Focht Lore: March 2019

In Spanish, bread is called pan. Bakeries are called panaderias. We've been buying many, many bags of fresh rolls whenever we find a panaderia, but sometimes we still run out. (We eat a lot.)

Then we discovered that the annoying horn-tooting sound circulating in our neighborhood around 5:00 every day was a pan vendor, vending pan. (There are street side vendors for everything, and there are vendors pushing carts or riding on motorcycles delivering to neighborhoods.) I ran out with my purse and asked how much it cost. There were some sweet rolls that were a bit pricier, but the basic rolls we all love were 10 for a sol. So I bought some, and we all had fresh bread for dinner.

The vendors were literally pan-handlers.

So we found a place to live, and we've survived the first week doing all our own cooking, cleaning, shopping, clothes-drying, mosquito-killing, water sanitation, flood mitigation....you know, typical new home stuff in your average developing nation.

Tolkien wrote about happy days slipping by into oblivion like pearls on a necklace, while tales that are palpitating, perilous, and even gruesome make a deal of telling (I can't remember the exact quote and I can't reference it because I don't have my books--they are all packed up in Virginia).

I'll write later about the search for a house--well, bother, now I'm starting to sound like The Never-ending Story (the book, not the movie) where every promising lead fades into "But that's another story that shall be told another time"--and then it isn't. I will try to follow up about everything eventually, though.

This past week has been fully occupied with survival and figuring things out, but I hope we're falling into something of a routine and will have more free time in the weeks to come. Well, we're already doing better on the sleep front due to Peru not participating in Daylight Savings Time!