My Sister's a Star

I received a big parcel on Friday. It was my sister sending me a birthday present consisting of a cool t-shirt bought in Australia and some tasty French cheese. The cheese was nicely packed in sealed plastic bags so that it wouldn't smell too much and could survive transport. Some of them are so strong they would qualify as chemical weapons but they taste fantastic. It should enable me to survive cheese-challenged Chiswick until I go home for Christmas.

Beers in Trujillo

When I was in Trujillo a couple of weeks ago, I ended up in a bar with Hans-Peter, a very nice Norwegian guy I had met while touring Chan Chan. As they had live music that evening, they also had a photographer from trujillo2night.com. And here's the evidence: Hans-Peter and I having a beer in the first picture.

1038 Photos

I finished uploading my photographs from Peru. All 1038 of them. They can be seen on flickr. In fact, that's not quite true: I have a thirty second film still in the camera that I need to finish, develop and upload. So the total should be a bit higher. I now need to go through all of them, title and tag them properly. Luckily, I'll have lots of free time very soon.

This Company Terminates Here, All Change Please

It's been a funny old week. I came back from holidays to discover that my company was indeed going to merge with our American partner but that they'd close the London office by the end of the year. So in practice, we are leaving the premises in less than 3 weeks and we will all be out of a job by the end of December. I should get my redundancy letter next week.

What next? I've had enough of companies I work stupid hours for, spending nights in the office, being paid below the market's average, because I believe in what we do, and that end up giving me a P45 as a thank you. So I am setting up a limited company to start as an independant contractor and see what I can do for myself without relying on anybody else. The IT market looks quite good at the moment so it's probably the right time to do it.

If anybody needs the services of an experienced Java/J2EE technical architect, I'm your man.

Pirate Copies

Latin America has a lot of cool rock bands and I wanted to buy a few albums today to add to my music collection. You would think that in one of the largest cities in Peru, it would be easy to find a music shop that would have a decent collection where I could find everything I wanted? No. It is not easy. You have lots of small corner shops that sell CDs, DVDs and other bits and bobs but they are completely unsorted and they are all illegal copies. I found only one shop that sold original copies but they were all old or non-standard stuff that only a fan who didn't find what he wanted in the pirate copy shops would buy. So I ended up buying a few pirate copies, after asking the guy to play them to make sure I wasn't buying blank CD-Rs.

I asked a local friend what she thought about this and how the band made money. She admitted that probably 70% or more of the market is pirate copies and that none of the money on those copies would go to the artists. But the price of a CD is so prohibitive for the average Peruvian that there is no way they could afford originals, even though local music companies did reduce prices significantly in the past few years to make original copies accessible. So the pirate copy market ensures that everybody can buy and listen to the music. As a result, the albums of Latin artists and played everywhere and everybody knows their songs. Comparatively, western music is only a niche market: you don't hear it very often and when you hear it, it's old tunes the sort of which you get 4 for 20 quid at Virgin in London. In practice, western music seems to be pricing itself out of the Peruvian market. Having said this, how do Latin bands earn a living? I don't know but I suspect that every time they do a concert somewhere, the venue is full to capacity. I will be able to confirm this tomorow by going to a concert of Los Prisioneros.

Original Artwork

I went to the Huaca de la Luna, Temple of the Moon, this morning. You also have the Huaca del Sol next to it that is significantly bigger but you can't visit it. The visit was very interesting as it is the Moche site that has been best studied and you can really get inside the pyramid and see the original frescoes, some of them have been restored to their original colours using natural pigments. Apparently, the site's archeologists also found a tumb with remains on Monday but we couldn't see it. I suspect it will eventually be part of the visit when they have finished working on it.

The place is really fascinating, the guides are knowledgeable but unfortunately they are rather under-staffed meaning that you end up being shown around in large groups, especially if you speak Spanish, the English groups being few, small and far between. There were two of us and we got lumped together with 20 odd students, their teachers and two couples.

You can also buy reproductions of Moche art at the site, made using original molds. I would probably have bought something if the guys had let me browse around rather than trying a hard sell and bombarding me with offers of price reductions for a particular piece I wasn't interested in. Ufortunately this is common practice around here and tends to put me off what they have to offer. I like to take my time and be able to look around and compare pieces when I buy something.

Virgins, Horses and Adobe

I arrived in Trujillo last night. According to my guide book, Trujillo is the most conservative city of Peru. What I discovered first is that it is not the cheapest: the hotel the taxi driver took me to offered me the smallest and most expensive room I've had so far. But then it is the end of the trip and only for a couple of days so I stayed. They also have 24 hour free internet access for guests with a decent connection so no need to go and shop around for this.

Once here, I went out and ended up in the Plaza de Armas, as you would in any Peruvian city. It was full of people who were obviously waiting for something and there were a lot of people in costumes. I had accidentally stumbled upon a procession of the Virgen de la Puerta, the Virgin of the Door. The story goes that in the year 1674, a fleet of pirates that had already pillaged Guayaquil, in today's Ecuador, were seen closing in on Trujillo, or rather the harbour of Huanchaco. The local people, who didn't even have much in terms of defensive walls sent emissaries to all surrounding villages, including Otuzco, where there was an hermitage dedicated to the Virgen de la Concepción. To cut a long story short, they put a statue of the saint on top of the city gate as only protection and the pirates didn't even disembark. To this day, they still don't know why but they celebrate the virgin and they do it in style.

Trujillo is also the most photogenic city I have visited so far in Peru, thanks to the beautiful colonial architecture of its centre. A large number of buildings are UNESCO world heritage and gives quite a posh and clean aspect to the whole city. This is exacerbated by the local favourite passtime: raising horses.

But Trujillo also has a past before the Spaniards. Around the city are some of the most important pre-Inca sites from the Moche and Chimu cultures, in particular the largest adobe city in the world, Chan Chan. I went there this morning and, even though a very small part can be visited, it is extremely impressive, covering 14 square kilometres.

Tomorrow, the plan is to see the Huacas del Sol y de la Luna, one of the best restored pre-Inca sites. Then, there's the beach and a concert on Saturday.

Peruvian Chav

There are a thousand and one ways to chav up a car and tastes vary form country to country. The Peruvian top mod seems to be a blue neon light around the back number plate. Apart from its dubious esthetic appeal, it has the advantage of making the number plate unreadable.

Update

I got it slightly wrong above. The trick is to have a blue neon light around both number plates. But I discovered last night that blue neon is only for the ordinary chav. The top chav will have purple neon lights! And the top of the top is to have both colours around each plate. I also got it wrong in that a blue neon light doesn't make the plate unreadable, a greeen one does. Green is probably for the eco-friendly chav, who will also customise his headlamps so that they glow green rather than white or yellow making them totally useless to light up the road: not light polution, result!

Peruvian Politics

In the ancient Inca culture, there was only one person called the Inca: the supreme ruler and semi-god. This can be applied to today's Peruvian politics, when they nickname their beloved president Paz, Peace. They can then talk of the Inca Paz or Incapaz, the Incapable One.

Executive Menu

After all this time in Peru, I've finally found how to eat well the cheapest way. In my defense, I wasn't really looking for cheap food, just typical local food. So the trick is that small local restaurants, the non-touristic ones, all have a menu ejecutivo, executive menu. It typically consists of an apetiser, a soup, a main course and a simple dessert. The whole meal is cheaper than any of the individual main dishes from the à la carte menu. So I've just had a 4 course meal for 6 soles, less than 2 USD or just about 1 GBP. I'll have a siesta on the bus to Trujillo.