California Gallivanting, Culture-Shock, Among Other Things

Yes, I know.  It's been a month since I've updated, mainly because a) I'm now back in Baltimore and exciting travel stories have been few and far between, and b) I've been insanely busy getting ready for the launch of this little beauty:

For anyone in the Baltimore area curious about what there is to do in Dublin or planning a trip to Ireland at any point, I will be giving a talk about some of its best pubs, activities, cafes, shops, and so on at 1:00 pm on April 12th, at Ukazoo Books on Dulaney Valley Road, right across from the Towson Town Center.  If you have any questions at all, stop by for tea and goodies!

To round off the end of my most recent stint of travels, I flew into San Francisco to visit my age-old friend Rima and her awesome roommates.  I've been to San Fran twice before - once with my dad and once with my sister - and I was barely in the city an hour before I remembered just how much I love it.  I'm not sure if it's the blustery weather or the hills or how pleasant the locals are, but there's just a great energy to the place that makes you want to eat avocados and exercise and be overwhelmingly friendly to everyone you meet.

So over the course of the weekend Rima took me all around the city and to more social engagements than I'd been to in the past two months.  (I seemed to get free food and drinks wherever we went, so I was very pleased with the itinerary.)  There was a dinner party at a beach house with her soccer team, an early-morning nature walk along the coast, a going-away party at a super-secret speakeasy bar where you have to utter a password at the front door and then another password to gain admittance to an even secreter bar behind a bookcase - I had the single most luminous and delicious cocktail of my life, though I can't remember what went into it... vermouth and brandy and a cherry, among other things - and a fundraiser for an AIDS/LifeCycle to San Diego that she and her roommates are taking on.

Though we had only one cold, foggy day left to do touristy things after all of Rima's social engagements were taken care of, we got a good deal of it done.  We had clam chowder in sourdough bread bowls down by Fisherman's Wharf, we saw the sea lions sprawled out over the pontoons in the bay, and we ambled through Pier 39.

We had hot chocolate at the Ghirardelli factory and then lunch at Chinatown, which was all decked out for Chinese New Year, and went in search of a certain tea shop that my sister and I had stumbled across once five years ago, Vital Tea Leaf.  In addition to selling a huge variety of loose-leaf teas, both delicious and chock-full of health benefits, the shop has a special, welcoming atmosphere, inviting passersby in to give them a full demonstration of how to brew and serve the tea, with free samples for all!  So Rima and I took shelter there from the rainstorm that had rolled around and we drank fancy tea out of eggshell-sized teacups.  And we even got to chat to Uncle Gee, the wildly charismatic and hospitable owner who doled out hugs left and right and then went back to his post at the front door, where he stood shouting down potential customers, "Hey, you!  Come in here and have some tea!  It will make you YOUNGER!  And STRONGER!  And TWICE AS SEXY!"  

Following San Francisco, I hopped a Greyhound north to Chico where I spent the next week being fed tea and fancy chocolates and gingerbread cookies by Katharine, my age-old (but not quite as age-old as Rima, whom I'd known since high school,) roommate that I hadn't seen since January of 2010 when I stopped by Frankfurt on a trip from Moscow to Helsinki.  It was a cozy and delightful time of cooking borscht and going on a promenade through the fairy tale playground, drinking artistic beers at the local microbrewery, taking a tour of the historic Bidwell mansion and their garage of turn of the century motorcars, and visiting the world's very biggest working yo-yo (they needed a crane to yo-yo it!) 

But mostly we just sat around wrapped up in blankets and played with her cat, Punkin.  Punkin was a very dapper cat indeed - he was all black with little white patches like he was wearing a tiny tuxedo and elegant cuff-links, and he bore himself with the brooding mien of a Byronic hero.  And then, when you were sleeping, he would sneak over and step quite delicately on your face.

And for now - until June, anyway - I'm through with traveling and shall spend my days focusing on writing projects and visa schemes.  I am, of course, knitting far more than I should, so any updates prior to me leaving for London will most likely be me babbling about my knitting attempts and experiments with cables and other over-my-head techniques.  Until then!

Alpaca museum and weaving in loose ends

I know I've been kind of lagging in the knitting section of this blog... in my defense, I've been quite busy (writing, having Christmas in summer, going to parties and barbecues, drinking Fernet and Coke in Buenos Aires which apparently I'm the only foreigner in the world who actually thinks is delicious,) and plus the temperature in Argentina and Chile was around 40 degrees and humid - not exactly propitious for knitting woolly mittens.

After a harrowing 42 hours of transit by bus and colectivo from Valaraiso to Santiago, Arica, Tacna, and finally Arequipa, I found myself back in the heartland of alpaca wool culling clothes left and right to make more room in my backpack for yarn.  For anyone interested in purchasing good quality alpaca wool, I got mine from a tiny alleyway filled with touristy restaurants and little artisan shops, just off of Calle Alvarez Tomas and to the north of Plaza de Armas.  One particular shop had a little bit more upscale, hand-knitted sweaters, hats, and gloves rather than the generic manufactured things you see everywhere, and if you ask the surly woman at the front desk she'll take you into the back room and show you a stash of alpaca skeins - 50 grams for 5 soles.  Any Sol Alpaca boutique you find will also sell skeins of baby alpaca, but you may end up paying an arm and a leg for them.

So I was staying up in San Lazaro, a tiny historic district filled with cobblestones and lantern-lined alley ways, and right around the corner from my hostel I discovered Mundo Alpaca, a museum of all things alpaca.  For anyone interested in textiles, it's sheer paradise because you get to wander through, learn about different types of alpacas, run your hands through a giant pile of raw wool, and watch it go through the combing, carding, spinning, and weaving process.

For anyone not interested in textiles, it's worth a look-see because a) it's free, and b) you get to see these guys!

But really, anyone curious about traditional artisan crafts in South America should set aside half an hour for this museum.  There are crazy machines with giant wheels and cogs reminiscent of Modern Times, (the knitting machine made me feel depressingly superfluous,) a dyeing station, and women demonstrating their mad weaving skills.  It really gives you an insider's perspective on all the work that goes into the alpaca industry, and just how important it is to the culture and economy of the area - of the estimated 4 million alpacas in South America, 95% of them are in central and southern Peru.  Plus, there's a gift shop at the end filled with gorgeous luxury alpaca garments, but I had no money left at this point and couldn't let myself go in because I would just get sad.

Overall, it made me really want to try spinning my own yarn, and I came close to buying one of those dreidel-shaped drop spindles you see women spinning with on street corners.  But, realistically, I would have no way of buying raw wool and then no patience for actually sitting down and spinning it.  Some day, though, when I actually have an overabundance of free time.

Squalor in the Vale of Paradise

Nothing can effectively describe Valparaíso- UNESCO World Heritage Site, incidentally - unless maybe you're Pablo Neruda, but I will certainly try.  It was like a compilation of all the weirdest and most exciting cities I've ever seen - a mix of San Francisco and Ping Yao and St. Petersburg - and it smelled like sewage and cigarettes and piss and freshly baked cakes.  So many cakes!  Moreover, it's filled with art and lovely stray dogs and pyramids of onions and avocados people are trying to sell you.  There is a raw transience about it, (maybe that was just me though, frazzled and at the end of my trip and projecting,) and colonial grandeur, and decay of Soviet Union proportions.  The houses have walls of corrugated tin and are painted in vibrant colors.  They look like boxcars from abandoned trains that have been stacked on top of each other all the way up the 42 hills and beyond the reach of tsunamis.  Plus, there are sliding boards for no reason at all.

The streets make no sense at all - they curve and spiral and stop dead and jut out over dizzying stone staircases.  All the walls have these alien fever dreams painted on them - geishas, koi fish, naiads, spaceships, steampunk chameleons, and even the stones have eyeballs - and it's swarming with bohemian types, ensuring that every street you walk down is going to have some sort of impromptu circus or jazz session or guy drawing chalk murals.  There are crumbling palaces and Belle Epoque hotels with fancy plaster facades and everything behind the walls demolished.  To get up and down the hills you can climb hundreds and hundreds of Wall of China-esque stairs or you can take the antique, rattling ascensores.  Walking up along the tsunami evacuation route, you can see the whole city spread out beneath you, 19th century mansions perched precariously over ravines, houses crowded together up and down hills, staircases switch-backing through raggedy gardens and past the ascensores and not really going anywhere at all.  The whole place is like something out of a Hayao Miyazaki film, like the place all your childhood toys go after you lose them.

Clearly, I could not get enough of the murals.  Over ten days of exploring I found some great art galleries, cafes, and second-hand bookshops, a lot of them around the trendy Cerro Concepción area.  I kept hearing the night life in Valpo was bar none, but I was entirely too tired/poor to go out much.  (Chile is the most expensive country in South America, with prices similar to what you'd get in Europe.)  However, I did take a tour of La Sebastiana, Pablo Neruda's amazing house full of seafaring things from around the world, where he used to sit and write in green ink in his study that overlooked the Pacific Ocean.  In the evenings he would hold parties for all his friends and say clever, poetic things, and sometimes come in disguise, darkening his face and eyebrows with burnt cork - Pablo Neruda was essentially Mr. Rochester.  It made me really want a house or flat to live in; nothing extravagant, just a charming couple of rooms in some squalid, romantic city where I can throw open the bay windows to the Black Sea in the summer and in the winter light cheap cigarettes off the gas stove as I knit fingerless gloves for the stray cats outside, where I can burn the manuscript of my three-volume novel for fuel and cook great, walloping pots of borscht and maybe even have my very own teapot.  (I've been missing Eastern Europe lately...)

Now I'm back in Peru again, after 42 hellish hours of transit from Valparaíso to Santiago to Tacna to Arica and finally to Arequipa.  It's a huge relief a) to come to a city I already know, which hasn't happened in practically eight months, and b) to be someplace where $3 can buy you a three-course meal plus a glass of chicha morada.  I've met up with Lisa, Darragh, and Diane again which is great, because traveling alone makes you crazy after a while.  Otherwise, I'm pretty busy finishing up the first draft of my book on Dublin as well as a few other travel articles and conceiving new projects and whatnot, and all is right with the world.

Mendoza: Asados, Bicycles, and Bodegas

Onwards to Mendoza, a city in the middle of the Argentinian desert kept green by an extensive irrigation system, which is much too pretty for its own good.  The city center is filled with fountains and plazas and tree-lined boulevards and trendy boutiques.  It's much quieter and more laid-back than Buenos Aires, and that's just fine by me.  Asados every night and a gloriously exciting midnight Christmas dancing across the street amongst fireworks exploding in every which direction like a scene out of Apocalypse Now was beginning to take its toll.  (My roommate at the time, a guy with a blue mohawk who was covered in tattoos and who worked, as one might expect, as a hairdresser and tattoo artist, plus his buddy Beepo - introduced to me as "El Maestro de Asado" and the name was not inaccurate - both got me into Iggy Pop, and I've been listening to his music fanatically ever since.)

As for Mendoza, there were two things I wanted to do here: horseback riding and a bike tour of the bodegas.  The first was as spectacular as they get - a group of us drove out into the desert and sat around a swimming pool until the sun was low enough for us to go out riding.  Then we rode off into the sunset (yes, we totally did!) and turned so we had the Andes mountains on our left.  We saw a wild tarantula crawling along the rocks on the side of the road, and everything was a dusty purplish in the twilight.  We walked along for a while but then the horses, who had a competitive streak, starting racing.

My horse especially seemed to have something of an inferiority complex, because any time someone tried to pass us, he'd just set off at a dead run.  And I have no more of an idea of how to ride a horse than I did in Ecuador, so I just clung on for dear life with my knees, my feet flying out of the stirrups, and mostly thought, "I'm going to die, I'm going to die!" as my horse went flying along the edge of a deep gully filled with pointy rocks and cacti with 7-inch spines.  Afterwards, some of the other foreigners commented on how comfortable I looked riding, and one Brazilian guy, when I told him it was only my second time on a horse, gaped at me and declared, "I thought you were an expert... but you're actually INSANE!!"

Afterwards we had an asado, filled with much wine and grilled steak - one of our guides cut me off a piece of the lomo, the best part of the cow, and it was crispy on the outside and so tender and juicy and savory on the inside that I nearly wept with joy.  I have every intention of turning the asado into a tradition everywhere I go from here on in.

As for the bike tour, it was good fun alright.  A group of us from the hostel biked out to three different bodegas, one an old family-owned bodega that made organic, artisan wine (I bought a bottle of Cabernet Sauvignon for my friend's wedding in February,) and another one a big, mass-producer and exporter.  Interestingly, as someone had told me at the asado from the night before, despite Argentina producing some of the best wines in the world, there really isn't much of a wine culture when it comes to drinking - on nights out, people usually just order beer.

After an excessively weird New Year's Eve of jumping into a swimming pool and dragging people in after me, giving myself a black eye, and sleeping in an abandoned stairwell, (yerba maté and tequila is a disastrous combination...) I took my final bus across the Andes to Santiago, where I had ice creams and juice with my Dutch friend Jonas and his girlfriend Stella, and together we visited the Museum of Human Rights, a memorial of the torturing and disappearances in Chile under the Pinochet regime.  It was a very interesting exhibition, with lots of first-hand accounts of what it was like, as well as newspaper clippings and TV footage.  However, it was all in Spanish, and the wave of information was too much for me to take in at once, so it was a good thing we had Stella to explain things from a local's perspective.

I'm in Valparaiso now for a few days, a city that begs to be explored, so off I go!

Dancing in Argentina: Gaucho Vs. Tango

I've made it, Argentina, last country on my agenda and it's been worth the wait!

There are three Argentinian things I've been dreaming of for the past six months, and they are tango, steak, and wine.  I've tried the first two in my time here, (strangely, no wine yet... but soon,) and it's been everything I've ever dreamed of.

First of all, I made it over the Peruvian-Chilean border without much ado, and I spent three nights in the desert oasis town of San Pedro de Atacama.  I went on a desert tour of the Valley of the Moon (mad stuff, all clay and plaster and crystals and salt flats, like scenery right out of The Dark Crystal,) and then had salsa lessons and Pisco Sours with some lovely Dutch folks.  Salsa still is not and never will be my dance, and as we sat around a campfire I mentioned how excited I was to try to learn tango in Argentina.

An Ecuadorian girl we were sitting with had this to say: "I cannot watch tango.  It's passionate and intense, but it makes me want to cry when I see it.... tango is not a happy dance."  Which, of course, immediately made me more determined than ever to learn it.

From San Pedro I bussed it to Salta in the north of Argentina, where I went out to a peña, a Gaucho party, and watched traditional dancing from that region.  And it was just the funnest thing in the world!  There was this little guy in full cowboy attire, ("The chubby ones are always the best," our Argentine friend assured us,) who just threw himself into it, stomping and spinning and throwing himself in romantic desperation at his lady partner, who seemed pretty thrilled with herself indeed.

By the end they were smiling and sweaty (it was a warm night,) and there were cheers all around.

Contrast this with tango, which is everywhere in Buenos Aires: from what I've seen, it's this fantastic music that's fueled entirely by melodrama.  That is, the more anguish and ire you can convey, whether singing or dancing or playing the concertina, the better you are.  For buying a CD from a street band named Al Afronte, who play traditional tango numbers with a kind of darker, artier, modern twist, I was given free entry to a tango club.  There I got a preliminary lesson to how to dance it, (my partner gave me this piece of kindly advice: "Try not to fall over your feet,") and then sat in a corner the rest of the night and drank gin and tonics with the one other Gringo in the class, a French guy who was even awkwarder than me.  (It's a start!  I WILL master tango!  Maybe not on this trip, but someday...)  But at any rate, the singer had this boundless, tragic energy and he bellowed from the stage like his heart was cleft down the middle.  Everyone else in the club danced and danced in this eerie blue light, like ghosts, and they were still dancing when we left.

And later on, at an outdoor market in San Telmo when meeting with a leather-worker who had promised to make me a bracelet, I stumbled into another pair of dancers, hired by the fancy restaurant to dance in the plaza and attract tourists, who were absolute quintessential tango.  They were young and handsome and dressed in black and red, and they were the two angriest looking people I'd ever seen.  (To be fair, it was nearly 30 degrees out, and the guy was in a full length black suit and waistcoat, and they must have been out in the sun all morning.)  But man, could they dance!  It's impossible to even describe it - their movements were lithe and sinewy and threatening, like neither of them weighed anything at all.  You couldn't even follow the pattern their feet were following - it was like calligraphy, and they were beautiful like a pair of 1930s con artists, like wolves, and like if you got too close to them they'd tear your throat out without breaking stride.

It was absolutely mesmerizing, and I stood there and watched until they took a break to pass a hat around.  So I gave 10 pesos to the guy and he said to me, "Gracias," with this look of pure loathing, like he hated me and himself and his partner and the whole world and everything in it except for tango.  It was absolutely fantastic.  I have got to take proper lessons at some point in the future.

Arequipa and the End of Peru

The White City, they call it, and the name really fits.  In addition from all the old buildings being built and carved out of white sandstone, everything seems to have a sort of bleached look about it.  It's warm and sunny every day, (another one of those "eternal spring" cities which South America seems to have so many of,) with cool breezes billowing in and out of the streets, and it smells like flowers.  On the hazy horizon loom three snow-capped volcanoes like gargantuan apparitions: El Mista, Chachani, and Pichu Pichu.

Two days ago Lisa, Darragh, and Charlotte caught up with me from Cusco and they were all just as thrilled as I was by the perpetual sunshine.  After the standard self-guided walking tour of the Plaza de Armas and grand, chaotic marketplace where we ate lomo saltado, (a traditional Peruvian dish of stir-fried beef, onions, and tomatoes served with the omnipresent pile of white rice and chips,) Charlotte and I went on a visit to the Monasterio Santa Catalina.  Founded in 1579, Santa Catalina is still a working convent where nuns live, but the historic part is sectioned off as a museum for tourists.

I've gotten pretty lazy when it comes to visiting tourist sites lately, but Santa Catalina was definitely one of the best things I've seen in the past six months, up there with Machu Picchu.  It was a labyrinth of courtyards and grottos and shadowy alcoves and secret orange tree cloisters, and you had could go exploring through all the rooms and sub-rooms and peek behind doors and climb stone stairs that lead to nothing to your heart's content.  Everything was so well-preserved you could very easily imagine nuns of the 16th century sweeping down the cobblestoned corridors with their wimples billowing in the wind (whenever I imagine nuns, they always have wimples that are billowing,) or sitting in the parlor embroidering or grinding corn into meal.  (Everywhere we went we saw smoke-stained kitchens with grinding stones.)

And the best news of all is that I finally did it - everywhere I'd read online told me it was impossible, but I found authentic, high-quality, INSANELY INEXPENSIVE alpaca wool and I bought it!  Ten balls of a lovely purplish-red color, each 110 yards, for 50 soles which comes to about $16.  I found it in an alpaca shop full of fancy designer knits, none of which I could afford, and I had to reign myself in from buying all the wool they had.

And now, in about four hours, I'm going to catch a bus to Tacna, on the border between Peru and Chile.  From there, if all goes according to plan (which in South America rarely happens, but I'm hopeful,) I will take a colectivo across the border and into Arica, and then a bus to San Pedro, a small tourist oasis in the Atacama desert.  Two days there and then across the border again into Argentina!  The final country, the one I've been most excited about since even before I planned this trip, and I'm almost there - it's starting to hit home that my trip is coming to an end and I'll be headed back to the States in two months.  I'm not dreading this as much as I might, as I'll be visiting a bunch of friends in California and then headed to a wedding in February.  And, best of all, I won't be in Baltimore long.  Besides, I'm beginning to get really sick of Andean cheese, which is all they have here.  It somehow manages to be both bland and stinky at the same time, and is pretty much the worst stuff ever.  I will NOT be sorry to see the end of it....

NOT SORRY AT ALL!

Dawn of the Cusco Knitting Club

I have started reading the second Game of Thrones book, (it seems to be moving a lot slower than the first, though that may be because I'm a lot busier with various writing projects and what have you,) and I still have the same mixed feelings towards it.  This is a small, pedantic detail, but I'm somewhat miffed at how Martin keeps taking perfectly ordinary things and giving them epic fantasy names.  "Lizard-lions" for alligators... OK, that makes sense.  They are lizardy, and they violently eat smaller animals.  "Zorses" for zebras, mmmm... where did they get the "Z" from in the first place if not from zebra?  But "Myrish lens tube" was the one that really got me.  How is the word "spyglass" possibly not old-timey enough?  Urgh.

Otherwise, I know there's been a considerable lack of knitting posts lately, and mostly this is because I've been too caught up in traveling, writing, and writing about travel.  But Cusco is essentially the Shangri-La of knitted products.  Everywhere you go you see women hanging out in the streets knitting frenziedly to pass the time as they sell apples, avocados, frogs' legs, or whatever else.  I've bought so many alpaca sweaters, scarves, hats, and mittens for people back home that I'm going to have to throw out pretty much everything in my backpack before moving on.  (Apparently you can get knitted products for a third of the price in Puno, but I was too excited to wait that long....)

Before the gang of my Machu Picchu buddies left for Lake Titicaca, Lisa, Charlotte and I went to explore a yarn store, which was essentially one of the most amazing things I've seen since I've been here - it was like a library, with all the walls stacked from floor to ceiling with skeins of multicolored yarn.  There was even this spidery, wooden spinning yarn-balling machine.  So Lisa bought me two skeins of rainbow yarn, which I've knitted into a pretty spiffy matching set of hat and gloves for her.

  Otherwise, we set up a knitting club, where I taught both Lisa and Charlotte the basics of knitting - the first meeting of knitting club mostly consisted of us balling yarn and attempting to untie knots and tangles from Lisa's skein.  But the second meeting of knitting club was a success!  They're both knitting enormous scarves, and I'm once again attempting to knit a sort of sundress out of skinny turquoise yarn and the remainder of Lisa's rainbow yarn.  It will either turn out to be really awesome or will make me look like a rag-doll... at this point it could go either way.