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unreal city
I am in Lima. My rucksack isn´t. When I got to the baggage reclaim, late at night local time after being in transit for 27 hours, I was so seeing-stars, sledgehammered-on-the-head tired that I wasn´t even annoyed when my bag failed to appear. I just shrugged and grinned weakly, filled in a load of forms and piloted myself to bed as best I could. Now, though, I´m getting a bit irritated. They said it´d be here last night, it´s now nine in the morning, and I want OUT OF HERE DAMNIT.
I mean, seeing new places is always good, but Lima... Mum has two friends who live here, elderly missionaries from her time assisting a bunch of priests here. They´re the source of the "pull your earrings off" quote. They seem to live in endless terror and are afraid to leave their house at all. They´re why mum was adamant that I shouldn´t set foot in Lima and why I am staying in this "airport hotel" rather than some nice friendly backpacker hostel in town where I might actually meet people.
(It is not an airport hotel. The brochure says "5 minutes from the airport", but it´s actually about 15 minutes´ fast drive through a wasteland of disused buildings either half built or tumbling down or both. Cab drivers don´t know where it is. One drove me around for like half an hour yesterday evening, asking everyone for directions. Everything costs twice as much as in town, and there´s something sneaky about the staff. Yesterday I asked to put my valuable bits in a safety deposit box. The box didn´t close. Receptionist pushed it to with her hand and said "It´s OK". Er, no. I asked her to put it in a different box and then she didn´t want to give me the key. I don´t like it here.)
But frankly Mum´s friends sound a bit Daily Mail and I was damn well not going to spend a whole day sitting in the Hotel Manhattan hoping for my bag to arrive. So I got a cab into town, called by the hotel (three times the cost of a normal one, it turned out later). And oh boy. Lima is insane. Crumbling and chaotic and filled with noise, dust and diesel fumes. The buildings are painted haphazardly in bright colours or just raw bricks and mortar, jostling randomly up against each other with not a right angle in sight. There´s stuff painted all over them in spraypaint. "No al Paro" is the most common slogan. (Paro seems to mean unemployment.) Tall shadowy arches lead into dark shops where every available inch of wall or ceiling is hung with stuff, which seems to mostly be weird sweets or religious icons in huge gilt frames covered in twirly ornamentation. Everyone blows their horn all the time, in their battered little biscuit-tin cars with blotches of rust and hand-painted text, as they negotiate huge potholes. But no one can move much. There was a siren going off behind the cab for ages, not moving. I figured it was the police, then it passed us. It was an ambulance.
The buses are rickety and rusty and seemingly stop in random places, so that the cars behind them jerk to a stop and lean on their horns. Black smoke pours out of everything. Every object has a layer of grime on it. The sky is flat white, part perpetual sea fog called ´garua´, part smoke. It gives the place the feeling of being under a dome, cut off from the rest of the country.
So I got to the Plaza de Armas in the centre of town. (There were diversions all round it. A policewoman was directing traffic away from the square, and rather than following the diversion my cab driver pulled up halfway across the junction to have a chat with her about it. Everyone behind leaned on their horns.) It´s surrounded by ornate buildings painted orangey-yellow. I bolted into a gringo cafe which was hoovering up all the intimidated tourists, gathered my wits and then went to see the cathedral, which is full-on, bloody, camp-as-hell Catholicism as theatre. Or maybe as schlock horror. Beheadings, skulls, souls in hell, gold leaf on absolutely everything. The tomb of Francisco Pizarro the conquistador is there, all pink and blue mosaics of angels and stuff, and floor tiling reading ´Pax´. (Wait, what? Surely they don´t revere him? Isn´t conquistador a dirty word?) There´s a subtext-laden painting from maybe the 1700s, showing all the rulers of Peru, with the Inca emperors, then a series of Spanish kings, and Christ the King supreme over the lot. At the back there´s a series of pictures showing the end of the world which made me almost burst out in giggles. Jesus is sitting on a cloud judging the resurrected souls. He looks like a cross between![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
dr_f_dellamorte and Julian Barratt. He´s got this hilarious mischievous grin/arm gesture combo which is all "Ha! You didn´t see that coming, did you?", like he´s just played an enormous practical joke on the world.
That cheered me up. So did talking to Dan in a phone shop. (Mum had been phoning him in a panic because I was out of touch for a whole twelve hours.) Also a pisco sour in the bar of the Gran Hotel Bolivar. Pisco is the national drink and there´s a long-running bunfight between Peru and Chile, who also claim it as their national drink. There are posters and murals everywhere saying "Pisco is Peruvian! So is pisco sour!" Pisco sour tastes a bit like a margarita, but smoother. The guides warn that it´s not such a good idea for lone female travellers to be out after dark. I thought I had a good two more hours of daylight but no, it´s winter in the southern hemisphere and about seven o´clock night suddenly fell with a flump like a black blanket, hanging in swags from the spires and lampposts. I bolted back to the phone shop to call a respectable cab. The guys were now going "hey senorita!" and making kissy noises, yes, but I´ve seen it done with much more ill will and felt less safe on Blackstock Road in Finsbury Park. I faffed with the phone with a sense of mild peril and then found a page in the guidebook which said the little boxy yellow taxis with signs were registered and legit. So I flagged one down.
I showed the young guy driving it the hotel brochure with its badly drawn map. He looked confused. I said "near the airport" which seemed to clear things up, and we bombed off across town. The car rattled like a biscuit tin. I chatted with him in rudimentary Spanish. His name was David. I told him I was from Ireland, yes I spoke English, Peru was nice but I´d only been there one day etc. A little dispassionate voice in the back of my mind said the more we chatted, the less likely it was that he´d rob me, but the more likely it was that he´d hit on me. Then he got lost in the wasteland around the airport and started asking for directions. Once he stopped at a junction where the road was blocked by big metal gates that shouldn´t have been there, and sat there shaking his head going "Luna Pizarro, Luna Pizarro" (the street we were trying to find). I hadn´t a clue where we were. Most of the way had looked familiar but not this bit. He saw me twitching. "Do not worry, my friend," he said in English. We got more directions, with many pauses during which he asked me long complicated things in Spanish. I said "no comprende" a lot. I started to suspect he *was* hitting on me. Oh shit. I played dumb and wondered where I´d bolt to if things got nasty. But we finally arrived at the hotel, where he did hit on me, but nicely. (Would I like him to pick me up in his car tomorrow and show me the town? I think that´s what he was saying.) I said I wasn´t going to be here. He took it OK. Charged me a third of the hotel taxi price, grinned and said bye-bye. I collapsed in my room, hardly able to believe I was back.
And now it´s mid-morning. I should go talk to the baggage people and see if they´ve heard anything. I feel like I´m Snake Plissken and it´s my job to escape from Lima. The forest and the mountains feel further away than they did back home in my office when I was planning things. I´m getting to the point where I feel time in Peru is more precious than anything I had in the bag. But we´ll see.
Oh, Matt Brooker´s photos from the comics exhibition are here.
I mean, seeing new places is always good, but Lima... Mum has two friends who live here, elderly missionaries from her time assisting a bunch of priests here. They´re the source of the "pull your earrings off" quote. They seem to live in endless terror and are afraid to leave their house at all. They´re why mum was adamant that I shouldn´t set foot in Lima and why I am staying in this "airport hotel" rather than some nice friendly backpacker hostel in town where I might actually meet people.
(It is not an airport hotel. The brochure says "5 minutes from the airport", but it´s actually about 15 minutes´ fast drive through a wasteland of disused buildings either half built or tumbling down or both. Cab drivers don´t know where it is. One drove me around for like half an hour yesterday evening, asking everyone for directions. Everything costs twice as much as in town, and there´s something sneaky about the staff. Yesterday I asked to put my valuable bits in a safety deposit box. The box didn´t close. Receptionist pushed it to with her hand and said "It´s OK". Er, no. I asked her to put it in a different box and then she didn´t want to give me the key. I don´t like it here.)
But frankly Mum´s friends sound a bit Daily Mail and I was damn well not going to spend a whole day sitting in the Hotel Manhattan hoping for my bag to arrive. So I got a cab into town, called by the hotel (three times the cost of a normal one, it turned out later). And oh boy. Lima is insane. Crumbling and chaotic and filled with noise, dust and diesel fumes. The buildings are painted haphazardly in bright colours or just raw bricks and mortar, jostling randomly up against each other with not a right angle in sight. There´s stuff painted all over them in spraypaint. "No al Paro" is the most common slogan. (Paro seems to mean unemployment.) Tall shadowy arches lead into dark shops where every available inch of wall or ceiling is hung with stuff, which seems to mostly be weird sweets or religious icons in huge gilt frames covered in twirly ornamentation. Everyone blows their horn all the time, in their battered little biscuit-tin cars with blotches of rust and hand-painted text, as they negotiate huge potholes. But no one can move much. There was a siren going off behind the cab for ages, not moving. I figured it was the police, then it passed us. It was an ambulance.
The buses are rickety and rusty and seemingly stop in random places, so that the cars behind them jerk to a stop and lean on their horns. Black smoke pours out of everything. Every object has a layer of grime on it. The sky is flat white, part perpetual sea fog called ´garua´, part smoke. It gives the place the feeling of being under a dome, cut off from the rest of the country.
So I got to the Plaza de Armas in the centre of town. (There were diversions all round it. A policewoman was directing traffic away from the square, and rather than following the diversion my cab driver pulled up halfway across the junction to have a chat with her about it. Everyone behind leaned on their horns.) It´s surrounded by ornate buildings painted orangey-yellow. I bolted into a gringo cafe which was hoovering up all the intimidated tourists, gathered my wits and then went to see the cathedral, which is full-on, bloody, camp-as-hell Catholicism as theatre. Or maybe as schlock horror. Beheadings, skulls, souls in hell, gold leaf on absolutely everything. The tomb of Francisco Pizarro the conquistador is there, all pink and blue mosaics of angels and stuff, and floor tiling reading ´Pax´. (Wait, what? Surely they don´t revere him? Isn´t conquistador a dirty word?) There´s a subtext-laden painting from maybe the 1700s, showing all the rulers of Peru, with the Inca emperors, then a series of Spanish kings, and Christ the King supreme over the lot. At the back there´s a series of pictures showing the end of the world which made me almost burst out in giggles. Jesus is sitting on a cloud judging the resurrected souls. He looks like a cross between
dr_f_dellamorte and Julian Barratt. He´s got this hilarious mischievous grin/arm gesture combo which is all "Ha! You didn´t see that coming, did you?", like he´s just played an enormous practical joke on the world. That cheered me up. So did talking to Dan in a phone shop. (Mum had been phoning him in a panic because I was out of touch for a whole twelve hours.) Also a pisco sour in the bar of the Gran Hotel Bolivar. Pisco is the national drink and there´s a long-running bunfight between Peru and Chile, who also claim it as their national drink. There are posters and murals everywhere saying "Pisco is Peruvian! So is pisco sour!" Pisco sour tastes a bit like a margarita, but smoother. The guides warn that it´s not such a good idea for lone female travellers to be out after dark. I thought I had a good two more hours of daylight but no, it´s winter in the southern hemisphere and about seven o´clock night suddenly fell with a flump like a black blanket, hanging in swags from the spires and lampposts. I bolted back to the phone shop to call a respectable cab. The guys were now going "hey senorita!" and making kissy noises, yes, but I´ve seen it done with much more ill will and felt less safe on Blackstock Road in Finsbury Park. I faffed with the phone with a sense of mild peril and then found a page in the guidebook which said the little boxy yellow taxis with signs were registered and legit. So I flagged one down.
I showed the young guy driving it the hotel brochure with its badly drawn map. He looked confused. I said "near the airport" which seemed to clear things up, and we bombed off across town. The car rattled like a biscuit tin. I chatted with him in rudimentary Spanish. His name was David. I told him I was from Ireland, yes I spoke English, Peru was nice but I´d only been there one day etc. A little dispassionate voice in the back of my mind said the more we chatted, the less likely it was that he´d rob me, but the more likely it was that he´d hit on me. Then he got lost in the wasteland around the airport and started asking for directions. Once he stopped at a junction where the road was blocked by big metal gates that shouldn´t have been there, and sat there shaking his head going "Luna Pizarro, Luna Pizarro" (the street we were trying to find). I hadn´t a clue where we were. Most of the way had looked familiar but not this bit. He saw me twitching. "Do not worry, my friend," he said in English. We got more directions, with many pauses during which he asked me long complicated things in Spanish. I said "no comprende" a lot. I started to suspect he *was* hitting on me. Oh shit. I played dumb and wondered where I´d bolt to if things got nasty. But we finally arrived at the hotel, where he did hit on me, but nicely. (Would I like him to pick me up in his car tomorrow and show me the town? I think that´s what he was saying.) I said I wasn´t going to be here. He took it OK. Charged me a third of the hotel taxi price, grinned and said bye-bye. I collapsed in my room, hardly able to believe I was back.
And now it´s mid-morning. I should go talk to the baggage people and see if they´ve heard anything. I feel like I´m Snake Plissken and it´s my job to escape from Lima. The forest and the mountains feel further away than they did back home in my office when I was planning things. I´m getting to the point where I feel time in Peru is more precious than anything I had in the bag. But we´ll see.
Oh, Matt Brooker´s photos from the comics exhibition are here.
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Best of luck with the baggage
Re: Best of luck with the baggage
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