix has been working with this medium since his time in Spain. But the work is harder in Lima.

Why? I asked.

In Valladolid, it was easy to come across scraps in the street. People parted easily with what they deemed "junk." Surrounded by cheap and easy access to goods, they left their tailpipes and their tires by the wayside.

But in Lima, people horde their trash. If a car's tailpipe breaks off in the street, chances are another driver will pick it up and keep it for his own repairs. Finding finding raw materials for Vix's art is thus a challenge in this city.

I wonder what would happen if we started judging our civilization by what it throws away?

(For more on Vix, check out his blog.)

Served with the tit: and I'm back...briefly

So, I lied when I said I'd be back in June.

July didn't feel right either.

It's the end of August, the schizoid Boston summer is drawing its last gasps, and I'm finally, FINALLY getting around to updating this public log of lettered masturbation.

If there was anyone out there actually reading, my apologies.

I have a few posts pending before I launch into a reformulated version of Epicurean Piggy. (Still working on what that will be, since I'm chained to a desk job in Cambridge for at least the next year.) We should pick off where I left off. Post-vaccinations and post-France, but before my reentry to grown up working life. The 3-week interval that (mercifully) padded my departure from Saint-Etienne and the return to the 9-5 grind.

My journey to the Andes, to the land of Inka Kola, salt flats, and coca leaves. An indirect journey, since to get to just about anywhere in South America, travelers typically fly through one of three "portals": LAX, Houston, or MIA.

Mi-yami International Aeroport. The first airport I ever flew from. Probably, the airport I know the best in the world. I've flown out of MIA as a baby shit-machine, a pajama-clad toddler, an awkward unibrowed pre-teen, and an awkward-er teenager (apparently, there's only so much separating your eyebrows can do to up your cool quotient). In my twenties, I've probably flown in/out/and through MIA close to thirty times.

So I know it well.

And yet, there's a particular phenomenon that still catches me off guard each time I step off a plane and walk past the pink flamingos, mounted tropical fish, and palm trees that class up the joint. I head to the nearest Starbucks for a caffeine fix, I stand in line, and I observe this exchange.

Starbucks employee: What would you like?
Customer: Deme un café y un blueberry muffin, please.
Starbucks employee: Señora, there's no más blueberry muffins. Le puedo offer uno de apple cinnamon.
Customer: No, entonces un bagel con cream cheese, por favor.
Starbucks: Son cuatro dollars and siete cents.

Spanglish, not English or Spanish, is the ruling language in this town. Miamians occupy a unique linguistic space where even white people sound Latin and Hispanics forget that "parquear" is not, in fact, the Spanish equivalent of "park."

If I told you my house was ubicated by the river, would you know what I was talking about?

This is one of the big drawbacks to being fully billingual: you become too comfortable slipping in and out of multiple languages, and sooner or later they begin to fuse together in your brain.

Here is another example: as a child, I often made the mistake of telling my cousins I was embarazada. What I hoped to communicate to them was that I was embarrassed. What they heard was that I was pregnant. The two are what the French call faux amis - false friends (or cognates) in English.

The latter is my favorite type of billingual misfire. False, and often inappropriate, friends. And as a Miamian through and through, I thought I'd heard the best of the best.

Wrong.


The frowning gentleman you see above is my friend Sergey, a Russian, raised part in the Old Country and part in Amerika. You know how there are people who are bitten by the travel bug? Sergey was bitten by the travel python. He quit his job two years ago to travel across Asia and the Middle East. He returned to the U.S., deferred his entrance to business school, and kept on traveling; this time around South America. I met up with Sergey in Lima, the first leg of my Andean adventure. Fresh from Colombia and Ecuador, Sergey came to me a newly minted Spanglophile, wearing stories of linguistic missteps like badges of honor.

Sergey is (un)luckier than most: he speaks English and Russian like a native, French like a respectable Russian, and now, Spanish. This means that his misfires run the risk of being more powerful than most folks (picture tiny armies of English, Russian, French, and Spanish neurons chasing each other all around the left side of his brain). Our first day together, he told me the following story.

Sergey is in the Medellin sky tram, in Colombia. He's packed tightly in the car with a handful of other internationals; the rest of the tram riders are locals. Sergey is deep in a discussion about Colombian fare: specifically, seafood. It appears there is a local fish that is considered a delicacy. Sergey wants to know more. He wants to ask how the fish is served. If it is served whole. With the head.

Sergey thinks he remembers the word for "head" in Spanish. He "makes memory" (hacer memoria, sorry, I couldn't resist). He scans his mind. There's the word! It travels from his brain to his mouth, and he asks:

"Se sirve con la teta?"

The tram explodes with laughter. Sergey is confused. For a moment. And then, that pale creamy skin of his turns dark crimson.

The thing is, Sergey happened on the French word for head. La tête. In Spanish, it is la cabeza. But to say teta in Spanish, is to give the question an entirely different meaning.

"Is it served with the tit?"