What I had in my head that night was wrong. The rare, almost impossible, miscalculation on my part. The trip takes 11 hours easy. Imagine my surprise when I wake up and check my phone to see that it is 7 am and I am still in my bus seat. 'O crap.... I'm on my way to Cuzco.' I quickly ask the attendant where the heck we are, and she tells me we are almost to Arequipa. Now I am confused. This is a familiar feeling. I try to call my Couch Surfing friend to tell her I will be late but I can't. So I just go on.
I got to the station finally and made my way to the city center. Got a hold of Alexa and told her I wasn't going to make it. And thus began my time in Arequipa. Now that the segway is over let's talk about Arequipa. It's really cool. I like it here a lot. It is in the desert more or less but it is surrounded by three huge volcanoes, Chachani, Misti and Pichu pichu. They say that from the top of Misti it looks like the mountains actually arc over the city slightly, like it's in a giant bowl. It kind of reminds me of New Mexico, in the desert but with mountains very close. The sky is always clear and it's so dry I immediately developed a cold sore that is just now healing. The city is centered around the Plaza de Armas and all the buildings are made of a white limestone known as sillar. That's why they call it the 'ciudad blanca' or white city. The people here are very independent and assosciate themselves with Arequipa first and Peru second. Sound familiar? Maybe that's why I like it here, the pride. Or it could be that there's tons of stuff to do in the outdoors, as well as a decent bar and club scene. So far I have white water rafted and rock climbed, and this upcoming weekend I am going to backpack in Colca Canyon, the major outdoor attraction near Arequipa. It's twice as deep as the Grand Canyon although not as steep, and the villages in the bottom of the canyon preserve a tradicional Peruvian culture, complete with nature worship and llama rearing. Maybe it's just for the tourists but it seems legit.
Anyways, I wanted to do a post about Arequipa with some thoughts I had on the first day I was here. When I got to my hostel one block off of the Plaza, I couldn't check in so I just walked around. It was a Sunday. There are two things I really like about Peru. Sundays and old style VW beetles. I like Sundays here because Sunday is family day more or less in Peru, so everyone is out enjoying the day and doing fun stuff. The Plaza is beautiful and it was even nicer full of happy people. The people were only outnumbered by the pidgeons. You pretty much wade through pidgeons to get across the plaza.
It just makes you feel nice. Peruvians seems sort of fanatic about family and I don't know if I dig that, but the fact that it's just customary that one day a week everyone goes out and enjoys themselves is pretty sweet. I like the VW beetles because they are everywhere and typically in really good shape with nice looking pastel colors. Here's one I saw in Lima:
Generally I like the fact that Peruvians like bright colors. In their buildings nad cars and everything. Honestly, the brightly colored Bugs made me feel like I was in Cuba or something. That's just what I had in my head. But I'm not in Cuba. I'm in Peru. That's the problem. I like the bugs because they fulfill an expectation, they make me feel like I am somewhere exotic. It sort of sours the act of enjoying something while traveling because you can't separate your preconcieved notions about what traveling should be and what you should see while traveling from what you are actually seeing. This conflict between enjoyment due to expectation and enjoyment of unadultered experience continued. I was walking aroung the Plaza, which is framed by shops on three sides and a giant beautiful cathedral on the last side. The catheral didn't seem open so I went to an old looking church that was at the corner of the Plaza. It was quiet and very solemn inside. When I entered I stared at one of the ornate altars to some saint and tried to feel something. I realized I wanted it to be solemn, to be sacred, for it to be a spiritual experience. I tried to open my mind to simply take in what I was seeing without preconceived notions. And in fact, when I saw a man kneeling in front of an altar to Jesus I was drawn to kneel and pray as well. It felt good. I had not prayed in a long time and when I left the church I felt ' spiritualized '. But it was still unclear to me to what degree this feeling was caused by the sacred place and some higher power and not by my desire to have a spiritual experience, because that's just what you do when you travel.
So I go to this coffee shop right on the plaza and I'm contemplating this and also enjoying the place I'm in, a beautiful square in a foreign country drinking coffee. I have the overpowering urge to take a picture, to try and capture the ' coolness ' of the moment. I begin to write in my journal, letting my thoughts flow. I come to find that, for me, there are two paradoxes or conflicts or whatever with traveling and experience in general. The first is the paradox between enjoying something becuase it's cool or because it moved you strictly in the moment and enjoying something because you want to enjoy it or similarly because it's what you expected. E.g. the cool church and the VW beetles. The other is the struggle between enjoying the moment and spending your time trying to capture that enjoyment. Sometimes I walk around just trying to find a cool picture that captures my unique feelings and experiences. The problem is that in those moments I am no longer occupied with the experience, my mind is on creating something that later my friends will look at and say, 'O cool! '. None of this is actually important and some (cough Holly) might say I am just overanalyzing the situation. Even so, sometimes it is fun to doubt yourself and really try and figure out what's going on in your head.
Maybe that's enough for one post. Am I boring? I'll keep them coming and sum up (that implies brevity but I have a hard time with that) my time in Arequipa.
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