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?"

Stockholm: Latin America Day

In November of last year, the New Yorker published a profile of Thomas Friedman that I only just read in January. In it, the famed author and journalist quotes economist Paul Romer:

"A crisis is a terrible thing to waste."

Romer's words could have easily served as the subtitle for Sweden's recent "Latin America Day," where the tone was one of hope and opportunity. The event, held at the Sveriges Riksdag (the Swedish parliament) in Stockholm, was a last-minute surprise during my February travels.

As part of my journey through Scandinavia, I made a five day stop in Sweden's island capital, where I was put up by His Excellency the Uruguayan Ambassador to Sweden, Norway, Finland, Denmark, Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania, and his wife. (Uruguay is a small country; apparently the Ministry of Foreign Affairs can afford to lump all the Scandinavian and Baltic nations under a sole diplomatic umbrella.) I know them as Manuel and Marta, friends of my mother's from their time in Miami at the Uruguayan Consulate. Marta, especially, developed a close friendship with my mother through their volunteer work with the Asociación de Mujeres Uruguayas de Florida (Uruguayan Women's Association of Florida). For any architects or engineers out there, Marta is also the daughter of famed Uruguayan Eladio Dieste who invented the Gaussian vault. You've gotta love the Uruguayan family tree; shake it hard enough, and you never know who might fall out.

From what I could observe, Manuel's job is as exhausting as it is stimulating. His presence (and, frequently, Marta's) is required at multiple diplomatic events on a daily basis: cocktails at the United Arab Emirates embassy, dinner with the Spanish, royal meet-and-greet at the Palace, not to mention responsibilities as mundane as riding the embassy car to the airport to pick up Uruguayan and Latin American VIPs. In his down time, Manuel removes his suit coat, kicks off his shoes, and stretches his wiry frame out on the plush couch in their living room, where he indulges in the daily cable broadcast of Cuéntame como pasó, a popular and long-running Spanish TV show that follows a family from the Franco years into the 1990s. Manuel's laptop is seldom far from his fingertips; he surfs the web in his stocking feet, alternating between BBC news and Mininova, the torrent downloading site where he downloads movies to watch when he is traveling.

Marta, with short clipped hair and a tan complexion even in the dead of Swedish winter, is still looking for more activities to occupy her time. She tells me, in that low, smoky voice characteristic of women from the River Plate region, that she misses the network of friends she left behind in Miami. And then she shows me the thick stack of diplomatic invitations, extended in ornate, stenciled writing to "His Excellency and partner," to dinners and receptions and teas and so on.

One of these invitations was to "Latin America Day," a day long conference featuring such notable Latin American specialists as Enrique Iglesias and Pierre Schori. On Manuel and Marta's enthusiastic offer (and because I miss the Latin Americanist environment), I decided to attend.

Latin America has always been of great importance to Sweden, and vice versa. When violent dictatorships ravaged much of the region's intelligentsia in the last century, many, particularly from South America, fled to the northern, amnesty-granting nation. And they remained there. Many even went on to become members of parliament

"The many Latin Americans who live in Sweden are an important asset to our society," began Gunnar Wieslander, State Secretary to the Minister of Trade, as he launched into his presentation entitled "Latin America and Sweden - a Broad Relation." He went on to note that "more students than ever study Spanish in Sweden." Latin America is "more important than our neighbor Russia, and more important, even, than the giant China." Wieslander's claim, though broad and not deeply explored in his key note address, was echoed both by his mastery of Spanish and his expert knowledge of the region (later showcased during the panel debate). He wrapped up his talk with an earnest request directed to the Latin American statesmen and businessmen in the room: "Please think of us as ready to work on equal footing."

Next up was superstar Pierre Schori, former Swedish Ambassador to the United Nations and recent author of the book "The Years of the Dragon´s Teeth - September 11, the Iraq War and the World after Bush." He was a member of the parliament back in 1982 when "Gabo" (Gabriel García Márquez) came to Stockholm to receive the Nobel Prize in Literature. Schori recalled how the Colombian Ambassador commenced ill-advised festivities by handing out bottles of rum to parliamentarians. Unfortunately, someone higher up decided it was "not appropriate" and put an end to the rum. "But I can assure you we all enjoyed it very much," Schori proclaimed, smiling at the audience.

His talk went on to address Latin American gains (a major theme throughout the conference) and the outlook for U.S.-Latin American relations. He remarked on poverty reduction in the region, signaling positive strides while noting that income gaps have widened. "La pobreza tiene color y es femenina," (Poverty has a color, and it is feminine) he added, highlighting where there is significant room for improvement.

Another trend, and one that has been concretized by the economic crisis, is that Latin America "speaks with its own voice," Schori said, borrowing Brazilian President Lula's recent words in Madrid after receiving the Cervantes Prize. This is in marked difference to the region's position in past crises. Now, Schori explained quoting OAS Secretary General José Miguel Insulza, there has been shift to "create policies with countries, not for them." On the subject of the U.S. and what Obama can do for Latin America, Schori was more cynical, citing Obama's already full plate (the state of the American economy, health care, and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan). Though he recognized the closing of Guantanamo, Schori cautioned against being overly optimistic: "A good signal would be for the U.S. not only to close Guantanamo but to hand it back to its rightful owners."

Enrique Iglesias followed Schori's talk by delving straight into the current global crisis, which he called the "perfect crisis." Why? "Consumers don't consume, investors don't invest, banks don't lend, and governments don't collect taxes." It is, Iglesias asserted, a "dramatic crisis of confidence...and the capitalist system depends on confidence."

In the last decade, Latin America has reaped the fruits of a "bonanza:" it "learned how to manage the economy" and joined the new world geography, exporting food, energy and metals. Consequently, the region saw an overall reduction of poverty from 45% to 35%, saved $450 billion in reserves, and currently boasts inflation and unemployment figures in the single digits, as well as stability. The crisis has brought with it a regrettable series of effects that threaten these tremendous strides. Tourism is down, as are remittances and commodities prices, and the region is feeling credit crunch.

"But Latin America is better prepared than ever to deal," Iglesias stated in an unequivocally positive tone. For the first time, "emerging markets are not part of the problem: they are part of the solution." What's more, Latin America posseses a great and unique asset: "Now is the time to activate integration," he urged. "A new world will emerge;" one in which "maybe we can tackle other problems." (A crisis is, indeed, a terrible thing to waste.) Amidst all these potential opportunities, Iglesias underscored the importance of keeping alive poverty reduction policies: "Ten points is a conquest, and it would be very dramatic if we lose that. If we return people to poverty." He concluded by impressing on us the singular chance offered by the crisis to not only put order in house economically but ethically. (To my knowledge, it is a rare thing to hear a key note speaker at a trade conference appeal to our sense of right and wrong while discussing economic policy.)

After Iglesias, Johan Schaar spoke on managing climate change as part of the new development agenda. Schaar, Director of the Commission on Climate Change and Development, also pointed to the interlinked nature of current crises (finance, climate, food, and energy) which offers us the opportunity to deal with them simultaneously. Stefan de Vylder, an Associate Professor of Development Economics, then stepped up to the podium and bemoaned "THE IRONY" of the current situation. How "the recipe today is the opposite of what it was" when Latin American countries were in economic turmoil. (For those of you unfamiliar with recent Latin American economic history, nations in financial crisis were sternly instructed to restrict their spending and follow an extremely austere fiscal regimen, as dictated by the IMF; of course now that developed countries are in crisis, these recommendations have been completely reversed. Spend, spend, spend and "stimulate" the economy, say the fiscal experts. What magnificent hypocrisy. Tsk tsk.)

De Vylder's somewhat tongue-in-cheek address, entitled "It Is Not Our Fault This Time! Latin America Coping With Past and Present Financial Crises," reiterated Latin America's relatively good position today: just last year, 70% of all reserves were in emerging and developing markets. Latin American banks, specifically, don't have toxic assets.

Whatever the post-crisis future brings, developing countries and markets will need to play a markedly stronger role. And there is reason to believe that this is a very good thing.