Red light green light

I pulled up to an intersection the other night to a traffic light that was a good metaphor for what my next move is in Peru. It was both red and green at the same time. Some cars stayed put and didn't move, and others went racing through, and others kind of putted around the intersection not knowing what to do. While it's somewhat normal for Lima traffic, not knowing what's next is a new experience for me. For those that haven't heard, Vanessa's pregnant and in the next few months we'll be needing things like health insurance and a real salary. That means that I will have to cut my Peruvian sabbatical short and return to DC to look for a job. Although I'm not looking forward to job-hunting and being told that my skills are perfect - if I only had a security clearance, I will be glad to leave some things in Peru behind.

First of all is the ingrained class system that puts people with white skin at the top, and people with dark skin that look like natives at the bottom, regardless of their education level. It's way worse than the middle east, it's horrible. They don't even try to hide it.

To the right is a picture of a park next to our house with two huge people making out.

Second will be the driving. I've driven in some crazy places, both in the US, Europe and the Middle East. Egypt, for example has no system or order to the traffic, and you always have to be on your toes or you'll get run over by a taxi, a mule, or herd of goats, but the people are pretty good drivers, and a system of organized chaos works itself out. Washington DC has the opposite problem. The driving is over-organized, but people are bad drivers. When one person goes outside of the established traffic system, nobody knows what to do and they all run into each other. Here in Lima you have the worst combination - no order, and bad drivers. Nobody follows the traffic system, and nobody ever knows what to do. So you have people parking in the middle of a one lane road and going to get something to eat and people backed up for 2 miles and everybody just kind of sits there and waits. Or you get people driving 5 miles an hour on the freeway for no reason, and people swerving around them and into everybody else. It's like bumper cars out here, and the body of your car is there to absorb all of the dings and scrapes that you collect daily.

The picture of the paraglider was taken right outside our house, they go back and forth all day giving tourists rides.

Third will be the pollution, and visiting relatives. It's not that I don't like going and visiting relatives, but in Peru a dinner visit is a 6-8 hour affair. You arrive at 2 or 3 for lunch, then you wait until about 5 until they actually start cooking, then you eat and are expected to take a nap in one of their beds, and then continue eating and hanging out until 10 or 11 or so. It's an all-day affair, and when you have stuff you'd rather be doing, like being in your own house scratching your bum, it get's to be too much. I will miss the food in Peru though.

We haven't done much outside of naps, nursery and eating. We did go to a wild bird refuge on the outskirts of town and took a little boat around a swamp. Alexa is talking more and more and is always doing something funny. She's in the making faces stage. She is also obsessed with spices, and makes me take her to the spice rack every five minutes. She has about 10 of them memorized by smell, and I let her sniff the cap and she'll say "paprika", or "cumin", etc. She also won't go anywhere without a funny red duck marionette that has to walk in front of her at all times.