Milk

There’s no fresh milk here. Or at least if there is, I haven’t seen it. Everyone uses evaporated milk, and although it’s hard to believe it actually froths to make good foam for a cappucino. Tastes like crap though.

Domesticated Animals

… are everywhere. Pigs, dogs, cows, llamas, cats, chickens and ducks line the streets of villages eerywhere. They’re often roped to something near the road, but it’s not uncommon to see a few cows leisurely crossing the street. We saw two large pigs roaming a service station last week. In Cusco, a city of 800,000 people, I saw a llama in the middle of a roundabout chomping on grass.

Hawkers

Frequently people approach you in the street to sell you stuf, which is usually crap. Sometimes it’s children doing the selling, and they’re a bit more forward. They poke your arms and tug at your clothes. Coral yelled at one once here in Cusco. In the last two days I’ve been asked to buy yellow confetti, massages, restaurant meals, finger puppets and lollies. Kaj was asked to buy marijuana and cocaine. He get’s all the luck.

Dot Matrix Printers

Evidently Peru is where all our old dot matrix printers have ended up. Just about every business has one, and very few have inkjet or laser printers. I hear that song in my head everytime a printer goes… you know, the dot matrix song?

Independant Thought

Peru excepts its citizens of independant thought. The only helpful people we’ve encountered are non-Peruvians. This includes staff at hotels, airlines and shops. Maybe some of this are issues lost in translation, but it’s been particularly noticable in dealing with the staff at Lan. Problems get fixed if I call Lan in Miami, and people just give me blank looks here. There have been countless occasions of dealing with local people and they just can’t string together concepts.

Seat Belts

Nobody needs to wear them, and most cars are not fitted with seat belts in the back. Drivers sometimes wear them, but it’s definitely a seat belt optional country. Which is an interesting concept because there also seems to be few speed limits. Luckily the roads are often so bad you can’t go fast on them anyhow.

Breakfast

Unfortunately the breakfasts are really ordinary. You usually get a couple of flat and tasteless bread rolls with butter (again, made from evaporated milk) and memolada, usually strawberry flavoured. You’re often served orange juice which is freshly squeezed from green oranges, so it tastes more like lemon juice. I am so looking forward to bacon and eggs, scrambled eggs with truffle oil, tomato tartlets, omelettes, pancakes and all the other breakfast goodies I make at home. Someone needs to revolutionise Peruvian breakfast.

Bread

In general, the bread is bad. Maybe they don’t have yeast here, but there’s no bread like we would know bread, so toast isn’t an option. You only ever get flat round rolls, or occasionally a good bread at a posh restaurant. I’m looking forward to a vegemite on toast – or anything on toast.

Toilet Habits

Erick, skip this bit. You don’t flush your toilet paper, apparently the system can’t handle it. So, there’s always a bin next to the toilet which hopefully the housekeepers empty every day. Otherwise it gets a bit whiffy.

Kaj and I are still in Cusco but are happily not suffering from altitude issues any longer. Last night was New Years Eve, and it´s interesting how people celebrate when they don´t have so many regulations like we do.

In the morning Kaj and I walked around the city and discovered a very strange looking market. Mostly local people were at this market, and we soon figured the things being sold were for the New Years celebrations in the evening.

Yellow is a good luck colour here and Cusco has this really odd tradition where people don yellow underpants on the outside of their clothing and run around the main square. So, one of the commonly sold items at the markets were yellow underpants. In Australia I´m not sure you´d see too many pairs of yellow knickers, but here there must be a lot of manufacturers that prepare specially for this day. There were little bitty lacy ones, man sized ones and even children´s editions. I have never seen so many yellow underwear!

Just about everything for the celebrations was yellow. There were plastic flower necklaces, streamers, bags of confetti, clickers and crazy flouro yellow glasses that had ´2008´written on them. Kaj noted they´ll have difficulty in 2010 as to 00 is for your eyes to see through. We didn´t buy any of these crazy things, but they were funny to look at.

We had tickets to an exclusive club here, Fallen Angel, which is famous for it´s New Years parties. We had dinner at the club, and then at about 10pm the staff moved all the tables out. The dinner had 150 people, and 600 folk had tickets for after dinner. I had no idea where 600 people would fit in this establishment, as in Australia they´d probably have approval for 100 people at the most. Needless to say, it was a dramatic fire hazard and we were sardines by 11pm.

Upon arrival at the party we were given a plastic bag filled with yellow goodies we´d seen at the markets earlier in the day, and a pair of silver wings and a halo. Since everyone was wearing white to the party, the whole place looked like a bunch of crazy angels with wings and halos.

At about 11:30pm, the owner of the club, who is an overtly gay man, got onto the microphone and started blurting gayness in Spanish. Then, he proceeded to throw yellow underpants into the crowd. The people cheered and scrambled for the yellow pants, which prompted him to tell everyone he had a pair for every person. Unfortunately for me the pair I recieved had a stain on the crotch, but I believe it was a passing smoker who came in contact with my yellow knickers. They were also branded with Fallen Angel 2008.

So then just before midnight everyone has their knickers, yellow goodies and halos and wings, and we´re ordered to clear out of the club and head to the main square which is about one block away. As everyone is leaving the club there are a collection of Fallen Angel staff at the front door handing everyone a bottle of bubbly.

There is a little mini square outside the club, and most partygoers had collected there with their bottles of bubbly. Then, at about 5 mins to midnight everybody started shaking their bottles and spraying their friends. It´s 4C and I´m breathing fog and I am so damn grateful the only friend we had at this party was Gonzalo our tour guide, as I had absolutely no intention of getting bubbly drenched in the freezing cold! It was bad enough I couldn´t feel any of my fingers.

Suddenly some major fireworks exploded above our little square, and they´re the closest I´ve ever been to exploding fireworks! Gonzalo knows the owner of this club quite well, and discovered that these fireworks were organised especially for the Fallen Angel party people. These were the only fireworks of the evening, as here they don´t have a big public display like we do at home.

Kaj and I still had full bottles of bubbly and collectively decidied we should dump them on Gonzalo since he was in the party mood. After we sprayed him I threw yellow confetti all over him, which stuck beautifully.

The whole party then marched together into the main square, and the street parted to let us through as if we were celebrities. Everyone was looking and gawking to see where we´d come from! We had drummers at the front of our procession, and a whole bunch of men scattered through the crowd letting off firecrackers above our heads.

Once inside the square we caught up with Gonzalo´s friends, many of whom we´d already met through our gourmet food travels. People were very celebratory and happy. The square was filled with a couple thousand people, and at least a couple hundred were letting off their own firecrackers. Loud booms often went off near us, and every couple of seconds there would be screaming fireworks shot into the sky.

Every now and then a hawker would approach Kaj and I to buy things. So I´d throw confetti on them and say ´Happy New Years´, and they´d soon go away.

At about 2am a whole bunch of riot police entered the main square, and that´s when Kaj and I decided it was time to head to bed. Seeing riot police in person are actually a bit scary.

Today is the last day of our gourmet food tour, and we´re looking forward to the finale dinner at the MAP restaurant inside the museum here. After that we take a train to Puno which is on the shores of Lake Titicaca, the highest navigatable lake in the world. Bolivia, a completely landlocked country, run their navy on the lake. This seems like a dramatic waste of money to me. We´re here for 2 days then head to the USA on 5th January.