Pyramids, Part II

Our next destination was Pachacamac, a site with sixteen pyramids that was about forty minutes away. Monica drove us through several towns on the outskirts of Lima. This part of Peru is perpetually overcast, but we were blessed with sunshine for most of our trip despite an unfortunate weather forecast that promised rain everyday. Rain in Lima is just a brief sprinkling and then it goes back to being gray and arid. A truck in front of us sprayed water on the grass along the highway.

The stretches of sand all of a sudden turned into multitudes of rainbow shacks built one on top of the other, shantytowns comparable to the favelas in Brazil. I took a lot of pictures of them, but it's hard to convey the magnitude of these metropolises and how suddenly they would crop up.

When we arrived at Pachacamac, there was a little lawn where llamas and alpacas grazed. I imagine they were employed there as nature's cuddliest lawnmowers. I stepped over the barriers and attempted to approach the alpaca, but I was stopped by the woman in the ticket booth. I had a wish to embrace an alpaca while I was in Peru and my wish was not fulfilled.

Snow white angel.

There was a market outside of the museum with vendors selling baskets, jewelry, and handbags. One man was whittling a gourd with a pocketknife. He sold intricately carved gourds that were hollowed out into boxes. Some of them were birds with beads rattling inside them, little maracas. We considered buying some gourd boxes, but worried that they would be damaged in our suitcases. The artist was quick to interject. He picked up one of his creations, smashed it on the pavement, and then presented it to us unharmed, demonstrating the indestructible nature of his folk art product. We bought three of his indestructible gourds. (One gourd is in my apartment next to a Wandering Jew, filled with white chocolate Lindt truffles. The second is Upstate on a bookshelf with dozens of polished mineral eggs and a Lord of the Rings elven sword. There is also an owl-shaped maraca gourd on a sailboat somewhere off the coast of California.)

We walked through the collection of artifacts in the museum. The ceramic figures on display had cartoonish facial expressions. The Incas made jewelry and other decorations out of bright pink shells that were more valuable to them than gold.

Pre-Columbian statement necklace.

Knotted ropes that seemed to be necklaces were mounted on the walls, but Monica pointed out that they were actually writing. For a moment, this blew my mind. What messages were being communicated through the particular arrangement of knots on a rope? Upon closer inspection of the nearby description of the artifacts, it was a sort of bill for products and services.

When our guide was ready, we drove to the first of the ruins. Our guide, a Peruvian woman with very angular features, wore a beige outfit and a beige adventuring hat. She coordinated perfectly with the sand. We drove from one ruin to the next. In the car, Dave and I ravenously devoured a package of salty corn kernels and juicy peaches. Lunch is the main-event-meal in Peru and we had not had ours yet.

The first ruin was a pre-Incan palace where a community of beautiful women made crafts for the earth god Pachacamac. The most beautiful of the beautiful women - they could not have any moles - were happily sacrificed to the earth god.

There were a total of sixteen pyramids at this site, created by different cultures because the region kept changing hands and changing religions. The largest was The Temple of the Sun, an enormous beige fortress built by the Incas that was once painted with bright murals. We ascended the path to the temple, which is still being excavated.

Walking around the temple, you could see the shantytowns in the desert, an oasis of grass, and two islands standing in the ocean. Those islands have a myth: The big island is a beautiful princess who was too proud to marry anyone. The little island is her baby. A mischievous god impregnated her with a piece of fruit filled with his seed and then humiliated her in front of the other gods. She flung herself and her baby into the ocean.

Click here for even more pyramids.

Pyramids, Part I

Our first adventure in Lima was a quest for Incan ruins. Dave and I set out early in the morning with our friends Monica and Moniquita and drove to a pyramid called Huallamarca, nestled in the middle of the historical, old-money houses of the San Isidro district. The dusty archaeological site rose up in the middle of the city, right across from a bank and a small parking lot.

There weren't any guides at this archaeological site, so a security guard escorted us through the museum and pyramid in exchange for a small tip. There was an entire room devoted to the importance of gourds, with gourd bowls, urns, and masks.

So excited.

In the next room, we found an Incan mummy excavated from the pyramid. She was hunched over, like she was cowering in fear of the icy breath of death.

The glamorous afterlife.

That is just how the Incas buried their dead, curled up in a fetal position inside of giant gourds rather than lying down with crossed arms, like Egyptian pharaohs. Then the bodies were hidden like Easter eggs in pyramids for posterity, with all of their pots and bowls. This particular mummy had signs of a fractured arm that had been healed with advanced Incan medicine. She had been treated for rheumatoid arthritis. I was surprised to see a full head of natural hair crowning her skull.

Incan mummies like Russian nesting dolls full of bones.

Then we all climbed the pyramid to see small excavations on the surface. Tents covered more pear-shaped mummies with startled expressions on their gourd masks. Some of them had shaggy wigs like rag dolls.

From the top, we had a panoramic view of Lima and all of its continuous rumbling construction. Sometimes it seemed like Lima's population was entirely made up of jackhammers. Walking up and down the pyramid, my sneakers went from black to a dusty graphite gray.

I noticed that every archaeological site was guarded by an elderly, skeletal canine with a sweater and a laughable haircut. We saw one at each site, but this guy is my favorite.

Click here to read Pyramids, Part II.

Vulture

This vulture is waiting for a tourist to die. The death will most likely occur due to natural causes, such as sunstroke, dehydration, food poisoning, hepatitis A, or a reckless bus driver fueled by too much pisco sour. The vulture will have no hand in it. She doesn't care what sort of structural damage is caused by impact with the bus; she doesn't care about the condition of the human carrion's exposed liver when she prods it with her beak. All the tourists look delicious, Australians and Brits and Germans walking in orderly lines to their potential deaths, but the rotund American man in the polo shirt would be ideal. His dark pink flesh could feed her bald children for weeks. The one with the tiny backpack. Yes.

***

There are buses here called "killers." They are red and yellow and green. No one knows when they come and go or what route they will take to get there. There is no formal schedule. The districts in which they stop are listed on the side of the bus in no particular order. This is the only information prospective passengers have to go on. For the leisurely passenger with no attachment to plans or even the prospect of arrival, it is the most cost-effective form of transportation available in the capital and the only form of public transportation at all. One or two soles for a hazardous rollick through the streets of Lima. The buses speed, turn sharply around corners, and infamously careen into neatly parked vehicles. On the bus, women sit wedged between strange grinning men and hug their purses. As the bus jerks onto a side street, questionable characters feel up unsuspecting human ornaments hanging from the overhead bar and probe their jean pockets for change. Just stay at home.

***

A stranded American man hunches under the insurmountable burden of his backpack in the park outside of the Plaza de Armas. Sweat soaks the armpits of his polo shirt and leaves two moist spots over his nipples. The sun colors his face a blooming shade of lobster and he desperately looks around for a street vendor purveying chilled sodas. Crippling nausea seized him just fifteen minutes after he left the restaurant and he couldn't be sure whether it was the desert sun beaming on his face or food poisoning from the disappointing lunch he ordered, which unexpectedly turned out to be octopus. When he saw the word pulpo, he supposed he was ordering something fruity. With terror he wonders if his hepatitis A vaccine was actually making him sick. If he could go back to the hotel and get an antacid and a cold drink, he would feel a hundred times better. He sees a bus coming towards him and "Miraflores" is written in bold letters on its side. He steps into the road, but the bus only seems to be flying faster.

Night in the Parking Lot

I didn't intend to spend most of the night in the parking lot of my place of employment, but that is exactly what happened. I got out of work at midnight and trudged into the shadowy parking lot with all the vivacity of a somnambulist. I unlocked my car. I put my car keys into my purse. I opened one of the rear doors, threw all of my bags into the plushy back seat, and closed the door. As soon as I opened the door to the driver's seat I realized my grave error: My car keys were in the back. I closed the door.

Then the car locked automatically. It takes all of ten seconds for Nina the Car to shut down like a tank. Because of this, no one will ever steal her, not even me. Her security system is so sensitive it can be set off by a firefly. It's like owning a really vicious Rottweiler. Every time someone takes a step too close, she starts snarling her head off, even when you're the one holding the end of her chain.

I shook my fists at the sky. I haven't had the car for two months and I've already had the check engine light turn on, a tire deflate, and the battery run dead. I seem to be going through the whole checklist of things that can go wrong with a car.

Not knowing what else to do, I went back into the building. I saw a security guard in his office and humbly asked what I should do. He directed me to the engineering department. The engineer and I walked out to the car, where he attempted to pull the doors open with his bare hands. He seemed strangely surprised that his fingers couldn't pry open a car door. Then he advised me to call the local police.

The engineer and I waited for the police outside under a streetlight in the otherwise lifeless employee parking lot. A coworker pulled up in a truck.

"Did you lock your keys in your car?"

I nodded.

"What you need to do is get a screwdriver and then wrap it in a piece of cloth and dig it into the top of your car door. Then you pry open a space to fit in a coat hanger."

I suspected that this coworker might be an expert car thief.

"You've been down this road before," I said.

As he drove away, I tried to imagine myself prying open a car door with a screwdriver. I was not the Herculean strong-man for the job, but the man swerving away in the truck might have been. The engineer was offering to fetch me a screwdriver when the police arrived. He scribbled down my licence plate number and information and gave me something to sign.

"I don't know if I'll be able to open the car," the officer said, producing a black duffle bag full of thick, rubber-coated wires. "We used to carry slim jims. Now the department says we can't do that anymore. The slim jim will open up most cars, but sometimes it will break the lock system. Then the people who own the cars can't sue because they signed a waiver."

Then I realized that the thing I had hastily signed was a waiver.

"But I can open up a car with a slim jim in ten seconds flat," he boasted. "I've been doing it for fifteen years. It's these new guys who don't have the proper training who break cars."

He proceeded to mutter about department funding as he wedged one of his tools into the corner of the car door. He was still unable to fit one of the wires into the door, so he inserted a thing that sort of looked like a whoopee cushion and pumped air into it as though he was taking the car's blood pressure. The air wedged the door open a little bit more and the wire fit into the space with ease. At the end of the wire was a little nub of rubber that was supposed to catch on the lock of the door and unlock it.

For the next ten minutes, I watched the officer fish wires of varying lengths into my car to catch the lock. This tense display of skill was like watching someone play the crane game in an arcade and dropping the teddy bear over and over again. The rubber nub would nick the lock, slip, and thud against the window like a bird. The officer took out the wire, bent it at another angle, and tried again. Finally, the lock bobbed up and the car alarm went off. I flung open the door and dug my keys out of my purse, resolving to make a copy of my car key and wear it around my neck for the rest of my life.

"Yeah, if I had the slim jim it would have taken me ten seconds, not ten minutes," the officer muttered. "But the department thinks this is better. What do I know?"

I thanked the officer and he drove away with his duffle bag of magical wires. I also thanked the engineer, who had been supervising the unlocking process. I waved goodbye and he walked away, waving. I called Dave to let him know why I was coming home late.

"Why didn't you just call me? I could have just brought you your spare key," he said.

When I hung up the phone, the engineer was still there, waving. So I waved again. I pulled around the parking lot. He was still there, slightly little closer to the building now, waving.

Hello, Car Insurance!

I got the license, I got the car, but I needed to get car insurance before I could drive off into the sunset. I was forced to descend into a dark underworld of labyrinthine bureaucracies, to endure the relentless gnawing of customer service agents paid on commission.

I. Please leave a message.

In the beginning, I called a local insurance agent recommended to me by a Real Adult. The first time I called, I got the secretary. The secretary, sounding bored and crabby, told me the agent was in a meeting with an important client and that she would have to take down my information. The meeting must have lasted the whole day because I never got a call back. Later, I tried to call again and got her voicemail.

The next day I called again, got the same yawning secretary and left the same futile message. After the weekend passed, I knew that I needed to create contingency plan in case this woman turned out not to exist. I collected quotes from other insurance companies and called back armed with information, this time finally hearing the voice of the agent I was trying to contact all along. She took down my information and said she would call me back later that day with a quote.

She never called me back that afternoon. At work that evening, I saw I had a voicemail. It was from the agent, saying that the car identification number the secretary took down had too many digits, but she had a quote ready for me. I called the next day and got the voicemail. When I finally got in touch with her, the quote she gave me was twice as high as the highest quote I had gotten so far. I wrote her a nice email thanking her for her time, saying that I had taken another offer.

“It’s okay, we’ll get you onto our policy in six months. Give me a call then,” she wrote back.

II. BEST FRIEND.

The sites that calculate car insurance quotes are designed to be user friendly, but they ask a lot of confusing and seemingly unnecessary questions.

What is your social security number?

When was the date of your last period?

List three things you've never told anyone.

Besides that, I didn't know if I had anti-lock brakes. I didn't know if my car was a CE or a LE or a VE or a PE. The first site I went to on my quest for insurance quotes left me wondering, “Am I doing any of this right?” I picked up my cell phone and talked to an “Insurance Expert.”

Katie gladly answered all of my questions and then asked me for my credit card number so we could go through with the purchase. This was all moving too fast for me. I didn't know what to say. Did she really think I was going to buy insurance on impulse?

“Uh, I really want to discuss this with my boyfriend first. It’s a big decision and I’d really like to call you back about it,” I said with some stuttering.

“Sure! Hey! Why don’t I call your boyfriend and we can talk him into this together? Don’t worry! I do this all the time with couples who have questions about our policies. Then I can answer any questions the two of you have. I’m sure that we can convince him that this is the best option for you.”

“No. That’s okay. I’d rather call back.”

“Okay, here’s what I’m going to do for you…”

I could not get her off the phone. I couldn't bring myself to say that I wanted to compare insurance companies without her breathing down my neck from a calling center in Omaha. Eventually she ended up asking me a lot of questions about my life, trying to develop an amiable relationship with me. Are you a student? You were a creative writing major! That is so cool! Are you going to write a book? I’m totally going to buy your book when it comes out. What kind of work are you doing now?

“I’m a telephone operator. I basically do the same job as you, but in a hotel rather than an insurance company.”

That’s a comparison no Insurance Expert wants to hear.

In the end, I got her to say goodbye. I told her that I had to follow up with an insurance company my parents suggested before making a decision. I was worried she would want to start a party line with me, her, and anyone I would ever consult for advice, but fortunately that didn't come up.

III. You seem like a smart girl.

In the end, I settled on the insurance company that gave me the best rate. Naturally. What else was I supposed to do? How else does one choose between a series of comparably sketchy options? I called the winning insurance company and set up a policy with yet another Insurance Expert named James. I felt like James was sitting at his switchboard phone snickering at some fantastic joke that I wasn't part of, playfully elbowing the ribs of his best friend who crouched beside his desk, trying not to burst out laughing. James was a bad actor and he was giving the performance of a lifetime.

“Wow! Look at this rate! You must have the best rate in the whole state of New York! I want to live where you live and get an excellent rate like this. I mean, you’re a new driver, you’re only twenty-three years old, and you’re getting this great rate! And the rate that I’m going to give you is only thirty dollars more than the rate you got online! Wow! You must be so happy with this rate.”

I found myself laughing out loud at him. I felt like I was walking into a scam, but I guess that’s how one always feels when purchasing insurance.

“Listen Brittany, you seem like a smart girl. I mean, you’re buying your insurance from us. So just bear with me while I read you these terms and conditions…”

Finally. I got my insurance, I registered my vehicle, and now Nina the Car is in my clumsy hands forever. Then the check engine light turned on, but that is another story for another day.