From Cusco to Puno

Tomorrow I am hopefully heading to Puno at 730am. I won´t be returning to Cusco after 3 stints here.

Bus rides, Illness, and Women

I´ve been really sick since my last post. I stayed an extra night in Puerto and then took an 18.5hour bus to Cusco. Its only like 550km but the road is literally being built as we speak (part of the InterOceanic highway linking Brazil to the Pacific). Apparently it used to take 45-60 hours by truck. Obviously being sick the bus was pretty bad, I had stomach cramps for abour 5 of every 15 minutes. We stopped for 20 minutes at night for food, though I didn´t eat anything, and I ran into a random woman´s house and asked her if I could destroy her bathroom. I could go on. Actually one non-stomach related embarassment happened sometime around 4 in the morning when we stopped for a bathroom break (side of the road as always). I had just woken up and didn´t have my glasses on, I was really out of it. I got to the ditch and started doing my business and noticed something moving further down the road in the ditch. It looked like half my size and was white wooly so I thought it was an alpaca and stared at it a bit longer (its not quite pitch black out). Of course when the women who was squatting in her white alpaca sweater stood up looking straight at me and pulled her pants up I felt like a retard. Luckily she didn´t sit near me in the bus.

On the bus they played ripped DVDs that continually skipped every 5 minutes, like Hits of the 80s, and Father of the Bride (only dubbed in Spanish). Brutality. The best part? Besides saving all the money on a plane ticket and a place to stay overnight was the woman 2 seats to my left who threw up on 7 different occasions throughout the trip. I don´t know if she has a weak stomach (she came prepared with plastic bags) or if she was sick but she looked (and sounded) awful and I was not in the best state to listen to any of it.

I haven´t eaten much in the past 40 hours and that will continue to be my plan. Body, muscles, head, and throat all still feel perfect, but my stomach is just ruined.

Actually another funny two things happened last night and on the bus the night before. Shortly after I had left this random woman´s house on dinner break I was waiting for the bus driver to return on the curb in who knows where. One of the passengers, a girl maybe 20 years old, came and sat beside me and started talking to me. She was stunning, and despite the broken spanish conversation we had it was obvious she was really interested in me. Obviously I could have just asked her to dinner the next night in Cusco but I was sick as a dog and kind of gave her the polite shoulder. Women that good looking don´t approach me... it was strange. Its not like I was dressed like a high roller either in my ratty jeans and tshirt.

Just after I finished telling Emre about it yesterday I went out for a small dinner at a Western restaurant. Halfway through my meal an American girl comes up to my table and asks me if I´m travelling alone, etc. After like 20 seconds she sits down beside me and wants me to go to Norton´s rat with her and her friends after dinner. Maybe its the tan but these two incidents are pretty unusual. Anyways at the pub we had a good enough time, and one of her friends was a Canadian journalist from Moncton, very cool, but I went to the bathroom like 3 times in 2 hours. I was glad they called it an early night (they all had Spanish class in the morning) because I wasn´t going to make it. I might meet up with her in Puno this weekend.

Things I miss about Canada:

Sterile corporate big box grocery stores: There are a lot of people who lament the inhuman nature of our corporate big box stores and how our society is terrible etc. I invite you to even think about buying fruit in the 3rd world. As with the state of nature most of these JeanJaques dont consider alternatives when they complain. I wouldn´t eat a piece of fruit from the best grocery store I´ve found here for 250 dollars.

Music: rap, hip hop, rock, pop. I heard U2´s the Sweetest thing in the gringo restaurant last night and the song lived up to its name. There is fine music here but I would pay good money to listen to two hours of rap.

Youtube, the internet, etc. The internet cafe´s here are pretty remarkable given the condition of the country. That being said I can´t wait to watch an hour of random Youtube videos in Canada.

Fixed prices: This has to be an economic indicator of how poor a business or economy is. That is the presence of bargaining seems to me to indicate underdeveloped state. I dont like and dont want to bargain. I dont mind it when the person is nice and when its something I dont need (ie I can walk away). But here you can bargain everything. I´d like to see a set price for bus tickets, food, hostels, etc. Just put a sign up on the wall. When I see a sweater in a store and it doesn´t have a price tag you just know you are getting ripped off.

No littering: If you think people in Canada don´t care about the environment, and don´t care about littering, while those who live closer to nature, closer to "traditional" ways of life, have a respect for Mother Earth that we need to recapture you´ve been drinking way too much Kool Aid. People here buy a piece of corn from a vendor on the bus and throw the plastic on the groun when they are done. I have not seen a single Peruvian finish any snack and not just drop the litter, even in the smallest villages.

Cars that have to pass emissions tests: I really like Cusco but there is one thing I will not miss walking the streets and that is the noxious fumes emitted from just about every cab and vehicle passing by. Its brutal.

Personal space: people here have a different concept of it, let´s put it that way.

Secular society: For almost all intents and purposes, when you walk down a street in Canada, you are living in a secular society. I went to Europe and I loved the Sistine Chapel, I loved some of the church architecture I saw in Bern, Vienna, Rome, and Paris. I enjoyed a lot of religious paintings at the Louvre. But its different in Peru. The paintings first of all -- I haven´t found one Christian painting here that I enjoyed. There are fawning idealizations of the Virgin Mary or some other saint, with angels carrying her up, while devils attack from below, painted in a style (I dont know the name) which is really unappealing to me. Then there is Jesus, always in the most gory, in your face poses. You see these two types of paintings over and over and over again without any variation in theme or execution. All the cab drivers/busses have similar displays on their hoods and they ahng in every store, restaurant, and hostel. The military has an official religion and people keep shoving the virgin mary in my face. While I have become good friends with the family that runs the hostel I stay at here, they too have a similar painting hanging and even their website changes the cursor into a cross. Its just all a bit too much.

Of course there is the dynamic that a lot of people make the cross sign when they pass a church but don´t go in it once during a year (as in every country I would guess). But when it comes to these things there is a real, I would go as far to say, slavish mentality amongst the people with respect to roman catholicism that I haven´t observed in other countries en mass. That Nietzschian (slave mentality) and Marxist (opium of the people) theses are very easy to spot here when its a bit more subtle (and more personal) in Canada and elsewhere.

Bargaining

I think bargaining probably has a few economic implications. The first being that those who are selling things that they would be willing to sell for a lot less are trying to rip you off since they are so poor. Of course, it isn´t close to a perfect market. One thing is information: the consumer doesn´t have information on what the price of (let´s say a souvenir) x good should cost. This is mostly because the Westerner is coming from another place... and the bargainers who dont list prices want to take advantage of this. They want to take advantage of a few dynamics. The first is that the gap between what the difference between reasonable profit margin (ie what they would be willing to sell at) versus what a Westerner ends up paying is asymetrical. Ie: From 60 soles to 40 is not as much to me as it is to the person who would sell at a 5 soles profit for 30. To me its 6 bucks or something, to them 6 bucks is not 5 coffees from Tim´s, its 12 full meals or more. There is the other dynamic, that of the starbucks frap. There is a good book called "The Undercover Economist" whose author I don´t recall where he describes the basic premise of this phenomenon. Why do people buy fancy coffees from Starbucks when they can get a 1/3 of the price for a cup from Tim´s that will give them 85% of the same satisfaction? Its basically because they can afford it and they are willing to pay extra for a small gain which a) satisfies their ideas of status b) they perceive this as luxurious, which it may be, and are willing to pay exponentially more per % added of satisfaction. That´s why starbucks offers so many different kinds of drinks... they aren´t selecting necessarily for taste (atleast entirely) they are also selecting for income bracket cross referenced with willingness for conspicuous consumption in the consumer. They want the thrifty to buy their product at a profit to them, but the don´t want that to discourage the wealthy from paying a lot more (and vice versa). Actually the exact opposite thing happens when a grocery store puts out a flyer every week for a sale on certain items. They are selecting for the low income person who wouldn´t buy product x regularly. They want business from this income bracket (at a profit) while not giving too good a deal for the higher income brackets who are willing to pay more (what´s 50 cents more for peanut butter to the lawyer´s wife?). I can tell you if I see that PB is 50 cents off at A and P this week I will be more inclined to walk to the store and buy it... and probably other things while I´m there.

So the souvenir person here in Peru has the following adantages: I don´t know how much it should actually cost, I may be willing to pay more because it isn´t as much to me, and I may be willing to indulge if I am inclined to partake in conspicuous consumption. In a more ideal market there are websites like gasbuddy.com that list all prices at gas stations across a geographic area. This way the consumer benefits, they will go to the lowest price gas station if saving money on gas is important to them, and the stations will have to respond by making their prices as appealing as they can to the consumer. It seems to me a lot more exchange will happen under this scheme than that of the bargainer. I´m sure there are more things that we can tell about an economy from the presence of bargaining....

Hopefully I´ll be in Puno tomorrow and my stomach will be fine. Its hard to upset it if nothing goes into it right?