Market Sights

One the Eve of New Year's Eve in Lima

There are pretty much only two days when Lima --yes, pretty much  the entire city-- comes almost to a standstill: Christmas Day and New Year's Day. I mean, not even on Sundays does the place get as quiet and still as it does on those two days.

In between them, however, are a few days of frenzied activity for vendors who have a short window of time in which to get sell their New Year's themed merchandise in preparation for the big night.

 There are a number of traditions associated with New Year's Eve.  For example, some people eat twelve grapes or olives at the stroke of midnight.   Others walk around the block with an empty suitcase in hopes of traveling in the coming year.  Others, taking note that the word for a square block - manzana- is the same as that for apple, take things a bit tongue-in-cheek and stay indoors and just walk their suitcase around an apple.

Yellow, or more accurately, gold, is the color associated with New Year's Eve.  That means that, overnight after Christmas the street stalls and small shops, put away the multicolored swag and lights of Christmas, and everything turns yellow: yellow streamers, yellow table cloths and napkins, flowers, decorations, etc.

One of the things that most stands out is the astonishing amount of yellow underwear that appears as if by magic, as it is fortuitous to greet the New Year wearing new yellow underwear that has been received as a gift.

Where have all those yellow undies been during the rest of the year?  I don't know, but given the sheer amount of it, it seems impossible that it could all be sold in the course of the one week between the two holidays.

Lima Book Fair

On the Saturday after my birthday party and just before I returned to the US, I made it to the Lima Book Fair, which this year was in its 18th installment.

When Jacho and I arrived there was a big line to get in.  We were impressed that so many people, specially young people, were so eager to get in, particularly given that it was only the second day of the fair and there was yet another fortnight in which to visit it.  It turned out, however, that there was talk being given by Peruvian rock singer Pedro Suarez Vertiz at the presentation of his book, Yo, Pedro, which occasioned the long lines outside and, again, inside the tent!

Unlike other times, when I would scour the fair from end to end, and return on multiple occasions, this time around -due to matters of space and luggage weight- I went only the one time and targeted my shopping toward a few key stands and a predetermined wish-list of books I had been holding off on buying until the fair. 

Among them:

• Memorias de un soldado desconocido by Lurgio Gavilan
• Historia de la corrupcion en el Peru by Alfonzo Quiroz
• Los Quipucamayos by Frank Salomon

I was also pleased to be able to pick up a copy of Sombras del Imperio: La nobleza indigena del Cuzco, 1750-1825, a translation of Shadows of Empire: The Indian Nobility of Cusco, 1750-1825, a book by Reed College professor David T. Garrett, whom I had heard speak on the subject at a talk at the Alianza Francesa a few weeks earlier.

Book shopping

Yesterday, since Liz had left for the US and I suddenly found myself without anything in particular to do, I decided to do some book shopping.

My first appointed task was to walk to the offices of the Peruvian Forensic Anthropology Team (EPAF) to buy a book of theirs on damage left on skeletal remains as a result of human rights violations.   I walked a number of blocks, made a wrong turn and found I was going the long way around -adding three more blocks to my walk- only to not be able to find the place.  I walked back home and found  that, whereas Google Maps had sent me to the tenth block of the street, the place I was looking for was on the third block!

After lunch, I caught a cab to downtown, and went looking for a political bookstore I had heard mentioned online.  I did find the place, but no one there knew of the bookstore.  I knew I was in the right place because it was an old building that housed the offices of one of Peru's Communist Parties, Patria Roja, and of the movement that arose from the recent anti-mining struggles in Cajamarca, the Movimiento de Afirmacion Social, led by Gregorio Santos.  The shop must've closed last year at some point, is my guess.

So, frustrated for the second time, I walked from Avenida Abancay to Plaza San Martin, to visit one of my favorite used book shops in Lima, the Libreria Georges Politzer, on Jiron Quilca.

There, I did manage to pick up an interesting set of bulletins published by the Chinese Embassy in 1974-1976 containing news summaries from the Xinghua News Agency.  I did not know that they put out such things, so I was rather pleased to find them -and to get the stack for just under 4 bucks!

Book Fair finds

Yesterday, after lunch I made time to head to the 15th Lima International Book Fair which is being held at a park near San Felipe, Parque de los Proceres -which everyone still calls Matamula, even though it's name was officially changed in the early 1970s.

Aside from a book on early photography in Ayacucho and one on the events in Bagua last June, I was rather pleased to find some older books which can be rather hard to find in Spanish, including a translation of Capital that was previously unknown to me.

Particularly pleasing was the opportunity to pick up a copy of the bookbound edition of Rafo León's Caín y Abel.

Caín y Abel  originally appeared as a series of vignettes in the monthly No! supplement to Lima's Sí magazine in 1987.  The storyline was told from the viewpoints of two twin brothers, Caín and Abel. 
 

Caín was a rebel, part of Lima's "underground" (subterraneo or subte) music scene, and something of a black sheep. His contributions were punctuated with swear words and lyrics.   Abel, on the other hand, was a sweet, studious boy, who wanted nothing more than to please his mother, and who's sanctimoniousness drove Caín crazy and made his father worry for his sexual orientation.   The humor lay in the disparate ways that each described the very same events and the way that León was able to so fully convey each of his character's idyosincratic world-views.

Polvos Azules

A day or so into Liz and the kids' trip - on the way, in fact, to the Centro- we stopped for an almost obligatory shopping excursion in Polvos Azules.

Polvos Azules owes its name, which means blue powders, to Colonial-era merchants who plied their trade on a street along the Rimac River next to where the Presidential Palaca now stands. After Independence the place name stuck though the blue powders market was long gone.

In time the area was made into a parking lot, which in turn was by the 1980s taken over by street merchants, encouraged in part by the mayor who wanted them off the streets. Thus, Polvos Azules became a warren of informal merchant stalls and peddlers, a magnet for petty criminals, and one of the busiest markets in all of Lima. The very same economic economic and social crises which had pushed so many into street sales pushed an even larger number to seek the bargains to be had in Polvos Azules, where almost anything could be found, from Chinese tweezers or ponytail holders, to sportswear, car parts, and stereos. Some of it was name-brand, some of it fake, some legitimate, some contraband, some stolen, some a mixture of all of the above, but all of it at dirt floor prices and handed over with a big dose of caveat emptor.

Eventually, however, City Hall decided that it wanted the merchants out of Polvos Azules as well. People had tired of years of mismanagement of the city and unkept promises to "reclaim" downtown. Moreover, Lima's historic downtown had been declared a World Heritage Site by UNESCO, and the presence of Polvos Azules and the pressure its tide of humanity put on the city centre were a bit of an embarrassment.

Faced with the threat of eviction, and after a number of fights with the police and a still-unsolved New Years Day fire, the merchants of Polvos Azules offered to buy the ground they were squatting on. The City declined and the merchants were obliged to look elsewhere, eventually finding an unused warehouse along the Paseo de la Republica.

In 1997, sixteen years after its founding, the street market of Polvos Azules moved indoors, its remaining 1500 merchants moving their shops with all their goods and the name Polvos Azules. The purchase went foul and years later they are still in court battling embezzlement, but together the merchants had resisted forcible eviction from the Centro, had raised the US$ 5 million to buy the property, had saved their market, and had reason to be proud. They celebrated the event with a parade and painted the building blue.

Today, Polvos Azules has a web site and a public relations department, but it is still a warren of small shops, spread over three floors and though not as wild and woolly as before it still has a slight air of wildness about it. It is a cacophony of sounds -reggaeton, cumbia, salsa, huayno, videogame sound effects, human voices- all competing for one's attention. A million smells -leather (real and fake), electronics, sweat- assault your senses, only to get worse at lunchtime.

Most importantly, it continues to offer bargains, and whether they like to admit it or not, people of every class pass through Polvos Azules at one time or another. There you can find shoes, clothes, Chinese MP3 players or TVs for a fraction of the price of a departments store, have the voltage changed on foreign appliances or your stereo repaired, you can buy cell phones, music CDs, game systems, even DVDs of films not yet released into theaters for a dollar apiece.

It is an experience, to be sure, and one we never miss out on during our visits to the city and this time was no exception. We came out with a repaired CD player, several pairs of new shoes, shoulder bags, and several counterfeit CDs which were so good that I thought they were legitimate but used ones until I found that the label had a different one printed on the reverse and the tracks are mislabeled when played on Windows Media Player. What did I say about about caveat emptor...?

Well, it's been pretty quiet around here. Did some shopping for furniture the other day but found nothing worth getting. I did run out of change on that trip, however, and so had to duck into the local Ace Hardware affiliate "Maestro Home Center", to buy something so I could make change and get back home.

I bought the tickets to Ayacucho yesterday, so that's pretty exciting. Nico arrives today, and that's even more exciting!

We're in Lima

We got in yesterday without incident, and promptly started settling into the apartment, making the beds, putting up the curtains, and doing a bit of grocery shopping.

This morning we went with Diego to buy a bed, a dresser, and a pair of mattresses. So, thus far, our time has been largely spent taking care of errands. Not much fun, but Hey! we're running errands in Lima!

Tomorrow my uncle Willy will be driving us up the coast a bit, northward, to visit the pre-inca ruins at Caral. Caral has recently been discovered to have been the earliest known urbanization in the Americas. I'm rather looking forward to that trip, and Willy -being an anthropologist and having been an archaeologist- is an ideal person to take it with.

We got it!

Yes, we got the apartment, though it took some last-minute wrangling and fretting, and a looong meeting that took all morning long to get a three-page form signed.

We then went shopping for kitchen appliances and went to spend a few minutes in our new, but as yet empty, digs.

In a Saga-Falabella department store, hunting for good deals.

The view to the south, from the living room.

To the east, from one of the bedrooms.

Measuring the small, back bathroom.

Two views of the kitchen.