I've ben Interpoled

"Permitting the world's leading sponsor of terror to possess the world's deadliest weapon would be an unforgivable betrayal of future generations."

President George Bush, speaking to Knesset 2008

Hmm, I think we have to admit failure on that one...at least if you agree with Chomsky.

Today Michael drove me in our new car (new being a relative term, as the car dates from 1983), a mercedes, to Interpol's Peruvian office, where my fingerprints were taken and my teeth inspected. My file is now hopefully on its way to some vague place where it should meet with the void that is my criminal record. In one week, I'll be able to go to what is rapidly becoming number one on my personal most-visited-places-in-Lima list; DIGEMIN, the office for migratory issues. There, I'll try to acquire the sought-after migratory classification "student", which is one of the "resident" types of visa. In other words, I'll qualify for a "Tarjeta de extranjería", a "foreigness card". Great!

Things that still make me feel like a foreigner:

• believing that people will arrive on time, and arriving on time myself (blasted cultural conditioning)


• balking at the sugar content of Peruvian vanilla ice cream and then checking the price of Ben and Jerry's only to find its ca 300% more expensive and realising that is why it's covered in ice and sitting at the back of the supermarket freezer


• reacting to the shocking language of the tabloids ("bus crash left 15 stiff ones and 3 injured"). Daily mirror ain't got nothing on them!

First impressions: positive

In the tourist brochures, Sète is given the epithet “l’île singulière” (the singular island), which makes me think of astrophysical phenomena. Fortunately, the town has, to my knowledge, no resemblance to a black hole. It is, rather, one pearl on the string of towns and villages that lines the Mediterranean coast west of the Camargue delta. Arriving by train, I first thought that of Sète as a very flat town made up of beaches, an impression which was undone as soon as I stepped out of the train station and gazed upon the hill at the centre of the island, optimistically named “Mont” St-Clair (175 amsl).

A fan of panoramic views it was not long until I had climbed up the pilgrims’ path starting close to our flat, stopping every so often to admire as much the wild herbs in the rather unkempt gardens on the steep ascent, as the widening view of the harbour.

The town centre is very much characterised by the old port with its fishing vessels, the new port with a shipping terminal from which apparently ferries leave for Tanger, and four canals of varying length, width and depth. On the one side the Mediterranean, on the other the “Étang de Thau” with its mussel and oyster beds. It can all be seen from the top of the roof of the chapel erected by and for the pilgrims.

Americans have the right to bear arms. You would think that it was the constitutional privilege of every hexagonist over 18 years to own a car and use it whenever possible, with a preference for causing ridiculously long (all the more so in Sète, where the average street bends and invents a hill every 50 metres or so, and you can consequently no longer see the intersection) queues at traffic lights, or careering down one-way streets.

*

Culinary missions of the summer: learn the recipes for tiaille and macarons. This should be good!

What's up Doc

Visit to the doctor no 1:
In October 2007 I have a sore throat and cough, so I call the general medical centre for my part of town, according to the phone book. They confirm that they are indeed immediately responsible for my looking after my health, but unfortunately they don't have the practical capacity to accommodate me. In other words, the first autumn colds and ear drum infections have hit the local nurseries and primary schools, and the waiting room is swamped.
In the end we agree that I should try with the private medical centre that my dad goes to at his company's expense, so I call them and get an appointment for a few hours later. It's a nice clinic in a single-storey building and there is an aquarium with brightly coloured fish in the reception.
After my patient card has been checked and I have been charged ca 260 SEK, I am ushered into an examination room, where I wait for a few minutes. Then the youngish male doctor comes in and quickly listens to me. Before I can say tonsillitis, he's taken a sample from the back of my throat and run it through a machine, while doing something else somewhere in the clinic. After five minutes, he comes back and tells me it is not a bacterial infection and he can do nothing. I get the bus home again.

Visit to the doctor no 2:
Since I left Peru, I've had fever, a sore throat, headache, aching sinuses, a blocked nose etc. But I refrained from going to the doctor since all they ever do is tell me antibiotics will do nothing. On Saturday I bought some sea water hypertonic nose spray, and it did the trick, plus I don't have a fever anymore. Still, I wanted someone to listen to my breathing, just in case. I wouldn't want to give 70 wedding guests any dangerous infection on Saturday, after all.
The doctor has appointments until 5 o'clock, then it's open clinic until 20. I go early to avoid the queue, and so am called in by the doctor herself at half past four. The surgery is on the ground floor of an apartment block from the 60s/70s. There is no reception, just a waiting room with women's magazines from four years ago.
The doctor listens to all my symptoms, then examines my chest. She tells me it's nothing serious, probably a virus - there are a lot of them going around, apparently. Back at her desk, she explains me that she will give me a receipt for the €22 her expertise costs, with which I can claim back the cost of the medical visit from my local Swedish "mutuelle", i.e. the social security people. I tell her I'll try, but since Swedish people are normally made to pay over €20 for a medical visit anyway, and most of us are not entitled to reimbursement, I'll probably have a hard time. She looks at me incredulously at this revelation but admits I probably know better than her in this particular case. She then prescribes me

• a mixture of thymol, campher and eucalyptus to dissolve in boiling water and inhale
• paracetamol, although I tell her I have other painkillers at home
• a nose spray to clear my sinuses
• an anti-cough syrup

She asks me what I'm taking for the sore throat, and I tell her "tea?!", upon which she agrees that the things she has already prescribed me will probably suffice. I'm told to come back in case my symptoms worsen. No doubt, for another prescription marathon of semi-harmless drugs, so that I will feel confident she has done her job properly.

Crepusculum

18.27.
At this time on certain days, Lima is drowned in ephemeral twilight. Viewed from our living room window, the sandy mountains in the South and East appear from the haze that has occluded them all day, and they make a magnificent violet and fuchsia backdrop to the high-rise buildings in San Isidro and Miraflores, the last rays of sunshine reflected in a few windows. The dome of the cathedral in Avenida de Sucre and the park two blocks away from our home hint at what the city looked like before it became a metropolis.

These are the fifteen minutes before Lima lights up for the evening; the neon lights of pharmacies, supermarkets, casinos, bars and pay-per-hour hostels, the street lamps and the statues of Jesus and the Virgin in the parks, the radio masts all over Lima and flight surveillance equipment in Ventanilla, the port lights and ships of La Punta and Callao. The heat becomes bearable with the last afternoon breeze, before the chilly evening wind brings with it the raw smell of ocean from the West. The cacophony of children, dogs and ice cream vendors with their duck lure pipes in the street dies away, the semi-public buses pass less frequently and stop advertising their destinations with such fervency. Some days even the sound of traffic is reduced around this time, and does not pick up again for a while. It is as if the city takes a long, deep breath before switching into night mode.

They are my favourite 15 minutes.

Incatown

In Cusco airport there are signs stating that due to the extraordinary meteorological conditions pertaining to Cusco and the air above the city, flights may be postponed or cancelled with short notice. Once you have stood next to the ruins of Saqsawayman or on any of the other hills surrounding the hub of the Incas, you see how these conditions could be shaped. The valley almost looks like I imagine an old volcano crater does. And on 3000 m or so above the sea, one can only imagine the whirlwinds and strange sudden drops of pressure...

Our arrival in Cusco in the afternoon of the 24th of December started with the woman at the information desk misinterpreting Michael’s desired price range of “25” as USD, very likely on purpose. After all, why would you stand behind a counter at the airport wearing a dress suit if you were working for businesses that charge as little as 9USD per night? When corrected, she told the blatant lie that those hostels were all booked up. During Cusco’s “low season”? We decided not to be discouraged, picked up the suitcase and then encountered the taxi drivers, who claimed that 15 soles was a fair price, why, almost giving the trip to downtown Cusco away. Moreover, they were in on the hostel hustle too (on the take, so to speak). We stepped 20 metres outside the airport and got a friendly old man who agreed to take us into town for 8 soles, AND take us to some hostels within our price range while sharing our indignation at the hotel mafia.

On the way, we got some nice tourist information about the local cuisine and the trains to Machu Picchu. Then we were invited to inspect three hostels, or rather, Michael and the taxi driver went inside, Michael to check the rooms were ok, the driver to make sure the price didn’t mysteriously deviate from what he had told us. I was left in the taxi with the suitcase, trying to look as inconspicuous as possible. Blond hair, too, has a way of haussing the value of mere twin bed rooms with cable TV and a skanky shower heater to a comfortable suite for two with hot water and all facilities.

We picked a hostel in that street, the taxi driver performed a little sale speech about the personal trips that he could offer to the surrounding villages, gave us his business card and left. We entered the hostel, which we soon discovered was a family business, as many others, with some member of the family always hanging about downstairs in the lounge/living room together with two dogs looking like boxers who loved being scratched and cuddled with. Of course I obliged.

After unpacking and cross-examining the elder members of the family about Cusco, markets, restaurants, Christmas celebrations, Machu Picchu, the villages and lots of other things, we went for a stroll up the Avenida del Sol, the main avenue, which was handily just around the corner.
Cusco was not what I had expected. I think I must still have had the images from Che's visit in the “Motorcycle Diaries” in my mind, and yes, that was a while ago...There are many beautiful Spanish buildings, at the cost of the Inka ruins looming above – the latter were, until the middle of the 20th century, the official city quarry.

A lot of people had come in from the countryside for Christmas, and as we entered the main square, the Plaza de Armas, the first simultaneous impressions were unfortunately
1) a lot of poor and dirty villagers huddling and begging along the stone walls of the cathedral and 2) the stench from the rent-a-loos (leaking) placed nearby. However, we moved on into the crowded market, and I was surprised at how much of the market was taken up by manger decoration materials – big armfuls of tall grass, moss, wood, paper painted in different dark green shades and many, many figures of all sizes and types. Of course, the manger in Cusco includes llamas or alpacas, but also a multitude of creatures that I would not necessarily associate with either Bethlehem or Cusco.

We entered some sort of religious large hall where the competitors and winners of “best manger” were being exhibited, along with some finer crafts, such as very elaborate chess boards with inkas and llamas versus the Spanish conquistadores and the more expensive puzzle versions of the most famous wall in Cusco with the stone with umpteen angles. It immediately made me think of the ceramic Nessie...different culture, same idea.

And the concours goes on

Of course, it is very important to be sober when you take an exam. Many worthwhile careers in the street- cleansing, fruit-picking and subway-guitar-playing industries have been founded on a lack of understanding of this simple fact.

Terry Pratchett, Moving Pictures

Still no report from the holidays. Appalling, really. Some good news though:
I've been sent a preliminary invitation to sit the translation exam in Brussels. And no, it's not the exam that will land me a fabulous job should I pass it. It'll possibly get me on a list for potential candidates to interview should a vacancy present itself for translators into Swedish working in the DG Translation. A grey area of possibilities and probabilities, in other words. And let us all join in shock and horror at the EU telling me I can't sit the exam in Cosa No-, sorry the Commission's office in Lima and instead forcing me to cross the Atlantic thus adding to the greenhouse effect (or the UV screening effect, depending on which way you choose to look at it).

Holidays come and gone

If I weren't completely swamped with work, I would be writing my travel stories from Cusco, Machu Picchu, Trujillo and Huanchaco. It was lovely. For now, here are some photos

Saqsawayman

Pisaq

Cusco surroundings

Machu Picchu