Exploring Lima, Peru: The Cats of Miraflores

With just one day to explore Lima, there’s no hope to see everything. I don’t even try. I spend the first part of the day around Plaza de Armas with a local guide and then return to the hotel in Miraflores. I’ll explore more of Lima at the end of my trip.

After a nap, I put on my jacket and head outside to explore Miraflores. I’m actually looking for dinner — and probably at a KFC. But instead of eating, I walk.

Note: KFC is popular here. More popular even than in the United States. (Or at least more popular than in Portland.) It seems like there’s a KFC on every corner, and there are KFC billboards all over the place.

I walk down past the taxistand where the minivans packed with people stop to pick up more passengers. (As they stop, a man leans out the door — or walks alongside the van — announcing destinations and asking people to climb aboard.)

I walk past Iglesia de la Virgen Milagrosa (the Church of the Miraculous Virgin) and see that folks are flocking to the doors. I go inside too. Because I know little of Catholicism, I can’t tell if it’s the start or the end of Mass — or if it’s Mass at all — but I stand for five or ten minutes to listen. I’m not at all religious, but I’m moved by the prayer and the song, the strange familiarity of the ritual. I look at the people in the pews and, for a moment, I wish I could trade places with them.

Instead, I leave. I walk toward Kennedy Park to see the cats. Miraflores apparently has a cat problem. People dump their unwanted animals here, and they roam the streets begging for food. As a Crazy Cat Man, this makes me happy. But the local government doesn’t like it.

I smile at the teenage girls who stroll past. They’re talking and laughing and having a good time. One girl in braces is struggling to ride her skateboard on the cobblestone sidewalk. And there’s un niño, a boy about three years old who is chasing one of the cats into the street. (There’s no traffic here; it’s like a pedestrian mall.)

At the park, I sit on a bench and write. Just like I used to! It’s been too long since I’ve done this: sitting still, watching the details of life as it flows around me, writing it all down. I’ve been too busy, which is a lousy excuse. Because this! This is what I love.

Cats in Parque Kennedy (Miraflores, Lima)

And so I spend half an hour watching the people. And the cats. And the people with the cats. The city may not want the cats here, but it’s clear that the people do. They smile when they see them. Every few minutes, somebody stops to call to them. Sometimes one or two cats come closer. They want food, I think, but they settle for being patted and petted. (One cat tries to enter the church but is quickly rebuked.)

There are cats on benches. There are cats on the lawn. There are cats on the sidewalk, and there are cats standing still as stone statues in the middle of the flower beds.

I know this isn’t all of Lima. In fact, it’s completely unrepresentative of the city as a whole. But in this moment, in this place, I love the town.

As I’m preparing to leave, a little tortoise-shell cat comes up to me and meows. I pet her and she rubs her face against my hand. She talks to me. When I stop petting her, she stands on her hind legs and paw-paws me, asking for more.

For a moment, this feels like home.

I Am Far Away

Most of you already know this, but I am in Peru. If you want to follow my adventures for the next few weeks, check out my travel blog, Far Away Places. I’ve had good wireless connections so far, and I’ve been writing a ton in my notebook. I’m transferring this writing to the web as fast as I can, while still trying not to compromise the time in a foreign country.

I’ll have plenty to post back here when I return in November. Chao!

Exploring Lima, Peru: Plaza de Armas

After my first night’s misadventure with the taxi, I was a little nervous about what to expect in my first full day in Lima, Peru. Fortunately, things worked out just fine.

After scolding me for not finding him at the airport, Manolo — the agent for the travel company — asked me what I planned to do with my free day. “I don’t know,” I said. “I may just wander around Miraflores. But maybe I’ll try to head downtown. Is it walkable?”

He frowned. “No,” he said. “You need to take a taxi. If you’d like, I can show you around.”

“That’d be great,” I said, so we headed out together. Taxi rates are much more reasonable when you have a Peruvian asking for the fares. Instead of 95 soles from the airport to Miraflores, it only took 14 soles to get downtown (and the distance was about the same). We wended our way through the chaotic Lima traffic, traffic that’s much more of a mess than any city I’ve ever been to. Worse than New York. Worse than Rome. Worse than Paris. I would not want to drive here! But at least I learned some new Spanish swear words.

On the steps of el Palacio Arzobispal de Lima

Museo San Francisco

Manolo and I spent about five hours together in the center of Lima looking at churches and tiendas and watching the changing of the guard at the Palacio de Gobierno. We paid seven soles to take the guided tour of the Museo San Francisco, a sixteenth-century Franciscan monastery.

Longer ago, this church served as Lima’s cemetery. When people died, they wanted to be buried beneath it. “They thought it would bring them closer to heaven,” Manolo told me. “But it wasn’t true.” He was raised Catholic, but doesn’t know what to think now. (He’s been dabbling with Mormonism over the past few years.)

As we followed the small group from room to room, we chatted in both English and Spanish. I asked Manolo a little bit about himself. He’s from Aguage, a small town near the jungle city of Iquitos in the north of Peru. He’s been studying tourism for the past few years, but it’s slow going because he can’t always afford the classes he wants to take.

The Franciscan Church in Lima, Peru

As we toured the church, I smiled at a painting of the Last Supper. “They’re eating apples and potatoes and chili peppers,” I said.

“And cuy,” Manolo said, indicating the roast guinea pig. “They’re eating only Peruvian food.” Por supuesto!

As we toured the crypts beneath the church — or the first of three levels, anyhow — I was reminded of the Basilica di San Clemente, the church I loved in Rome. There, though, the tunnels under the building were actually city streets that vanished as sediment was deposited throughout time. And instead of being 350 years old, the catacombs in Rome are 2000 years old.

Note: Unfortunately, no photos were allowed in the Museo San Francisco. I know many people would have taken them anyway but — aside from the Cistine Chapel — I try to respect “no photo” rules. (I must be the only person to have visited Florence and not taken a photo of Michaelangelo’s David!)

After I took a photo of this dog alone, the old man insisted I take one with him in it!

Plaza de Armas

After the museum, we stopped briefly at Casa de la Literatura Peruana, the Peruvian writers museum. It was packed with schoolchildren, but there was little to interest me. (Although I did take a photo of the Mario Vargas Llosa sign for Aly, my tutor.)

Outside, we stopped in the Plaza de Armas to watch a part of the changing of the guard. The brass band was fun because instead of playing only marches, it played Latin-influenced jazzy stuff.

For lunch, we ate lomo saltado at a restaurant Manolo recommended. I wanted to try lúcuma juice, but the jungle fruit was not in season. “You might get sick from your meal,” Manolo warned me. I told him I knew the risks. I ate heartily, but still couldn’t finish all the food on my plate.

After eating, he led me down a long calle that has been closed off for several blocks as a pedestrian shopping mall. (This is very similar to places I’ve seen in Dublin, Paris, Florence, an Cape Town.) And then we took a taxi back to Miraflores.

Manolo in Plaza de Armas

“How long have you been learning Spanish?” Manolo asked at one point.

“Solamente cuatros meses,” I said. I keep saying three months, but it’s closer to four months now.

Manolo smiled. “Cuatros mas y ya sabes todo,” he said. Ha. Not likely. It’s nice to be complimented, but I feel like I’m really struggling.

In the later afternoon, I walked around Miraflores — or a small part of it, anyhow. I explored the shops around Kennedy Park, and here I got confirmation that my Spanish is still very raw. While my conversations with Manolo had gone well, I couldn’t understand the folks in the stores — and they couldn’t undrestand me. But I muddled through.

In the evening, I spent some time lounging around Kennedy Park in Miraflores. But that’s a story that will have to wait until tomorrow.

How NOT to Take a Taxi in Lima

Hola, todos! I am safe and sound in Lima and will soon depart for Cuzco. Before I go, I want to share a bit about the journey from Chicago to Peru. Generally, I don’t think of the actual travel part of travel as being very interesting. This time was different.

Things got off to a good start in Houston when una abuela asked me for help. In Spanish. And I was able to help her. In Spanish. We only exchanged a few sentences, but it felt good. The only problem? I forgot to use usted, and used the familiar form tú instead. Oops. (I also practiced my Spanish in flight by watching 30 Rock en español. For some reason, the show is even funnier when I barely understand a word.)

In-Flight Entertainment

I was seated next to Mark, who lives in California. He’s in Lima to visit his girlfriend. They met on a Latin American dating site and want to get married, but need to iron out some issues with her visa. He gave me some practical tips about getting around town. “Be careful of the taxis,” he told me. “They’ll try to rip you off.”

Note: A drunk young man was seated in front of us. He was loud but friendly. When the flight attendant chastised him for being so noisy, he was contrite. He offered to “buy everyone everything from the SkyMall catalog”. It would have been annoying, but he was sincere. Well, sincere and loud. Eventually he settled back to watch Captain America: The First Avenger. So did I — though not in Spanish.

Also on the flight was Ben, whom I’d met briefly at the airport. He came to find me, and he and Mark and I had a long conversation about travel in general and Peru in specific. Both Mark and Ben have traveled extensively. Ben has been traveling for 30 years, and has strong opinions about Americans who are stuck in the rat race.

“The world is full of abundance,” Ben told me. He stood in the aisle, using his styrofoam coffee cup to gesture for emphasis. “Food. Clothes. Housing. It’s all out there and will come to you if you let it. I mean it. Its true. ” I listened, but I didn’t say anything. If you’ve been reading my stuff for a while, you know what I think of the Law of Attraction.

Mark and Ben talked about their visits to Peru and Colombia. They agreed that Latin American women are beautiful, but that Colombian women are the most beautiful of all. I winced at the loudness of it all, especially when Ben began to generalize about Peru and Peruvians. (Mentally I noted that sometimes generalizations about Americans are correct.)

How NOT to Take a Taxi in Lima

I hesitate to tell the next anecdote because it’s precisely the sort of thing you’re not supposed to let happen to you in Peru, but truth is truth. I made a mistake, and I may as well be honest.

After clearing customs at the Lima airport, I wandered into the reception area, which is a large funnel of people. There were dozens of drivers holding signs, but nobody was holding a sign for me. Not ten minutes in the country and already I’d hit a snag! I went back through twice more but couldn’t find my transfer.

Not to worry. There were plenty of helpful taxi drivers offering to assist me. I brushed them off until one clever fellow convinced me to let him call my hotel. They had my reservation, he told me, but they didn’t have me down for an airport transfer.

“I can take you, señor,” he volunteered helpfully. (Read that “helpfully” with a touch of irony, please.)

“Cuanto cuesta?” I asked, not sure if that was the right way thing to say. He understood.

“Treinta soles, señor,” he said. That’s about $12, which sounded reasonable, so I agreed. He helped me put my bags into the back of his car.

I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t scared. I was a little scared. I’ve taken few taxi rides in my life, and I’ve heard too many warnings about taxi scams in Latin America — not just from Mark, but from other people. But my driver and I had a pleasant drive into Miraflores. Between his broken English and my broken Spanish, we made it work. I remembered to use usted. He complimented me on my Spanish, saying it was good for having studied only three months.

But then, as he was driving me through a dicey neighborhood, he asked me to pay him. “Now?” I asked.

“Si, señor,” he said.

“Thirty soles, right?” I said. Confirmation seemed like a formality.

“No,” he said. “Treinta dólares.”

I was caught off guard, and I tried to argue a little, but there was no use. He held firm. He even dug out some sort of rate card (although he wouldn’t let me hold it) where something was listed as $30 or 95 soles. In the end, I gave him 60 soles and $10, or about $31.60.

The rest of the drive was pleasant enough. I focused on practicing my Spanish, but inside I was steaming. I wasn’t mad at the driver. I was mad at myself. What a dope!

Even Worse

This morning I met Manolo, my liaison in Lima. “Where were you last night?” he asked. He had been at the airport, holding a sign for the travel company. I explained that I’d looked several times but seen nobody. I apologized profusely. “It’s okay,” he said. When I gave him my receipt for the taxi, he shook his head in disapproval. “You should have only paid maybe 22 soles,” he said.

Some personal finance whiz I am. I paid four times as much for a taxi as I should have. And I didn’t need to take one at all. But you know what? Lesson learned. I need to make this same taxi ride twice more while in Peru, and now I know what to expect.

As I mentioned, I spent the day seeing a few tiny pieces of Lima: Plaza de Armas in the city center, and the area of Miraflores around the hotel. More on that tomorrow. Right now, it’s time for bed. I need to catch an early-morning flight to Cuzco!

Destination: Peru!

Earlier this summer, I made plans for the trip of a lifetime. I would fly to England where I’d spend most of August and part of September walking from coast to coast, following the path of Hadrian’s Wall. From there, I intended to hop a ferry to the Netherlands or to make my way south to Cambridge, where I’d lodge with some Get Rich Slowly readers.

Real life, however, intervened. My mother got sick. Our roof sprung a leak. Work demanded my attention. Between these things (and more), I was forced to cancel the trip.

I was bummed for a while, but soon put plans into motion for a different adventure. And tomorrow that adventure begins. As I write this, I’ve just wrapped up a weekend at a Financial Blogger Conference in Chicago. But I’m not returning directly to Portland. Where am I going instead? Well, on Tuesday I fly from Chicago, Illinois to Lima, Peru.

Lima evening, HDR. Photo by rednuht.

Destination: Peru

“Why do you want to go to Peru?” a friend asked me recently.

“Well, at first I thought I wanted to go to Ecuador,” I said. “But as I started to make my plans, my heart just wasn’t in it. Nothing about the trip excited me except the excursion to the Galapagos Islands. Then I did some reading about Peru, and I realized that Machu Picchu is there. Not just Machu Picchu, but also Lake Titicaca and Lima and the Nazca Lines. Plus there’s the Amazon rain forest. In fact, the more I read about Peru, the more I realized that there was too much to see and do.”

It took me an entire day of planning to come up with a five-week itinerary that packed in plenty to do while still remaining affordable. It was tough. I feel like there’s more to do and see in Peru than there was in Paris!

First up, I’ll do the Andes and Altiplano Trek from World Expeditions. I’ll meet the other members of the trip on Wednesday in Lima. From there, we’ll fly to Cuzco, the historic capital of the Inca Empire. After a few days to acclimate to the high altitude — Cuzco sits at 3399 meters above sea level, which is twice as high as Denver, Colorado — we’ll trek to Machu Picchu.

A llama atop one of the terraces at Machu Picchu. Photo by epicxero.

Machu Picchu is an ancient Incan city or estate — archaeologists can’t really agree on its original purpose. Nobody denies its beauty and importance, though. (It was selected as one of the new Seven Wonders of the World.) Tens of thousands of hikers walk the Inca Trail to Machu Picchu each year. I chose an expedition that takes the less-traveled Salcantay Route.

After reaching Machu Picchu, we’ll return for a couple of days rest in Cuzco before journeying to the town of Puno on the shores of Lake Titicaca. (At 3811 meters above sea level, this is the highest navigable lake in the world.) From here, we’ll venture into Bolivia for a four-day trek through the Condoriri region (and elevations of up to 5100 meters!). We finish the trip in La Paz.

From La Paz, I’ll fly back to Lima, where my wife will join me for a less strenuous trip through Peru. We’ll do a short culinary tour of Lima, and then fly to Cuzco for several days of site-seeing and a train ride to beautiful Machu Picchu.

Photo by szeke.

Ready to Go

With just 36 hours remaining before my flight leaves from Chicago for Lima, I’m eager to begin. I’ve never done anything like this. I’m both excited and scared.

But I’m packed and ready. I’m carrying a 45-liter travel pack weighing about 9kg. I also have a small daypack that comes in at about 4kg. I would love to get everything to fit in the bigger bag (and get my total weight down to 10kg), but that’s going to be tough. I picked up another kilogram of bulky material here at the blogging conference. Besides, I actually think I’m under-prepared for once. I may have to buy additional cold-weather layers in Cuzco.

My main worry is crime. Everyone I talk to says something like, “Oh yeah, you’ll probably get mugged, but it’s no big deal. Just accept the fact you’ll probably lose your laptop.” I don’t want to lose my laptop. I don’t want to be mugged. I know there are things I can do to reduce the likelihood that I’ll be targeted, but still…it’s not comforting to have every person I talk to — including native Peruvians — tells me that I should just accept the fact that I’ll be a victim of crime. (But you know what? Many folks told me I was going to get mugged in Italy. And Paris. And Cape Town. But I never had any trouble whatsoever.)

The truth is, aside from my life, nothing I have is that precious. Yes, I’d be pissed if my laptop were stolen, but everything I do on that machine is backed up online automatically anyhow. And it’s really the data I’m afraid of losing, right? As long as I can find a way to back up my photos as I travel, I should be fine.

Note

My top choice for this trip was a actually “tour” from Gap Adventures that consists of two weeks volunteering at a drop-in center for kids in Cuzco. I want to to explore “volunteer vacations” — I’ve been looking at projects with Edge of Seven, for instance — and I’m certain there’s some voluntourism in my future. But not this time.

The literature for the Cuzco Kids program strongly discourages folks who are’t proficient in Spanish. After three months of learning Spanish, my skills are coming along and I’m able to read it okay, but my speaking ability is terrible (and my listening skills aren’t much better). I’ll have to keep the Cuzco Kids program as an option for 2012 or 2013.

Outside Peet’s at 37th and Hawthorne

I often meet Aly for Spanish lessons at the Peet’s Coffee at 37th and Hawthorne. There are a lot of interesting things to see there. Sometimes there’s a group of young men skateboarding on 37th, blocking traffic and the sidewalk and getting cranky when people ask them to stop. There are often petitioners. For some reason, there are plenty of tourists here. Once there were young women giving free hugs.

And yesterday there was a bare-footed man in dirty clothes, smoking cigarettes and sitting on the newspaper dispenser. He was rather surly and a little…strange. At one point, he took a handful of coins from his pocket and tossed them to ground just outside the window from which I was watching. (Well, I was studying Spanish, but I was also keeping an eye on him.) The young man smoked and stared as people bent to pick up his quarters and dimes and nickels. I’m not sure what was going on there.

But the best thing I’ve ever seen at this corner was a dog. He’d lost the use of his back legs apparently, so he moved around on a makeshift cart. I snapped this photo with my iPhone:

“Whatcha starin’ at, boy? Ain’t never seen a dog with wheels before?”

Our Zoo: The Animals of Rosings Park

For living just a few miles from the center of the city, we sure have a lot of animals around this place! In fact, tonight as I was putting together a video about our bunny, I realized I’ve made all sorts of short movies about the animals of Rosings Park. Let’s look at some of them, shall we? (And, at the end, you’ll get to see footage of Blackberry, which is what Kris has named the rabbit.)

Let’s start at the box factory, though. As you’ll recall, one day a feral chicken showed up in the yard. He lived with us for several months, coexisting alongside the shop cat, sharing its food. Here’s footage of my chicken.

Returning to Rosings Park, the first thing to document is the birds. Our yard is filled with birds, especially in the autumn and winter. Kris feeds them well, and they’re grateful for it. Sometimes there are too many birds. When that happens, there can only be one result: a peanut battle!

One summer, Kris decided to train the scrub jays that are so prevalent here. Using their favorite food — peanuts — she slowly conditioned them to come closer and closer to her. Eventually she could sit at the picnic table and feed them. The collective memory of the jays has no recollection of this now, which is too bad. Maybe we’ll start again from scratch sometime. Here’s a short video of me working to condition the friendly jays.

There are other, wilder animals that roam the neighborhood at times. For instance, there are often raccoons (or bands of them) that sweep the neighborhood, tearing up gardens and chowing down on other foodstuffs they can find. Last autumn, after we kicked Toto out of the house, they discovered her food dish and helped themselves. A younger Toto might have tried to fight them off; the old (and near death) Toto simply watched grouchily.

We have almost as many spiders around here as we do birds. Here are some baby spiders in February; by July, they were full-grown and all over the yard.

The most prominent animals in our lives are the cats, obviously. They run this place. We shouldn’t call it Rosings Park; we should call it the Whisker Den (or something less dorky but just as feline). Here’s a typical morning in which the cats are running the show. (For the record, this is my second-most watched video on YouTube.)

And that leads us to our latest addition: our volunteer rabbit. The bunny showed up last week. I love having it around. It’s hilarious. I like how it chases the cats, but not out of spite — out of playfulness. I came home yesterday to find it lolling in the road with Max. We’ve decided it can stick around, but it can’t come in the house, and we’re not going to actively foster it.

Here’s how cute the damn thing is:

Who knows what animal we’ll keep next? Ducks? A dog? Goats? A cow?

p.s. I forgot about the squirrels! I don’t actually have any good squirrel footage, but they’re a big part of our lives too. Sometimes they eat from Kris’ hand. They taunt the cats. They fight with the birds over food. Last week, we saw one industrious fellow trying to drag a whole corn cob up the walnut tree. I’ll make it a priority to get some squirrel video to add to my collection.

Bookstore of Babel

I had a surreal experience today. After my Spanish lesson, I stopped at Wallace Books in Sellwood. (Yes, yes — I know I’ve complained about them in the past, but the fact is they’re the only real ~~used~~ bookstore around, so I’ll take what I can get.) I wanted to pick up A Game of Thrones and some sort of Spanish-language reading.

Turns out Wallace has a handful of Spanish-language books, but they’re mixed together with all of the other languages. As usual, there’s no rhyme or reason to the way the books are filed. No worries. There were only two or three shelves of foreign-language books, so I just browsed them all.

But as I did, something strange happened. In my mind, all of the languages I know morphed into one. And one language — Portuguese — that I don’t know!

So, I’d come across a French book with a promising title, pull it down, and leaf through it only to realize that while the title made sense, I couldn’t read anything else really. Or I’d grab a Portuguese or an Italian book, glance through it, and only realize I wasn’t looking at Spanish after about thirty seconds. (No joke!)

This went on for about twenty minutes, and it was strange. It was as if all of the bits and pieces of the languages that I’ve learned had united to form some sort of super-language in my head, allowing me to parse any of the Romanic languages. (I didn’t really ever get the German stuff confused with the Italian/Spanish/Portuguese/French — it’s too different.)

Fun, but very confusing. When it came time to leave, I had to put back three books from my to-buy stack because they weren’t actually Spanish, but some other language. In the end, the only Spanish book I came home with was Como agua para chocolate, which is a bit above my reading level. (Though it’s nowhere near as tough as Cien años de soledad. “I can only understand the first sentence of that,” I told Aly today, “and that’s because I’ve already read the book in English.”)

Bonus trivia: Wallace has a big display of the new book from Colin Meloy of the Decemberists. I was admiring it, so the clerk and I talked a bit about the band and its members. “You know he used to work here, right?” she told me. “No way!” I said. “Yes,” she said. “And Jenny too.” Well, there you go. Maybe I’ll have to give Wallace more cred in the future.

Lost in Translation

All day long, I think about Spanish. Sometimes, if I’m lucky, I think in Spanish (though this never lasts for long). When I’m not working on my Spanish, I wish I were. And sometimes, like last night, I’ll stay up long after Kris has gone to bed just so I can read more Spanish or do more flashcards.

My favorite activity is translation. I love taking a Spanish-language book or poem or song or comic and working out the English translation. It’s such lovely, imprecise work. (Aly and I have had some good conversations about how translation is never an exact thing because words in different languages never have direct analogs, and because of cultural nuances.)

Here’s a poem I’ve been working on today, a poem by Amado Nervo, a Mexican writer from a hundred years ago. This poem is called “En Paz“, or “At Peace”. It’s about a man nearing the end of his life.

En Paz por Amado Nervo

Muy cerca de mi ocaso, yo te bendigo, vida,
porque nunca me diste ni esperanza fallida,
ni trabajos injustos, ni pena inmerecida;

porque veo al final de mi rudo camino
que yo fui el arquitecto de mi propio destino;

que si extraje la miel o la hiel de las cosas,
fue porque en ellas puse hiel o mieles sabrosas:
cuando planté rosales, coseché siempre rosas.

…Cierto, a mis lozanías va a seguir el invierno:
¡mas tú no me dijiste que mayo fuese eterno!

Hallé sin duda largas noches de mis penas;
mas no me prometiste tú sólo noches buenas;
y en cambio tuve algunas santamente serenas…

Amé, fui amado, el sol acarició mi faz.
¡Vida, nada me debes! ¡Vida, estamos en paz!

And here is my very amateur translation, with an attempt to keep things poetic:

At Peace by Amado Nervo

As I approach my twilight, I bless you, Life,
because you never gave me false hope,
nor unjust labor, nor undeservéd pain;

because I see at the end of my long journey
that I was the maker of my own destiny;

that if I’ve taken sweetness or bitterness from things,
it was because I put sweetness or bitterness in them:
when I planted roses, I always harvested roses.

Indeed, my blossoms will continue into winter:
Although you never promised me an eternal spring!

It’s true that I’ve had long nights filled with pain and sorrow;
but you never promised that I’d only have good nights;
and in exchange, some nights were holy and serene.

I loved, was loved, and the sun caressed my face.
Life, you owe me nothing! Life, we are at peace!

I’ll freely admit that I may have messed up this translation in places. I’m not familiar with many Spanish idioms, and I suspect there are a few phrases here that I’ve translated literally but which ought to be taken in another way. (“Trabajos injustos“, for instance, and “pena inmerecida“.) But I’ve done my best to convert a beautiful Spanish poem into English.

Note: Here’s another example of translation difficulties — at least for me. There are several subtle different ways to translate the line “cuando planté rosales, coseché siempre rosas“. Rosales could be “roses” or it could be “rosebushes”. Rosas could be “roses” or it could be “pink” (or “pinks”). The latter may always imply the color — I’m not sure. So, how does one translate this? For me, to get the meaning that I think the author is going for and to remain poetic, I used the English word “rose” in both cases. But I could be wrong.

Back when our book group read the first volume of Proust, I remember that Pam complained that the translation was imprecise. She wanted it to be literal. The translation we read was the classic from C.K. Scott Moncrieff, who translated for mood and feeling and not exactly word for word. This bugged Pam. It didn’t bug me.

Note: For instance, the literal translation of the title to Proust’s huge novel is In Search of Lost Time, but Moncrieff translated it as Remembrance of Things Past, which was more poetic, a reference to Shakespeare, and attempted to capture the mood of the work. The modern, literal translation of the second volume’s title is “In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower”, which is hideous. Do the literalists actually like this? Moncrieff translated it as “Within a Budding Grove”, which is poetic and hints at the sexual awakening without being so overtly clinical.

The more I learn about languages, the less I like word-for-word translations. They may capture the technical meanings, but they don’t convey the deeper dimensions, the wonder behind the words.

I still have a lot of Spanish to learn — I’ve barely begun my journey — but I look forward to lots and lots of future translating. It’s my favorite part of this process.

Our Bunny (or, An Unexpected Guest)

It looks as if — for now, anyway — we’re not just a five cat family; we’re also a one rabbit family.

On Tuesday, for no apparent reason whatsoever, a rabbit appeared in the yard. We were standing in the kitchen when Kris said, “Look. Meatball is chasing a rabbit.” Sure enough. The big dumb oaf was chasing a white and brown bunny across the grass and into the boxwood hedge.

We went outside and spent several minutes trying to catch the rabbit, but to no avail. It’s got some smooth moves.

Over the past few days, the cats have gone from the aggressors, however, to the pursued. The rabbit has warmed up to them — and to us. It won’t let us pet it, but it does like to hop close to us. And to the cats. In fact, when it sees a cat, it bounds after it, essentially chasing the poor feline. The cats don’t really care for this.

Well, except Silver, one of our new additions. Silver thinks the rabbit is kind of fun:

We’re not sure what to do with the rabbit. We’ve asked the neighbors, and nobody is missing a bunny. We asked on the neighborhood email list, and nobody knows anything about it. I guess our next step is to put up signs around our community.

I want to keep the rabbit of course (though outside — I don’t want an indoor rabbit). Kris, naturally, is opposed.

I think she’ll change her mind if we name it, but I’m at a loss as to what to call our little friend. Hazel? Bigwig? Briscoe? Conejo? Stew?