Cooking and dancing

I'm sitting in a ridiculously loud internet café at the moment, courtesy of three Playstation-ready televisions and the Peruvian youth occupying them, so I anticipate this will be a relatively short post.

Yesterday I attended a cooking class, where the chef, speaking only Spanish, made a very good dish called lomo saltado. Potatoes (which practically everything in Peru contains), onions, tomatoes, beef, garlic, and a truly impressive amount of soy sauce, all stir-fried together in oceanic quantities of vegetable oil, and served with rice. Very good, and about as salty as seafood. Most of the other people in the small class spoke at least some English, and I got to chat briefly with a woman from New Jersey, mainly about the shady mechanic she was trying to prevent her father from taking her car to back home.

After the class last night, I wandered around the Plaza and the surrounding streets, waiting for my instructor, Sandra, with whom I later went out to have a drink. There's a small street off the plaza well-known as a tourist hot-spot. It's sort of like Waikiki on a small scale, with some other subtle differences. Anyway, it's also known as a place where drugs are frequently sold and where people in the employ of the police frequently set up sting operations to catch careless tourists and locals. I decided to walk down it and see how long it took before someone offered me drugs. Two seconds in, I got my first offer. Four seconds in, my second. Six seconds in, my third. There's so much marijuana in this particular street that you could probably just walk up and down it for a while and get high.

A little later I met Sandra, my instructor. She speaks more English than I speak Spanish, but there was still an impressive language barrier, which we manage to haltingly overcome. We first went to Paddy's, self-described as the highest Irish owned pub in the world. Afterwards we headed to one of the local clubs, where people were salsa-ing as effortlessly as most people walk. And I don't think this particular club was exceptional in that respect. Among my favorite moments of the evening was when the entire dance floor broke into what can only be described as a Salsa line dance. I could be wrong, but I think the line dance is an American export, which can be added to rock and roll and the national park system as good American inventions. A distant third, granted, but still, a good American invention.

And Playstations? On the whole, a bad Japanese invention. The number one cause of headache in me right now. Hope all is well, everyone. Glad to be in Peru, but I miss people back home.