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?"

Piggy on sabbatical

My time in France is nearly up. I've got two weeks with the little ones before boarding my plane back to the U.S. and A. Where I will promptly board another plane bound to South America. Lima, to be exact. Followed by Cusco, La Paz, San Pedro de Atacama, Arica, and Miami.

I'll skip over the logic (or lack thereof) I've exercised in taking yet another trip without job or a solid savings cushion to fall back on. To avoid major freak out, I'm attempting to follow Dave the Scot's "Two Rules of Life."

Rule number one: Never worry about the small things.
Rule number two: Everything in life is a small thing.

(As a sidenote, do you ever need help justifying a ludicrous trip to yourself? Use this foolproof affirmation: My prospective trip to [insert exotic destination here] is a once in a lifetime opportunity. For instance, my prospective trip to the Falkland Islands is a once in a lifetime opportunity. Or, my prospective trip to Greenland is a once in a lifetime opportunity. Say it out loud, and stress once in a lifetime! It works, trust me.)

The fact remains that, for better or for worse (and I'd venture to say for better), I will be Andes-bound on May 20th.

Here is a map.

The reason I've provided said map is twofold. First, and don't be offended, because I know that South American geography isn't an emphatic component of American education. Second, because this is a special map. Can you find Peru and Bolivia? Sweet. Can you see what color they are? Correct! Yellow! And not as in sunny or hot. As in fever, the yellow kind.

Traveling to Andean regions requires immunization against a slew of deadly diseases. These include Hepatitis A and B, Tetanus, Typhoid, and Yellow Fever. As of yesterday, I was missing three: Hep A, Typhoid, and Yellow Fever. I probably could have waited to get my shots, but French medicine being what it is (socialized and awesome), I opted to surrender my naked shoulders to French nurses and get them all in Saint-Etienne.

Yellow Fever is only provided at the Hospital. I had to call and make a rendez-vous with the Service des Maladies Tropicales (Tropical Diseases). Fairly simple and straightforward. I booked an appointment and showed up as planned. And aside from the somewhat terrifying nature of being in a French public hospital, specifically, in the Department of Tropical Diseases, where the waiting rooms are papered with fliers about Bird Flu and Dengue and Malaria, my first shot went off without a hitch.

Hepatitis A and Typhoid, on the other hand, are done at the Centre de Vaccinations (Vaccination Center). Or so I was led to believe. I had called before to make sure, since there is some still incomprehensible rule about getting a Yellow Fever shot the same day as your other shots (otherwise you have to stagger it?), and I was assured by an amiable voice that the Centre de Vaccinations was the place to go.

So I showed up after lunch, chock full of Yellow Fever and eggplant and goat cheese pizza from Chez Franco. I walked into the waiting room filled with parents and their sullen children watching educational cartoons on a wall-mounted TV.

Je peux vous aider?

Can I help you? I was asked by a smiling woman.

Yes, I replied, I'm here for my Hep A and Typhoid vaccines.

Smiling woman: Vous les avez acheter? (Did you buy them?)

Me: Non, j'ai appelé il y a quelque semaines, et on m'a dit de venir aujourd'hui. (No, I called a few weeks ago and was told to come in today.)

No longer smiling woman: Comment ça? Attendez un instant, madame. Je vais vous faire parler avec ma collègue. (How's that? Please wait a moment, ma'am. I'm going to have you speak with my colleague.)

Fine, I thought. I have to pay for them first, apparently.

Minutes later, I was in the front office speaking with la collègue.

Me: Alors, je suis içi pour les vaccins contre l'hépatite A et la typhoïde. (So, I'm here for the vaccines against Hep A and Typhoid.)

La collègue: Mais vous ne les avez pas acheter? (But you haven't bought them.)

Me (beginning to get pissed off): Non, mais je peux les acheter maintenant! (No, but I can buy them now!)

La collègue (pausing): ... Mais il faut les A-CHE-TER. (But you have to BUY THEM.)

Me (officially pissed off, FUCK this lady is such a condescending asshole): Et bien, je peux les A-CHE-TER MAINTENANT. (Yes okay, I can BUY THEM RIGHT NOW.)

Okay, so as it turns out, I'm the asshole. The asshole who failed to process the subtle difference between acheter and payer (buy and pay). Because in France, you have to buy your vaccines at a pharmacy. And then bring them to a Vaccination Center. And have someone do the shooting up for you.

It's a depressing moment indeed when you realize that even though you've lived in a country for over six months and spoken the language and feel integrated and confident about your ability to navigate the local culture, you can fall so miserably short of basic comprehension. At moments like these I feel like I should be narrating a cautionary children's story about a big overgrown dummy (i.e. ME). See Katie. See Katie insert foot in mouth.

At any rate, I had plenty of time to go buy my Hep A and Typhoid vaccine at a nearby pharmacy (I wonder what would happen if I asked for a vaccine at an American pharmacy?) before closing time at the Vaccination Center. So I did. And then I returned, apologetic, contrite. And I thanked the staff. Profusely.

Note: I'm taking a break from blogging until I come back from my South America trip. Check back for updates on new travels in June!