There are all sorts of things I've wanted to share that are too small for a blog post of their own. Well, here they are.
For instance: these pictures of Trujillo, a beautiful colonial city on Peru's coast, where I spent three days hanging out and catching up on laundry, emails, and other tasks.
According to Virgilo, a retired professor of Spanish literature and tenth-generation Trujillano who showed me around town, this blue house used to be the palace of the Archbishop, who lived there with his "sisters" and some suspiciously similar-looking "nephews".
There's this photo of Canchanque, a beautiful district in the Piura region where I went to meet with coffee producers. Along the way I found myself teaching English verb conjugations on a bouncing bus through the desert. My new student was a nineteen-year-old named Wilder studying computer programming in Piura, the regional capital. Wilder is one of eleven children, and his father died before he was born. To complete high school, he woke up each morning at 4 am to walk two hours to the nearest major town.
Sometimes Peru breaks my heart.
I'm in Lima now, in the neighborhood of Miraflores. Lima is nicknamed "the Horrible" by Peruvians. I can't decide yet whether the name is deserved. The fog is thick and grey, and the city is loud and chaotic. But there was an eight-hour parade yesterday (complete with fireworks, folk dancing, and giant dancing babies, naturally) and it's hard to dislike a place that can throw that kind of party.
