This and That

There are things I want to talk about that don’t merit their own post and don’t fit well with other themes.  So here they are in a jumble together.

In Peru, they call popcorn “palomamitas de maiz” which means, “little corn doves.”  It’s because it’s white and the kernels fly up when they pop.  Cute! 

The different levels of development here are mysterious to me.  My house has electricity, but we poop in a hole and bathe in buckets of well water heated over a stove that burns grass and cow chips.  My family has a pretty nice color TV and some of the older siblings have laptops, but the kids still run outside when they hear a plane and try to find it in the sky.

Speaking of things in the sky, OVNIs are a big thing here in Junin.  I think it stands for Objecto Volando No Identificable or something similar.  They’re the castellano equivalents of UFOs.  Everyone here I’ve asked about it is absolutely convinced they’ve seen aliens.  I can’t blame them.  Planes and satelites can look like all sorts of different things and this landscape certainly lends itself to the mystical.  And who knows, maybe the aliens don’t buy into America as the capital of the world and are trying to contact the Peruvians first.

After lunch on a rainy Sunday, a few hermanos and I watched 28 Weeks Later with me narrating the essential English parts.  It was a bad idea for me.  When I woke up at 4 having to pee, I had the zombie jitters and the sheep scared the shit out of me in the yard.  Our house is marginal for the zombie apocalypse.  We can see far around, so we could pick a bunch off as they came, but there’s nowhere to go or hide in the pampa once they inevitably get in.  It also got me reflecting that in all the movies I’ve seen, zombies seem to be an exclusively first-world problem.  So maybe I should concentrate on the aliens and leave zombies to the more developed nations.