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tumblrbot asked: ROBOTS OR DINOSAURS?
ROBOTS
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I guess its time for an update.
A whole week in Trujillo. The lack of computer makes it kind of hard to update. Typing on an iPod is hard. After getting very sunburned on the bike tour, we spent the next day exploring the center of Lima. The main square has government buildings, the cathedral, and the Monastery of San Francisco. The monastery has catacombs underneath it… and there were tons and tons of bones! really old bones! Skulls and femurs. We wandered around pretty much all day, and then ended the day wandering around a park full of fountains.
The next day we flew to Trujillo. Michael, the director of WindAid, the company we are working for, picked us up at the airport. We are staying at their house with their family and the other volunteers Greg and Peter. Greg did two years here in the Peace Corps and he is staying around to help Michael for the next few months. Peter is here from Wales for two weeks. He works in product design.
WindAid is a social entrepreneurship. It builds wind turbines to sell, and also to install in communities in the mountains. We spent Sunday watching some documentaries about energy and climate change. Part of the program is to try to raise awareness in the volunteers. Monday - Thursday we spent in the shop working. I addition to Michael, there is Tico who just moved here from the US, Sr. Abel, Yun, and some guys from the national university who work in the shop and patiently deal with our lack of expertise.I wont bore with the technical stuff… but i’ve been learning lots and finally getting to do some cool stuff.
The weather has been around seventy and sunny all day. Its amazing and we’ve been walking around and exploring lots. Mangos are in season. Yaaay. We also went and saw the Huacas del sol y de la luna. They are pre-Incan ruins. Around every 80-100 years, they would build a new temple on top of the old one, so these ruins are five layers deep. After an especially devastating el nino year, the group split and part moved to the coast. They left ruins as well, called Chan Chan.
We were supposed to go to work today, but there was a transit strike today and it was advised not to drive. Apparently someone high up in la policia decided to go rouge and take care of some mafia leaders on his own (Trujillo has a rather large involvement in the cocaine business) but he was fired. A lot of the people that he had freed from mafia control were the people that run the microbusses here. The strike turned out to be not much of a big deal, but it meant we got today off and we will be heading back to the shop tomorrow.
Next week, if things go as planned (which they never do in Peru) we will be heading up to a community on Tuesday to do an install and probably also eat some guinea pig. Nom.
Thats all for now folks!
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Buenos dias!
Hola de Lima, Peru. It’s been a lovely day of biking on the coast and exploring ancient ruins. Unfortunately, the bottle of sunscreen I put next to the backpack did not end up in the backpack…. And I returned much pinker than when I left. Also with a sweet burn line from the watch I was wearing. Oh well.
Let’s first do a little recap of Lima dia 1. We started with early breakfast at the hostel, but were a bit jet lagged, so we napped. Then we headed out from the hostel to explore Miraflores. We walked along the coast and then in to find food and a grocery store to buy water. We then tried to go see the ruins, but the tours had closed for the day. Instead we got dinner at the swanky shopping area overlooking the beach. We each got a traditional drink called a pisco sour. Pisco is a brandy made from fermenting grapes. Then we went to go see a movie in Spanish: the newest Mission Impossible. Too bad it was in English with Spanish subtitles. Oh well.
We started today with breakfast at the hostel. Coffee, eggs, bread and jam. Then headed to where the bike tour started. There we met Juan and a Korean couple on their honeymoon (aww). Lima sits on top of cliffs looking out over the ocean, and a road/walking trail/long skinny park run along the edge. We biked south along the coast from Miraflores, the upscale touristy area where our hostel is, to Barranco, the bohemian district. This felt much more like an artsy town. All the houses are painted in a variety of bright colors. Juan joked that this is so they can find their way home drunk. This area has a lot of cool restaurants and bars. We’ll be checking it out later. We then rode south to Chorillos. An area that was much more typical limeña. There is a huge difference between the rich cliff-front condos and the small shacks packed up into the hills. We learned about the Peruvian-Chilean war (that was started over bird poo that makes a good fertilizer) and how the Chileans burned parts of Lima to the ground. We then rode back to Barranco and had a lunch of Inca cola with a ham sandwich.
At the end of the tour, we rode through Parque Kennedy in Miraflores. I took many pictures I will post later, but the park is very literally filled with cats. It started with people abandoning them, and they started reproducing. Now they live in the park and some nice people feed them.
After the tour, we headed north to some 1400 year old ruins. They were discovered in 1981 in the middle of the city. The giant mound of dirt that is the ruins was being used as a motocross park. They have since restored it and discovered many things including shark fins and teeth, footprints, and the remains of many Incan women sacrificed to the goddess of the ocean. This about sums up Lima dia 2. We are gonna go find some sushi for dinner. Tomorrow we head to the historic district in central Lima. Stay tuned. -
Another fun thing to mention. Multiple successful conversations in Spanish. Usually just who I am, why I’m here, where I’m from etc… But still. Very encouraging. Great success I’d say for not having used Spanish in more than a year. The people at my hostel are very friendly. Some from vancouver, BC, a lady from Sweden, and an American man who is trying to decide where in south America he wants to live because he does not want to die of the radiation quietly killing people off in the northern hemisphere.
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Merry Christmas
So I think I’m going to try to bring this back. Especially because I’m going to Peru. But also because maybe a little bit of writing will be good for me, use a different part of the brain. I only wish I had the talent and voice to write a blog as wonderful as Alski’s. I’ll start by keeping these short until I really have interesting things to say.
In around thirty hours I will be leaving from the SeaTac airport to fly to Lima. I will be spending four days in Lima exploring before I head up north to Trujillo where I will be working building and installing a 2kW wind turbine. I know very little about the group I will be with so I am excited and nervous. Mostly nervous because its been a year since I needed to talk in any other language besides English. Rusty spanish will be an understatement.
One of the other things I’m looking forward to is the disconnectedness. I’ll be leaving my computer at home and my phone wont work. It’ll be lovely to take a break from facebook, and email, although I’m not sure I’ll know what to do with all the spare time I’ll have. This break has been really good for relaxing, thinking, and in general not being very productive. Peru will be a change of pace.
I don’t have much else to say. Lots of packing to do. I’ll leave you with this song. As bad as it is and as much as I have been trying to avoid any and all music these last two weeks (especially that damn Katy Perry song), this song still makes me chuckle every time the radio overplays it.
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Please note the joy that is ONLY two-digit numbers.
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James Earl Scones (suggested by Jameel Winter and subtilitas)
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Pictures!
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Another scattered update.
First off, these are the types of history things I love. Not the whats and whens but the whos. Worth a read if you have a couple minutes.
Hmmmm. I always think of interesting things to write about when I am driving. Then I sit down to write something here, nothing witty comes to mind. I will say however that there are some things that I have been realizing over the last few weeks. First off, I know people say this over and over, but its not what you know, its who you know. I always hear it, but I have started asking around, looking for jobs and advice, asking people about what they did after college. People know a whole ton that they don’t share. And its good advice. It starts out with a couple questions and that turns into here, email this person and that turns into a meeting. And then they pass your resume on to someone in Oregon or point out a really cool class you should take. Cool beans. Secondly, I think I pretty much know the coolest people in the world. You don’t realize how much you miss them until you sit down to a two hour skype date with someone you havent talked to in two months. And I’ve met lots of cool people here. People I wish didn’t live on the OTHER side of the country. But my friends and family really are the best. So cheers to you.
On a less philisophical note…..VEGAS BABY!!!!! We (6 of us) are staying in the Palms hotel which looks awesome. I went and bought new clothes for Vegas which has been my first clothing purchase in at least two months. Waahoo. I got paid today and what with rent and Vegas and plane tickets it looks like I will not be saving quite as much of this paycheck as I had hoped.
I have officially purchesed my plane tickets to go so Pitbull and Enrique in San Jose. This will include catchy music that some of you may judge me for, but also time with Sarah and Max! I’m not sure why I am such a Pitbull fan. I will be the first to admit its not good music, its catchy music. But still I love it. I’m not sure I even know what he looks like. Oh well, we all have our weaknesses.
One of my goals for this summer was to read the news more often and try to stay updated on curret goings-ons. Now I have done much better with this than I thought I would, but I can say two things from it: yes, I feel like I can participate more intelligently in talks about the world and politics, but in general I am just fed up and/or frustrated with what I read. And from reading the comments on sites like CNN and BBC, no matter what political affiliation one is, everyone is. But no one does anything about it except complain on blogs (like me) and to their friends and parents (like me). After one becomes intelligently informed (informed opinions are key, not just snap judgements from biased news sources) the next step is to start acting on the things you feel strongly about. Vote. Write letters. Sign petitions. Talk to your state politicians. Tell them you are pissed off that tuition is $500 more expensive this quarter. I read an article last week saying that we are the most apathetic generations. The article (similar to this one) talked about reasons why we are that way. We are letting the most extreme subsets of an older generation make decisions that will affect US and OUR CHILDREN not them. No matter what your opinion is, its important you (and I) stand up for it. I think that should be my goal for the rest of the year. Whoops, the philosophy just snuck back up on me. Sorry guys.
I am on my work computer right now, but I will try to get more pictures up soon. Pictures are way more fun than words. I bet very few people aside from my lovely family made it this far through my wordy post. If you did, props. I’ll get some pictures up tonight.
Speaking of pictures, I have been getting to know my Nikon 3100 over the summer and I think we will get along great. The autofocus and i haven’t started out on the best foot, but when I have the time to shoot totally manually everythings great. Last night I went out to get a couple cool pictures of the dust storm/sunset from the tiny man-made duck-poop lake by my apartment complex. This turned into some work with night shots and slow shutter speeds. I didn’t have a tripod at all, so I found myself somewhat limited to pictures taken from a flat, still surface like a bench or a pole. People in my apartments thought I must have looked nutzo. I will get some of them up on facebook here pretty soon. A lot of them turned out much better than I expected. I’m sure I could make them look super fancy with some histogram, contrast, saturation tweaking etc…. but I think I may just leave these as is woohoo. Here is a cool one! I have really liked learning about this camera and ways to take cooler pictures. Ive been doing lots of reading online, but I still seem to struggle in my work with aperture and focus. Lots of times I’m taking shots of far away, so I don’t have much to play with. My close up shots though never turn out quite how I want them to. The whole picture is in focus. Or none of it is. Haha.
Its hard to believe that I have been on Arizona for two months. I love the sun (the heat less so). I have learned a ton at Intel, and I’m not sure I am excited to go back to the clouds of Seattle. The people and the culture YES. I also very much like working. I get paid. I don’t have homework. I learn. In fact, I don’t even have remote access as an intern, so no one even expects me to worry about work after 430 each day or on weekends. Its great! I interviewed for the rotation program for recent grads. Its essentially three six month rotations. So you have to be the newbie not once but thrice. But it would allow me to work three different jobs and potentially live in three different locations. They only hire like five undergrad degrees per year to this program though, the rest are MS and PhD. So we will see.
Anywho. Thats about it. Slow Friday at work today. Waahoo. Two more hours left.
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I am actually disgusted by the people shown in this.
Funnily enough I believe 98% are from FOX.
http://www.thedailyshow.com/watch/thu-august-18-2011/world-of-class-warfare—-the-poor-s-free-ride-is-over?xrs=playershare_fb
Absolutely disgusted.
