The Peru Chronicles - Living in Interesting Times

I had some excellent pictures of our tour of the Montaro valley, but for some reason they didn´t write to my CD - and I lost them. Never the less, when I get a chance to download what I wrote, I´ll post it.

I thought I was going to escape the Revenge of the Incas, but I didn´t. Like a dummy, I drank some coffee in a place that wasn´t exactly hygenic - and I have spent the last three days sleeping, etc. Today I was finally able to eat a hamburger patty, everything else disgusted me. I think the recovery is harder because of the altitude.

Since everyone wonders what Paty´s house looks like, here´s a couple of pictures. (Mama Eddy in the master bedroom.) I estimate that it has about 2500 square feet inside, plus another 600 on the roof, the basement is only about 300 square feet. The roof has a servant´s quarters, a
double sink for washing clothes, and a large open area for hanging them to dry. Besides having four bedrooms, three full baths, the house has a conference room (when the boys lived here, this is where they studdied.) (Norberth watching TV in the conference room.)

It´s a big house, but not an inviting one. As with virtually all construction outside of the Selva (jungle), this house was built with brick overlayed with concrete. The echo is terrible, and at night it can get really cold, especially when Mama Eddy leaves the back door open. Heaters are almost unheard of in Peru - even here in the Andes.

The other thing that is surprising about the house is how poorly it was built. Sure, the concrete walls are fine - but the hot water system doesn´t work, water pressure above the first floor is poor, the plumbing on the roof tanks leaks like a sieve as well as the skylites, and there isn´t a door in the house that shuts right. I find it frutstrating because such sloppy work goes completely against my grain. It not a question of money, it´s a question of doing things right.

I´ve begun to sense that this sloppiness is a cultural thing. So many things here, important things, are done (pardon the french) in a half-assed way. I see relections of this attitude in the kind of service we receive in restaraunts and other service organizations - a kind of indiference, at times almost hostility. On the other hand, every store I´ve been to, the people have been very nice, very helpful. It´s very hard to explain; I´m going to have to think about it for a while before I can put my finger on it. For now, I just observe and wonder how people can be that way.

On the bright side, I´ll end with a picture from our visit to the dentist. This dentist is a real profession, and extremely nice. He allowed us to take a ton of pictures while he worked. (Try that in the US!) I have an entire article about the dentist that I´ll post later.