David Grajal

Lima is the capital of Peru. The city looks messy but modern, with dirty and wide avenues. Lima is flat and huge. There are 9 million people living in Lima, mostly on  two story buildings. The city follow the coastline but it is the first city I’ve visited that instead of hugging the sea, it looks designed to give it the cold shoulder.

Lima, Plaza de Armas

Lima is a grey, functional city. The people look busy and only in the oldest part of downtown you can see some buildings with historic value, narrow streets and colonial style houses. My most interesting experiences in Lima are related to the traffic. Traffic in Lima is awful. Most of the cars are really old and are full of dents.

Public transportation is very interesting and have their particular name: “movilidad”. There is no subway or street cars. They don’t use the European concept of urban bus, but they have microbuses. Those microbuses are basically vans that move on a predeterminate route. There are two guys in each van, one of them is the driver. The other guy go out of the vehicle when there is a stop and start yelling to announce where the van is headed. Some microbus stops are clearly signed but frequently any red light is used as improvisated stop where you can get on or off the microbus.. even if it is on the middle of the road!.

Those vans have around 20 small seats but there are frequently full and the people stand straight. I’ve seen full of people vans with probably 30 people inside. The ticket for the micros are absurdly cheap.

The other half of “movilidad” concepts are cabs. They are a more expensive than the micros on long distances but the price on short distances is cheap and everybody can pay for them. Actually I guess 70% of vehicles in Peru are Taxis. The quality is… not good if we compare it with European standards. First, you need to stop the taxi and barter with the driver. There can be a huge difference between a taxi and another specially if they realize you are not from South America beause they will try to rip you off. And second, the cars are really old and dirty. Really dirty. And don’t expect the driver to wear a nice suit. Not expect even clean drivers.

Car = Cab on Lima

My best moments in Lima were in the cabs because it was a very good opportunity to speak with locals. Lima is a huge city and I needed a 40 minutes ride to downtown from the hotel (Paying like 1 EUR). Those people were honest, and they were clearly interested on having a foreigner Spanish speaker on board. I guess the drivers are not used to it because most of the tourists don’t bother taking taxis. It is something dangerous according to the travel guides.

About our conversations, the taxi drivers were street smart people. The general consensus is that everybody knows that the state corruption is abysmal but they accepted it. I will close the post with a cite I love from one of the Taxi Drivers because it shows clearly what I’m referring when I say they are street smart.

“We need intelligent people to lead us, and intelligent people are always smart to keep for themselves part of the wealth”.

After my short South American trip I’ve become very interested on the continent. I’ve been reading a lot about South America and I’m thinking about going for a trip from South to North following the shadow of Ernesto Guevara.

Why this sudden interest in South America?
It’s difficult to say. In South America I could feel my Spanish roots more powerfully than on Spain. South America people is closer to the XV century Spaniard adventurer that current Spanish people are. We have become too influenced by other cultures while South America is still faithful to the old spirit. The people is street smart, some of them are dreamers, most of them just live on the present and none of them seem to think too much on the future.

In South America happened one of the few moments in history when a developed civilization contacted a less advanced one. South American people had never contacted Greek and  Roman civilization and in consequence they developed by they own at lower pace. By the time Francisco Pizarro discovered them, they were 10 centuries behind in technical development. The Inca civilization was as military, social and economically complex as the Roman Empire had been in Europe.

At that time we didn’t have the same high moral and ethics we have now and we didn’t care about the social or scientific possibilities of such contact. Ten centuries of technical development between the too civilizations was simply too much. Spanish powder and Inca naivety were enough to subdue them on the wink of an eye. After the conquest, we took possession of a huge part of the continent and we made them a colonial province of the Spanish Empire . They become the main source of gold and silver to finance the Spanish expansion all around the world.

They become the magic key of the Spanish Empire. South America changed the course of the history five centuries ago.

In a few centuries South America was linked to the Spanish culture. We mix our races and we force them to forget their old natural gods and tribal languages and convert to Catholicism and a common language.

I spoke with lots of people about all of this. They consider us their roots and they blame us about how we invaded their country and took advantage of the local wealth instead of invest it there. Basically we place them on the modern world in exchange of several centuries of domination and exploitation.

The next posts will deal with what I discover in Lima, Cuzco and Machu Picchu. Stay tuned!

In October I went for a week long trip to Peru for business reasons. However I didn’t want to flight all over the world without also exploring the local culture. I enjoyed 5 days in Peru, 2 of them in Lima and the rest exploring Lima, Cuzco and the Sacred Valley.

This experience have been my first time in South America and also, my first experience in a country where you can touch, listen and smell poverty. It was short, but revelatory experience. After those days, I changed. A bit. You always change your mindset when you visit other cultures but this time has been different. In Peru the people is happy without any of the artificial modern complications we enjoyed on Europe. At the end of the trip I felt closer to human nature.

In Peru I had my first hands-on contact with South America Spanish. It sounds old, like stuck in time. The grammar they use is the same, the pronunciation sounds sweeter. The vocabulary is clearly different. They use the same words as in Spain with different meaning and they use completely different slang. In Peru the people doesn’t seem influenced by the American English as Mexicans do but they often mix Quechuan words with Spanish in their conversations. When I was speaking with locals we could understand each other without problems but sometimes we needed to ask for the exact meaning of the words.

I really liked the trip. It was intense. Not a lot of time but lots of experiences. I really want to explore the entire continent.
Many places to visit… and lots of different cultures to discover.

This book is the history of a missionary family, who in 1959 move from Georgia to the fictional village of Kilanga in the Belgian Congo. The book tells how they arrive on the new continent with lots of hopes and ideas, and how all those ideas failed because they were based in misconceptions about Africa and how the nature, the war and the political problems destroy the family and change forever each one of the main characters.

The Poisonwood Bible

It’s the first book I read that is written with a main argumental line on the background but without a clear interlocutor. Each charpter is written in first person, speaking from the mouth of one of the main characters in the book. I felt like entering in the head of different persons every few pages. Most of the chapters are written from the point of view of the teenager daughters and it’s interesting to see how they mature as you progress on the book.

The book is reveling because it tells in first person what happened in Congo in the last years of the Belgian colony and the first years of independence. The author often drops key points about why the Congo was a mess after the colonial period and the effect the foreign interference had on the people.

Overall, the book is a critique of inflexible positions and about situations were there is no possible win scenario. It is also a detailed overview of how the European colonization affected the people on the rural areas and a very detailed description of the post-colonial era following the independence. Social and political changes are always in the background and the characters are not heroes but normal people that looked around and questioned why the things are like they are.

What I learned reading this book? I discovered that I don’t know anything about Africa. I’ve never studied what happened on Africa on the last 100 years during school and sincerely,  I’d never cared about it. The media only tell us how poor and mismanaged they are and to remember us the aid they need each time there is a humanitarian catastrophe. In fact, each time something happened, normally a new war with lots of displaced people I never really understood it because I didn’t know anything about their current situation.

Since reading the book I’ve become a lot more interested on the African puzzle. I’m reading a lot about Africa and I’m getting a huge update about what happened on the continent on the last 100 years. It’s very interesting and fascinating and I recommend everyone to invest a little of time on discover it.