More on What’s Happening (-Jess and Andrew)

Jess’s work at PROCREL has developed slowly- there is not much space at the office and so she got handed several hundred pages of Spanish documents to read (eep!) in order to catch up on their past and present activities and try to start looking for a way to make herself useful.

Meanwhile, Andrew has gone a couple times to the IIAP field station (all by himself!) to help work on reproduction studies at the experimental farm for Amazon fish species, which mostly involved grabbing them out of big nets, squeezing them for gametes (i.e. sperm and eggs), and injecting a few with hormones to induce gamete release. (Fun fun!) One day, he even got to take the first trip up the Rio Nanay to scout out locations for water quality testing.

Andrew’s been watching the World Series on the Spanish ESPN channel and he played soccer again on Friday night (this time at the big fancy Iquitos city soccer stadium). We made a recent trip to the gym and were gifted(?) with the attention of the resident personal trainer who worked us both to the point of blacking out. Yay for sports.

A couple days ago, Noam Chany (the ornithologist who helped us find our apartment), invited us to meet with a student group called CANATURA (Club de Amigos de Natura). They are involved in a lot of environmental education activities and at the moment they are planning a big festival to celebrate the area’s biodiversity, with an emphasis on a newly discovered endemic bird. One of the most interesting things about the CANATURA program is that in return for their service, volunteers are supposed to receive free English lessons. On Wednesday night Noam had us signed up and scheduled for teaching classes everyday, starting immediately, so we got launched in fairly quickly. Andrew went to the first lesson by himself, and was thoroughly entertained as an Israeli man named Uri taught the alphabet song, some common conversation words, and then led the class in a round of “We Shall Overcome” which sounded surprisingly good. At the end of the class Uri asked Andrew to teach a song the next time, so he came home and racked his brain for things that would be appropriate. When we both showed up the next day, he asked us to teach not just one song, but a little over an hour’s worth of the class. So, we taught them the “Hokey Pokey” (with dance!) and went through the human body parts, then “Take Me Out to the Ballgame” (in honor of the World Series), and a round with “When the Saints” and “Swing Low”. So, along those lines, WE NEED IDEAS FOR MORE SONGS (simple, well-known, easy to sing without accompaniment) to teach in our next classes. Since they’re all college-aged biology students who are very interested in learning Enlgish, it looks to be really enjoyable and rewarding, especially if we can get them to help us with our Spanish along the way and then we can all talk biology!

Tomorrow we leave on our first trip to the campo with Jess’s workgroup, up the river to three villages where we will be assisting with several community service projects. We’ll get back in a week, hopefully with tons of interesting stories and pictures and videos to share. In the meantime, Happy Halloween!

La Casa (-Andrew)

Well, we have finally found a place to live, so we thought we’d post a brief description of our apartment (and some illustrative videos on YouTube). The apartment complex itself is very bright and cozy and has about a dozen small units in addition to the house-area where the family of the owner lives. You enter from the street through a long hallway, which opens up into a plant-filled courtyard covered with multicolored broken tile pieces (a nice touch all throughout). From the second floor we can see out across the floodplain to the river. The neighbors have all been nice so far, though luckily we are at the end and only share walls with one other apartment, with a resident who teaches private English classes and plays very loud movies. Further down the hall, Jess has befriended some engineers (who ironically work for a petroleum company) that are trying to set up a wireless internet connection that will work on our laptops (Luxury!). There are two elderly ladies who are part of the family that own this place who have found in us a new outlet for their grandmotherly instincts and we are very grateful for all of their help figuring out how to do things around here.

Our apartment is basically one big long room, subdivided into different areas (think New Orleans style, not Raleigh) and came mostly furnished, although we have invested in some bookshelves and kitchenware. There’s a living area in the front, which eases into a kitchen area with a counter island. A bathroom-island in the middle forces you to go around to the right side to reach the bedroom, which has some nice big closets. The floor is covered with white tiles, which makes it easy to see the different types of ants that swarm any bit of food dropped on the floor and are constantly exploring the walls, cabinets, and any other surface (one learns to view these as free cleaning help). The walls are yellow with an occasional green column (which looks nicer than it sounds), but the interior walls (around the bathroom) don’t go all the way up to the ceiling (so it ventilates into the bedroom and kitchen). There are two ceiling fans to combat the heat and some windows looking out on the courtyard and across some nearby rooftops for lighting (skylights too!)

There are definitely some deficiencies – no hot or potable water, one of the bookshelves we bought smells really bad (we call it “The Troll”), and the cooking facilities are fairly limited. So, we’re putting the call out for TWO-BURNER RECIPES (ie. no oven or microwave). Keep in mind that we have two pots, a deep pan, a water boiler, a colander, a spatula and two knives (and we’re going to invest in a juice-maker for jungle fruits).

So far we’ve experimented with: spaghetti with various sauces, scrambled eggs and omelets, and oatmeal with bananas.
Some possible ingredients we’ve noticed at our neighborhood grocery store: eggs, potatoes, many types of fruits (especially bananas), less types of vegetables (few leafy greens), rice, chicken, bread, pasta, milk and juice, ham and cheese, butter and oil, sugar and spices, coffee and tea. (We hear there are more options at the bigger market, but we’ve also been told that we will be robbed if we go there. So we are waiting until we have a buddy to go with us.) We’re happy for any suggestions!

You can email or send things (like letters and packages!) to our new permanent address: Andrew and Jess, Calle Raimondi #358, Interior #11, Iquitos, Peru

Felíz Día de Censo! (-Andrew)

Today we got to witness one of those amazing, once in a lifetime events. This, of course, was the first ever single-day national Peruvian Census. The Rules: everything is closed (even the churches and casinos), and everyone has to stay home between the hours of 8am and 6pm so that pollsters, mostly high school aged kids, can come by to take your information. Victor, one of our hosts at La Pascana, played Christmas music (think: Silent Night) as we ate breakfast (I was hoping that the next people who showed up at our inn would be shown to the stable, but alas...) in celebration of the holiday atmosphere. The hostel is near a school, so we were one of the first places to get a knock on the door. It was a very brief interview, consisting of our first names, questions like whether we could read/write, our religion (choices: Catholic, Evangelical Christian, other, or nothing... Jess said "Protestant" and got put in the "nothing" category) and then we got a sticker above our door to show that we had participated (very biblical). While most Peruvians had to stay home all day, we Gringos were allowed to venture forth after being interviewed, and found ourselves in a new, eerily quiet world with very few motorcycles, mototaxis, blaring loudspeakers, or people on the streets (we posted a video of the Plaza de Armas). It was like a disaster had just struck without the anxiety and fear or long term consequences. Just a quiet, peaceful, nationwide pause. Sadly, things have now returned to their normal hectic and chaotic state. Jess has declared Census Day as her new favorite holiday.

More importantly, perhaps due to some of the magic of Census Day, we finally got in touch with the famous Israeli/Californian/Peruvian ornithologist, Noam Shany. He confirmed our fears that apartment possibilities are very limited in Iquitos- there are only about 4 options. He pointed us away from his own apartment complex next door to La Pascana (too expensive, hot, and..expensive) and away from the apartments across the street more popular with the drug tourism crowd, and towards a nearby building that just happened to have an opening (at about half the price). So we jumped on it and moved. Just like that. Keep in mind that this place has no sign or indication that there are apartments behind the gated facade, so there is no way besides word of mouth that we could have found out about it. We are quite grateful to Noam for the tip, and will now finally begin what Jess calls "nesting." We´ll post a better description and some videos of our new pad soon- but the best way to see it would be to come visit... any takers?

Español y Fútbol (Andrew)

In case you haven´t experienced it for yourself, learning Spanish is a slow and difficult process. More specifically, learning to hear and speak Spanish is a slow and difficult process. For me, it´s been a constant struggle to piece together the sounds coming out of peoples´ mouths, and most of the time it sounds like a continuous gurgle. I have gotten a couple lessons from our friend Raquel (a former Fulbright English teacher), which have been somewhat helpful. Yesterday, Jess and I got called in to help rehearse some students who were memorizing skits in English. We were actually pretty impressed, not only because some of them were able to concentrate with continuous traffic noise and the occasional school brass band outburst, but several of them spoke fairly understandably in English with a British accent. (This was also a little discouraging since they were only in middle school and could already speak well in two languages. Teach your kids Spanish from day one and save them a heck of a frustrating experience later on.) Most of the kids, however, were in and out of the classroom and chatting with each other, and it was not really possible to control them with my limited Spanish ability/authority (I think we´re going to be called in to be judges in the skit competition on Tuesday). But, things are progressing, slowly but surely and hopefully it won´t be too long before I can have at least a short conversation.

In more exciting news, I got to reach one of my life goals (not really, but I´m taking dramatic license) of playing futbol in a South American country. At 8pm Friday night, leaving Jess my faithful translator behind, I jumped on a motorcycle (also for the first time ever- although I wasn´t driving), grabbed on for dear life, and took off into the dark city. I didn´t really have any clue about where we were going, so when we pulled up next to a big barbed wire fence (all soccer fields have barbed wire around them here) and found myself at the power plant, I was intrigued. Turns out, the power plant is the only place in town that has field lights at night- so, unless you want to play in the heat of the day, it´s the place to go. It also cost 6 Soles (about $2) per person, so I got the feeling that not too many people played there. There was also actual grass, which one doesn´t normally see on regularly used fields. The game was fun, although I was definitely the worst player on the field by far. At least there were no injuries. Hopefully I´ll get some more chances to work on my moves. I´ll let you know how that goes.

Fish Copulation and "The Little Flying Furry Pig" (-Jess)

We´ve been pleasantly surprised thus far at how often people who have only known us for fifteen minutes or so invite us to sit in on activities that they are hosting or attending. We met with a woman who is in charge of the environmental education activities for IIAP (the major research institution for the Peruvian Amazon) in order to talk about the possibility of Andrew volunteering with her in the future and found ourselves on a school bus packed with kids at 7:30am the next morning, headed for who knows what.

Who-knows-what turned out to be an all day long draw-a-thon, in which middle and high schools all across the region send their three top artists and each kid is assigned one of three stories (the winners from the short-story contest) to illustrate with 8 to 12 drawings or paintings. All the illustrations had to be done on the spot, on officially stamped paper, within the 9 hour time limit. The kid with the best illustrations from each story is named the winner, and their work will be used with their respective story in three children´s books that IIAP will publish. (Other cool projects that the Evironmental Ed team sponsors include helping schools to start butterfly farms, orchid orchards, and artificial beaches where they transplant eggs of river turtles and guard them until they hatch in order to protect them from being... poached. They also teach them to make trash into paper which they decorate and sell as notecards, and work with some schools to give each kid a tiny plot of school yard where they can do whatever they like- plant a tree, grow medicinal herbs, make a flower garden, raise worms, you name it. This helps to foster care for land and creatures in a hands-on, interactive way. I´m a little jealous.)

Unfortunately, Andrew and I were only allowed to watch, even though all the art supplies were awfully tempting. The illustrations were amazing (we put up some videos)- all full of vivid color and beautiful depictions of the jungle. They gave us the stories to read and it was discouraging that it took us most of the morning to read 3 pages worth of children´s stories. They were all pretty depressing- in one a fish is separated from its mother and while looking for her he has to swim through oil spills and past commercial harpoons and deforested river banks, in another a little creature that was described to us as a little pig with more hair was slowly dying in a drought after his whole family was killed and right as he closed his eyes he dreamed he could fly, and the last was about a tree that went to the city to tell the people to stop their destruction but he was peed on by a sick and itchy dog. So. That was sobering. The children had amazing concentration, working almost non-stop from 8 till 5, meanwhile, Andrew and I were having trouble maintaining our attention spans and Andrew was threatening to give up on Spanish forever. Fortunately, we were introduced to a very friendly guy named Carlos who spoke English and gave us a tour of the whole campus.

IIAP has several biological stations. This one focused mainly on biotechnology (no tour of this part due to sensitive lab set-ups) and the farming and reintroduction of native fish species. We got to see the ponds and tanks where they raise and do experiments with Paiche- the giants of the Amazon that can grow to several hundred kilograms and maybe 10 feet long. We fed them little minnows and watched them suck them up (the food-fish themselves were pretty crazy looking actually), and heard about how, when they want the fish to spawn, they have to catch them, wrastle them down so they can give them a hormone shot, squeeze out the gametes, and then mix it up in buckets until they turn into little fish. Craziness! Andrew might go help with the process next week. We also saw giant snails that grow to several pounds in 6 months that people raise to sell to the French market. These somehow know when the river is about to rise, because their eggs have to sit out of the water for two weeks and then they need to be transferred to the water to continue developing, so the clever snail crawls out and lays its eggs a few feet up on the bank 2 weeks before the rainy season starts and the rivers rise. This is especially tricky since the start of the high-water season is supposed to be pretty unpredictable around Iquitos. Our tour concluded with a taxonomy room full of lots of weird fishy creatures in jars (I´m not so sure about this bathing in the Amazon thing), and a fish food making factory that was being throughly inspected by a small kitten. You just never know what sorts of things you might learn and do around here on any given day!

Quote of the Week:

“Was it Chesterton or Kipling who said that an adventure is just a misfortune correctly understood?”
-Dessinger to Peter while traveling in India in David James Duncan’s, “The Brothers K”

Birding at the Alpahuayu-Mishana Reserve, UNAP Section (-Jess)

Normally, given the squares that we are, we don’t ever have to factor things like “clubbing” into our sleep equation, especially on nights when we are going to get up at 4am to go birding. However, after several days of having to wrack our brains for things to fill our time with (while waiting for the people I am working with to get back from Argentina), we didn’t want to turn down the opportunity to hang out with other people besides each other and do real-life activities, so we were suckered in to staying out past midnight and then getting up at 4. Add to this the fact that it is hot as bejeezuz, that we were both pretty sore from our gym adventures the day before, and that we didn’t want to look like pansies and stop all the time for rest and food and water, and you’ll have a good sense of the mind-frame we were in at the times when the birding was slow.

We realized that our previous birding experiences haven’t really prepared us for birding in the rainforest- mostly because you generally never see the bird and there are about ten zillion possible species. We were very glad we’d decided to go with a guide, Dennis, who impressed us with his knowledge of calls and shared lots of good natural history information with us. For example, on the same 1km stretch of path, we went through 3 different kinds of forest that have their own characteristic plants and animals and it all depends on soil geography (Dave- cool huh?). Two of the kinds of forest (white sand forests, or “varillals") are relatively rare in the Amazon basin and have several endemic birds associated with them (several of which are new species discovered by one of the guys I will hopefully be working with). There are some video clips from the forest on the you-tube site to give you an idea of what it is like adentro de la selva.

So, since I have a habit of rambling on, here is a condensed version of the highlights of our seen & heard birds this morning, chronologically:
1. Little Blue-black Grassquits that kept hopping very comically a few vertical feet and landing in the same spot.
2. We heard and then saw a chachalaca and learned that if you cross-breed it with a rooster it becomes super aggressive and is good for cockfighting.
3. I spotted a male and female Swallow Tanager (google these, they are beautiful), which the guide said he’d never seen at this location before, and that he’d never seen a pair together, and that they were indicators that the forest was healing (we were in a secondary scrubby field at that point, on the edge of the reserve.
4. Also google yellow-rumped caciques, they are pretty common, but cool-looking, with hanging nest-sacs.
5. We passed under a Screaming Piha lek (place where the males all gather to show off for the ladies) and got a video (on you-tube site) of their loud screaming.
6. Then we walked through a lek for hummingbirds called Great-billed Hermits (google them), and got buzzed as they chirped and chased each other around.
7. Our guide entertained us with stories of things that could go wrong in the jungle, like his friend the researcher who got bitten by an ant and had a fever for four days and had to be evacuated, or his friend the researcher who got speared in the leg by a trap that hunters had set to catch armadillos and had to be flown to Lima (“you said you were planning to do research here?”)
8. On our way back, we walked right into a big group of little squirrel-like tamarin monkeys (this species has the female as boss, and the males care for the young’ns). It is almost possible to forget that the trail you are walking is in the Amazon, until you walk under a group of monkeys. Then you think- whoa. Google these too- they’re cute and look kind of like cats.
9. We also saw a tiny red-backed poison frog that our guide said is used for medicine during heart operations, and is fairly lucrative for the people to collect so they are studying its life-cycle to make a management plan. (Cool fact: males of this species have been found hopping vertically up trees carrying a couple tadpoles on their backs.)
10. Last, and best, when we were out of the jungle and walking back across the scrubby fields to the road, Andrew spotted a fat little owl sitting in a bare-branched tree. Turns out, this was a species the guide had never seen before in his life (Rufous-banded Owl), and he was really excited and told Andrew that he had a “muy buen ojo”. We got close enough to get a great look with our binoculars, and a bad picture with my camera (see photo site). [Correction: after talking with a few hardcore ornithologists, we have learned that this was most definitely NOT a Rufous-banded Owl, but was infact a Feruginous Pygmy Owl (still cool). Apologies for the confusion.]

Overall, despite sleepiness, sweaty sweaty heat, hunger, thirst, slight discouragement at our extensive ignorance, and Andrew having to deal with only Spanish the whole time, a good time was had by all and we are looking forward to future chances to get out of the city and into the green stuff.

Revelations from Iquitos (-Andrew)

We have a new favorite restaurant, on the recommendation of our lovely Hospedaje hosts. It’s named Hausai (apparently after a type of palm) and is the place where lots of local people go for lunch, so it’s always full (an excellent sign!). They have a different menu each day for an 8 sole lunch (about $3), with a choice of appetizers, main courses, and, most importantly, pitchers of juice!! We usually order completely different meal combinations in order to maximize our combined tasting potential. For example: Jess orders: appetizer- chicken tamale, main course- vegetable pie, juice- Guayaba, Andrew orders: appetizer- pork and giant corn soup, main course- fish with rice, juice- Tumbo. That makes 6 things to taste for a total of 5 dollars. It sure beats going to one of the ubiquitous Pollorias (1 choice- chicken with platanos or papas fritas) for dinner, although the big lunches definitely force an early afternoon siesta. We did find one good Pollería, called Pollos Panda, which is owned by the family of a friend of ours named Karina from the Language School. We met there for dinner on Saturday, along with Raquel and Rocio, and Jess got her first taste of Inka Cola- for those of you that are interested, there´s a new Peruvian restaurant near the Cary Mall where you can experience it for yourself! (The food there isn’t great though.)

After all our experimenting with food, taking siestas, and sitting around our hospedaje for several days, we felt a strong need to get our blood moving. So we asked our friends for recommendations for getting exercise, and found out that there are several little gyms tucked in between houses and stores. We decided to check Jully´s Spa, which is a very nice (albeit a little girly) facility with weight machines, a dance studio, and a small pool. Other than the usual awkwardness of being offered instructions by muscle-bound gym rats (compounded by language difficulties), and not realizing we were supposed to bring our own towels (it got a little oceanic), it went well and was quite rejuvenating. We´re hoping to make it a common occurrence. Jess is really excited about taking dance classes, mostly so she can take her moves to the Club (right.).

Speaking of which, we went to our first South American club on Saturday night (Jess made the mistake of mentioning to our friends that we were interested in learning to dance) and ended up about a block from our hostel at Club NOA (NOrte-Americanos?? No lOnger Audible?). It was not exactly traditional dancing- by which I mean once we got inside we could have been in any Americanized city in the world. There were lots of flashing lights, loud music with even louder base, TERRIBLE beer sold by scantily clad young women (our friends recognized a couple of their students from the Language Center), and only a few brave souls actually dancing. This was because it was only 10pm which is apparently way to early for respectable people to be at a Discoteca. Rocio dragged us onto the exposed dance floor and taught us a few moves (and seemed to be impressed that we could keep the beat... kind of... sometimes), while Karina cracked up every time she made eye contact with one of us. We ended up staying after midnight, after promising ourselves that we would get to bed early. But all in all, it was more fun than expected, and we learned a few moves to practice on our own, so next time we can really get down.

Pipintuwasi: House of the Butterflies (-Jess)

On our second day in Iquitos (we spent most of the first day cowering in our hostel room, staring at the whirly ceiling fan, reflecting on whose fault it was that we were here, wherever here was, and speculating on how long we would last), we decided to be more extroverted and call one of the ladies that the Fulbright folks in Lima had said to contact if we had questions. This was a good move, although it led to a crazy day so full of wild things to take in that it led to spending our third day mildly in shock and again mostly meditating on the ceiling fan. Ceiling-fan thoughts can go in another, more philosophical post, so for now I’ll write about the adventures of Day Two in Iquitos.

We conquered the public phone long enough to arrange a morning coffee date with Raquel Moscoso, a Peruvian woman who had recently been a Spanish teacher in Oregon as part of the Fulbright exchange program. She spoke perfect English, and she brought two other ladies (Rocio and Karina) who spoke perfect (British) English who are applying for similar Fulbright exchange positions in the U.S. Their super-friendliness and English answers to our already long list of questions could not have been more welcome. They took us to an authentic (joke) Iquitos restaurant “The Yellow Rose of Texas”, so that we could talk over glasses of delicious fresh-squeezed juice. I am crazy about the juice here by the way. So far, it is one of the best things about this city. These were pretty hilarious ladies actually, and we really enjoyed talking with them, so things began to look brighter. They took us to some cell phone stores and explained about models and plans and whatnot, and showed us which bank we could use for turning big bills into smaller usable ones, and all sorts of useful stuff like that. They offered to check on the possibility of Andrew teaching English in exchange for Spanish lessons at the Language Center where they work, asked if we would like to sit as “jurors” on an English talent show in their class, and they offered to take me to the gym and teach me how to dance. Pretty cool, huh? I hope that at least some of that pans out. But even more immediately, they offered to go with us to a butterfly sanctuary and jungle-animal-rescue-operation a little ways out of town that very afternoon since it was apparently a holiday.

So, we had our first ride on a mototaxi (we thought we were going to die) to get to a crowded muddy port, where we were swarmed by a horde of men trying to get us to take their various boats to various places, followed Raquel and Karina into whatever canoe they got in, and rode under gathering ominous clouds up the muddy Nanay river to the village of Padrecocha. They were selling plates piled high with turtle eggs at the port. No wonder the river turtle populations are crashing. It was a little like the state fair. (Worm-on-a-stick anyone?) When we got to the village, all four of us, plus the driver and his toddler daughter, plus the kid hanging off the back, got onto this half-motorcycle half-golfcart and drove extremely quickly on a semi-paved track through the village that reminded me of some of the roller coasters at Cedar Point (we really thought we were going to die) to get to the home of an Austrian woman who runs an animal orphanage and butterfly sanctuary. Because she happened to also work for Raquel Moscoso in Iquitos, she let us in off-hours and gave us a private tour. She met us with an endangered red-faced uakari monkey clinging to the back of her head. She explained that it was afraid because ever since they’d gotten the new baby howler monkey the two older howler monkeys had become jealous and were taking it out on this one because he was the weak one. I was instantly fascinated. She walked us around and showed us first the butterfly sanctuary where she cultivated all sorts of lepidopterans, collected their eggs, hatched them into wild looking caterpillars (see the picture link), and set them loose to chew each other up (I bet you didn’t know that butterflies could be vicious). Then she showed us her pet JAGUAR, Pedro, who had enormous paws with which he liked to fish and eat chicken. Then there was a tapir named Lucas that you could feed pineapples to, agoutis running around all over the place, caimans in the little lake, macaws in the trees, and a fluffy giant anteater that was using its really long tongue to lap up a plate of milk. These are all animals that you would be varying degrees of very lucky to even get a glimpse of in the wild, so it was pretty durn cool to be able to get so close to them. However, my favorite part was definitely when it started to pour and we went under a little pavilion, and a howler monkey came and sat down right next to me and put her hand on my knee while she howled away (apparently she had just learned how to). I spent several weeks while studying abroad in Ecuador walking around in the jungle just hoping to hear a howler monkey, much less see one, much less see it close enough to see its facial expressions, much less have it treat me like just another monkey. Then a capuchin crawled in my lap and started playing with my watch Velcro, and an uakari came over and very carefully checked my hair for anything tasty. I began to think that maybe it was not such a big mistake to come to Iquitos after all.  But the ride back through the village reminded me that there was a lot more to this than playing with monkeys, because the lifestyle gap is almost unfathomably large, and the animals are all there because they were really sick or their parents were killed and eaten, but the people in the villages have to kill and eat the animals because that is how they feed themselves, meanwhile I live in a bubble, and it is all very confusing and thought-provoking. So, things are getting more and more interesting here. Check out the videos of the monkeys and enjoy the state fair!

Let me tell you about Iquitos (-Andrew)

Iquitos is not a peaceful jungle town, where the Amazon drifts quietly by as we a sit under palm trees and sip on fruit drinks in the shade. It is a large, dirty, bustling city, with over a half million people running all over the place. The predominant form of transportation is the mototaxi (a motorcycle with its back wheel exchanged for a little covered cart, big enough for two people to ride in). These are very loud and don’t seem to obey many traffic laws. As a result, there is a constant, ominous rumble at all times, and crossing the street is an adventure. Not to mention, that every time you go out, a dozen drivers approach to offer a ride. Fortunately, our little hostel, La Pascana, is tucked at the bottom of a dead-end street pointed toward the Amazon, so it is relatively peaceful.
At the center of La Pascana is a long rectangular courtyard with fruit trees and other plants (none of which I recognize). Along the sides are 20 small rooms with bathrooms. You can’t drink the water though- we get it from a big bottle in the lobby- and eating without going to a restaurant is a little problematic. But, so far we have successfully overcome these minor difficulties and used cuarto numero dos as our base from which to explore the city. Our current projects include looking for furnished apartments (of which there is a shortage), cell phones (of which there is an abundance), and figuring out exactly what it is we are going to do here.

Getting to the largest city that you can’t get to from anywhere else by road (-Andrew)

Our trip started off well. Actually, it all went well. Our flights took us from RDU to Miami, then to Lima where we spent a day, and finally a short hop over the Andes to Iquitos. The most exciting part of the flights actually occurred in the US, when our pilot suddenly pulled up just before landing in Miami and did another ten minute loop before landing. (By “just before landing” I mean that we were looking out the window and expecting the bump of our wheels touching the ground) The pilot calmly informed us that another airplane had been moving out onto the runway. This was mildly disconcerting.
After hearing a lot of Spanish in the Miami airport, we flew to Lima, Peru, and made it through customs with very little difficulty. We even had a luggage cart and a driver waiting for us with a sign to take us to a hostel. Lima is a very large city, and like Buenos Aires, filled with insane drivers. If there are 3 lanes across, there will be 4 or 5 cars squeezed in them, not to mention cars passing on the shoulder and on the side of oncoming traffic. We stayed at a pleasant little place called Aquisito, which according to the sign in our room means “just around the corner” or “your goal is close, take heart, you will achieve it”.
The next morning took us to the Fulbright Commission office. The street was closed off a block down by a large crowd and the neighborhood celebration of a local Saint. We met the people at the Comission, who were all very kind and spoke English (very well) for Andrew´s sake. After a few more errands and a broken clutch, we got back to our hostel and explored the neighborhood a little. We ate lunch at a little place called the Canta Rana (Singing Frog), which wa decorated with all kinds of flags, soccer and celebrity pictures, and other random artifacts. We tried our first Anticucho (basically a kabob) and Tacu Tacu con Mariscos (large pile of rice with seafood) and were impressed and stuffed. We walked down to see the coast from the cliffs of Lima, then headed back to the hostel before dark.
The next morning we relaxed and did some reading (Andrew got to watch a little of the Rugby World Cup- unfortunately New Zealand lost to France, which will certainly lead to much heckling by certain French friends... Fortunately Australia lost too). Then it was off to brave the Lima highways to get to the airport, where we found very kind employees who let us bring overweight baggage, and more English-speaking gringos on our plane than the one in Miami. Off to the Jungle!!