Archive for August, 2007
back to school
I think I might be in love with this city. It’s been a week, exactly, since I touched down in New York, and I haven’t even begun to stop getting utterly and deliriously lost every time I turn a corner. I’m at a point where I recognize the names of streets near me, but I couldn’t tell you where they go or how to get there. I know I really live somewhere when I can recite the streets in order. In Berkeley, it was Durant, Channing, Haste, Dwight…in Barcelona Passeig de Gracia, Rosselo, Diputacio, Consell de Cent…in San Francisco Oak, Fell, Hayes, Grove…
So far in New York I know I live on Myrtle, and that’s pretty much it. I’m starting to figure stuff out, though – where the closest hardware store is, and the best dumpster for scavenging wood. I also found the local DIY bike coop, which turns out is in a community space literally half a block from my house. I walked in last Saturday to a chaotic mess of greasy tools and neighborhood kids, and helped Joe, a shy10 year old, put a bike together.
The bike itself left a little to be desired, lacking derailleurs and brakes, but Joe’s friends were already done with their bikes, so it was all I could do to get him to tighten his seat post before he bolted out the door.
One of the best things in New York so far is the bike lanes on the bridges. Every bridge over the East River has a separate bike path, and the Williamsburg bridge bike path is elevated over the car traffic. The first time I rode over it there was a group of bike punks sitting in the closed off section that led to the other side of the bridge drinking 40′s out of paper bags and laughing at all the bikers who went charging off towards the closed bike path only to come up short against the chainlink fence and sheepishly turn around.
and finally, NYC
after an intense, delirious, sunburned week in San Francisco, I flew to NYC on Wednesday with the remnants of my stuff and my cats, who were less than pleased about being shoved in a box for twelve hours. I spent the entire flight worrying that they were freezing and/or dead, since I had to put them in the luggage hold and so couldn’t see them until I got to New York. They seem to be relatively well-adjusted and not too mad at me.
Yesterday I got my first taste of just how big New York really is. I’ll tell you stories about all the stupid stuff I do if you promise not to laugh. My new apartment is across from a subway stop, so I walked down to take the subway to the train station and catch a train to Princeton, where I left much of my stuff back in April. I approached the ticket machine and tried to put money in it, like you do at BART. A woman approached and looked at me trying to figure out why the machine wouldn’t take my money. “Whaddya want? Four dollar ticket?” she asked. “Um, sure”. I responded. She started tapping the touch screen menu (ah-ha….), moving so fast I couldn’t even see the questions on the screen. “Where ya going?” “Grand Central,” I said. “Do you know which way I should go?” She pointed me down the stairs, and I set off for the station.
Of course, in New York, there is more than one train station. And trains to New Jersey leave from Penn Station, not Grand Central. I left Grand Central and broke the rule I made for myself last time I was here, which is: do NOT randomly get on a train that you think is going the right direction. Which meant that I was out another 2 dollars, since I went the wrong way and had to exit and reenter the subway to go the right way. Grrrrr. Luckily, I have a bike to ride temporarily, at least until Rhonda gets here (she took the bus) so I don’t have to take the subway any more. wheeee.
So far I haven’t gone a whole lot further than my block, but a bike ride is in my near to immediate future.
I’m just glad I didn’t have to ride
After a truly marathon traveling experience, I am finally back in San Francisco. We left Arequipa at 3 Pm on Sunday and didn’t get into LA until nearly noon on Monday…I have a newfound hatred for sleeping on airport chairs. Then my sister and I drove to SF today, so I am finally at rest, more than 48 hours after we started.
I gotta tell you, I love my family. It was hard to say goodbye to my parents knowing I’m not going to see them again for at least a couple months. It’s been luxurious living in San Francisco and seeing them on a regular basis.
I’m exhausted, so more recounting of Peruvian adventures is going to have to wait, but I hope y’all are getting excited for the slideshow and storytime this Friday!
As high as I’ve ever been
I’m in Arequipa, the second largest city in Peru, cradled in the valley of El Misti, a 19,000 foot volcano that I stood on top of yesterday. It was pretty incredible to be looking down into the crater of an active volcano. The smell of sulphur suffused the air every time the wind shifted and I felt lightheaded and precarious looking down.
It was a two day trek led by Carlos Zarete Aventuras, which is a fantastic tour company. Carlos, the grandson of the original Carlos, was our guide on the trek. We had three porters to carry our stuff, which normally I’d object to, but when base camp is as high as I’d ever climbed before and we hadn’t acclimatized at all, I was in no position to complain. I was popping Diamox like they were party favors – it helps immensely with the acclimitization to the altitude even though it makes you have to pee basically every hour. It was an exercise in bladder control, let me tell you. We arrived at base camp around 4 pm, and basically sat around talking until dinner was ready. While I still prefer camping on my own, I think, it was pretty luxurious to walk into the mess tent and have someone hand me a bowl of soup.
We got up at 3:30 the next morning in order to be up and down the mountain before early afternoon. (I’m still not entirely sure why this was necessary, but I didn’t get a straight answer out of anyone). We did go to bed at 8 pm, so I guess they figure that 7 and a half hours of sleep is enough.
I bundled into all the warm clothes that Elizabeth’s friend Emi had lent me (thanks guys!) and we hit the trail. Base camp was at 15,650 feet, so we had a little less than 3,500 feet to climb yesterday. At that altitude, though, every 500 feet of elevation gain takes the best part of an hour.
The stars were stunningly dense – the Milky Way sharply etched against a field of every star in the universe. The Inka (which, Ben, you do spell with a K, at least down here) didn’t define constellations as such, but instead saw animals in the voids in the Milky Way. When you look at the Milky Way here, it makes sense – it appears as clouds of stars, so tightly packed that it’s impossible to distinguish any individual star, except where voids appear.
We started up the mountain in the dark, headlamps illuminating the ash under our feet. I walked automatically, planting my feet in Carlos’s footsteps. As we walked the dark drained out of the sky in the East, and the sun painted the distant mountains crimson ocher and every shade of gold.
Climbing the mountain was basically like climbing a giant sand dune – the trail was lightly etched onto a giant ash fall punctuated occasionally by huge volcanic rocks.
We reached the top around 11, the cold wind howling around a massive metal cross that some evangelical and slightly insane Catholics hauled to the summit.
What took us 9 hours to climb up took less than 2 to slide down, since every footstep slid into the scree and took us more than three strides down the hill. As a consequence of descending so fast, though, my right ear didn’t equalize properly to the increase in pressure and is just now clearing.
When we returned to the transportes, there was a young Argentinian hippie talking agitatedly to our porters. He looked utterly ill-equipped to be out in such an unforgiving landscape – he was wearing sandals and didn’t seem to have any extra clothing with him. Through a combination of eavesdropping and asking Carlos, I found out that he had been climbing El Misti the day before and had gotten separated from his sister, who he hadn’t seen since. He looked more than anything kind of forlorn – he certainly wasn’t displaying the kind of frantic anxiety I would feel if I had lost my sister on a mountain with no shelter for miles where it got below freezing at night. When we started hiking before dawn the water in my camelbak was completely frozen.
Our guides gave him some food and water and he walked out alone, over the dunes.
We leave Arequipa for Los Angeles tomorrow, so we’re spending today seeing everything there is to see in the city, including an almost intact mummy called “Juanita” which was discovered on the slopes of El Misti by Miguel Zarete, Carlos’s uncle.
Sunrise over the Andes
I’m back in Cusco, after two days at Machu Picchu, hanging out on the top of the world. It’s hard to believe that people actually lived there, and that they built the things they built in the places they built them (for instance, agricultural terraces thousands of feet up on the top of vertical stone cliffs.)
I’m exhausted, because we got up at dawn to watch the sun rise over the mountain and climb Huana Picchu (the really steep looking peak in the back of all the pictures, that looks like you’d be insane to climb), so I’m going to bed, but I uploaded the best of my pictures so far for your viewing pleasure.
Just click on the photo gallery. There’s even a chinchilla!
