New York & DC - Two Snow Whites

Last night after seeing Tribes, we realized that the night was still young (it was only 9:45pm).  So we ran back up to the movie theater at Lincoln Square and caught a screening of Mirror Mirror, the new Snow White movie with Julia Roberts and a handful of other interesting people.  (And yes, if you're keeping track, this does mean that in less than 36 hours, we had seen two movies, one opera, one play, eaten at three notable restaurants, and toured a cathedral -- because that's how Amanda and I do New York.)

The movie was terrible.  Visually very pretty, but in all other respects one of the stupidest movies I have seen in years.  Almost offensively so.  To the point that if I hadn't been so tired, I would seriously have contemplated leaving mid-movie (which I've only done once in my life).  And because it was so bad, that's all I'm going to say about it.

Ballet Preljocaj: Blanche Neige

Infinitely more interesting and satisfying on all levels was the performance of Snow White by Ballet Preljocaj at the Kennedy Center (which I saw this afternoon, directly after getting off the train from New York).  This French dance company (which is headed by Angelin Preljocaj) told the classic fairy tale in the form of a full-length narrative ballet but in the vernacular of modern dance -- so no pointe, no tutus; instead, we had funky modern movement in aggressive costumes by Jean-Paul Gaultier.

I really enjoyed it.  In particular, some of the highlights:

1.  The piece opened with the good queen (Snow White's mother) alone on the stage in a long black dress, heels and a crown.  She's enormously pregnant, and we see her give birth alone and in agony, and then die.  Clearly, this was not going to be a whimsical romp.

2.  When Snow White first meets the prince in the woods, they dance a very romantic pas de deux twice:  The first time, when their eyes first meet, the music stops, and they proceed in complete silence.  Then the music resumes and they repeat it exactly.  It felt to me as though we'd seen, in dance form, the concept of spiritual creation preceeding physical creation:  The dance without music was the spiritual connection between the lovers, and then the music brought them into the world and made it real.  Such an interesting and unexpected effect.

3.  The poison apple scene was completely terrifying.  Rather than allowing Snow White to eat the apple and wait passively for the poison to work, the witch rams it violently down the girl's throat, tormenting her until she's dead.  It felt like watching a poisonous snake take down a lovely bird.



4.  When the Prince discovers Snow White's body, he doesn't just kiss her -- first he melts in grief, and then he takes her lifeless form and dances a tender and lovely pas de deux.  It was surprisingly moving and, although he did eventually kiss her, I had the feeling that it was the dancing that brought her back more than the kiss.  It made me think of Gisele, where the heroine supports the dying prince as he dances under deadly enchantment.



5. Oh, and speaking of dancing to death, guess how they kill the witch! They bring in the fatal red shoes (from that other gruesome fairy tale) and force them onto her feet -- she then dances frenziedly until she expires of exhaustion.

Back again

There's always something a little surreal about coming home from traveling abroad.  To go from someplace so different to someplace so familiar in such a short time makes it almost hard to believe in the reality of either.  Part of the magic lies in the flip that occurs:  The foreignness that I lived for the past two weeks is, upon returning, more familiar than home; and the familiarity of home, in that instant, appears strange.  But ultimately the power of home -- that fundamental comfort and effortlessness of being at home -- wins out and everything becomes real again.  Real and a little mundane.  Ordinary.

Our flight home from Lima went smoothly.  Fortunately we landed at Reagan National Airport during a gap between summer thunderstorms.  For the rest of the afternoon there were violent downpours and warnings on the news that there would be major delays at all three of the DC airports.  We were also lucky to be in an area unaffected by earlier storms; apparently great swathes of the DC metro area is currently without power following some earlier storms.

The rest of the afternoon was spent unpacking, doing laundry, calling Comcast to fix a billing error that resulted from my move to the new apartment in early June (it only took 1.5 hours and seven Comcast people to solve the problem).  After a while we walked over to Chipotle and brought back some burritos to eat while watching Blade Runner -- which, by the way, is a super weird movie.  We picked it because we both knew the name but had never seen it, and we'd hoped it would be in the vein of the Matrix movies.  Nope.  It was creepy and moody and very 1980s (Vangelis!).  There were some nice elements, particularly the film noir parts.  But still very weird.

Oh well.  Now to bed.  I think we're going to get up early tomorrow to go to the beach.  I need to see if I can't get some sort of tan before going back to work on Monday.  After all, I need to have something to show for all this vacation!

Lima - Cathedral and Archbishop's Palace

The bulk of our afternoon in Lima was spent at the Cathedral and Archbishop's Palace on the Plaza de Armas.  There isn't a ton to say about them that isn't said in the pictures.  They were definitely worth the visit.

Cathedral

Cathedral

Francisco Pizarro's tomb

Box that Pizarro's head was in

Detail of choir stalls

Lineage of Peruvian rulers
from Incas through Spanish kings

Crypt - babies' coffins

Crypt - skulls

Ivory crucifix

Archbishop's Palace

Lima - Day 2

This is the last day of our trip and we decided to take it easy.  We slept in until 10am -- the latest we've slept on this entire trip (our more habitual rising time has been sometime between 5am and 7am).  Boy did we need that extra sleep!

We used the rest of the morning to catch up on blogging and emails and then headed out to explore more of the city.  Lima isn't a pretty city, and the weather doesn't help:  The winter weather is this constant damp greyness that would probably get pretty old after a while.  (The greyness of Belgium seems better to me, since at least there you have variation in the rain and clouds; here, it's just a uniform grey.)

It is an interesting city, though, and set dramatically on cliffs overlooking the Pacific Ocean.  And it has some pretty colonial buildings, too.

Miraflores coastline

Jesus

Coast highway

Palacio de Gobierno

Plaza de Armas

After touring the city, we had time and money to spend, so we found another nice restaurant -- this time a Swiss restaurant with delicious veal and desserts (and a piano player in the corner).

Veal with potatoes and mushroom sauce

Carrot cake

Lima - Transformers 3

I have a tradition of seeing (usually) bad American blockbusters in foreign cities.  I started with the Charlies Angels remake in Paris and brought Amanda into it with Transformers in Istanbul.  That would have been reason enough for us to see Transformers 3 in Lima. 

But there's an additional reason, too:  We were in Chicago last summer during the filming of Transformers 3 and walked along some of the street sets.  (I also saw the filming in DC later in the summer.)

So once we'd explored the neighborhood around our hotel in Lima and discovered a movie theater just a couple of blocks away, we knew we needed to get to a screening of Transformers 3.  It was terrible, of course, but also fun.

Arequipa to Lima

We got back from our trip to the Colca Canyon at around 5pm on Tuesday and, three hours later, jumped on an 18-hour bus ride to Lima.  During those three hours of non-travel time, we managed to work a little miracle.  As you'll recall, I hadn't showered the previous day due to lack of warm water in our Chivay hotel.  Needless to say, after an additional day of tromping through the canyon and sitting in minivans and getting stranded on the mountainside and almost having to kill and sleep inside a llama to survive, I was in need of some bathing. 

We had left our bags at our hotel in Arequipa and when we picked them up, I asked the woman at reception if she had any cheap rooms that we could take for a couple of hours -- long enough to shower before leaving for Lima.  I expected that she'd make us rent the room for the whole night and charge us the full rate, but she didn't!  She only charged us 20 soles (about $7)!  We got into the room, plugged every device we owned into the wall to charge, and proceeded to take wonderful hot showers! 

Then we grabbed a bite to eat at a local Turkish restaurant around the corner and headed out to the bus station.  We'd bought tickets on the nicest bus we could find -- the "bed" tickets for the fancy, fully reclining seats that we could sleep in.  The bus turned out not to be quite as nice as we'd hoped (I've still to see a bus that tops the luxury liner I rode in Honduras), but the seats were surprisingly comfortable.  I was more comfortable after 18 hours in that seat than I had been after 6 hours in the normal seats.  So that was something.

The only real problem that arose during the trip was with my ear.  We started dropping altitude fast after leaving Arequipa, and my right ear did not like it one bit (this is the ear that I had so many problems with growing up, and which still gives me problems despite the surgery).  Going from over 16,000 feet to sea level in the space of about 12 hours probably wasn't the best thing for my ear.  It hurt like heck and wouldn't adjust.  For some reason, too, it filled with fluid, which I discovered when it eventually ruptured and started draining (which was a relief, actually).  The next 24 hours was rough, with my ear still mighty sore and draining from time to time.  I stayed on antibiotics, though, to make sure that no infection developed, and I also took antihistamines and other decongestants to make sure that things stayed as open as possible.  Thanks to that, I'm feeling much better.

We arrived in Lima and checked into our hotel -- which is wonderful.  It has a great flowering courtyard and, just as the guidebook promised, a delightfully tinkling fountain in the middle.  There is a cage of songbirds right outside our window, and they sing beautifully in the morning.

After dropping off our bags and freshening up, we headed out to have lunch and do some initial exploration.  We ate at a little cafe called Manolo's, which had delicious dessert consisting of fresh churros and thick hot chocolate.

After eating, we walked around the Parque Kennedy for a while, soaking in the feel of the city.  We're in the upscale Miraflores neighborhood, and it's really nice.  Such a change from the colonial cities we've been in (not to mention the crummier country towns we've passed through, too).  It's refreshingly comfortable to be in a real city again.

Avenida Arequipa

City government building

Church near Parque Kennedy

Later in the evening we went to a fantastic Italian restaurant -- probably the nicest place we've been to so far on this trip (with prices to match, although they still were well under what a comparable place in the U.S. would have been).  I love being able to eat well in other countries without spending a fortune!

Mozzarella, tomato and basil salad

Four-cheese gnocchi

Fresh raspberries with whipped cream

Colca Excursion: Colca Canyon & Andean Condors

The Colca Valley leads into the Colca Canyon, the head of which is about 1.5 hours from Chivay.  The valley had been a prehistoric lake (similar to Lake Bonneville in Utah), and when the natural dam burst, the water drained through the Colca Canyon. 

As I mentioned before, the Colca Canyon is one of the deepest canyons in the world (only two others are deeper), and it's home to the Andean Condors.  Fortunately, we didn't need to climb into the canyon to see the condors.  There was a point fairly near the head of the canyon where a family of condors nested and, when the stars align, can be seen by tourists like ourselves. 

To maximize our chances of seeing the birds, we needed to get an early start.  This meant getting up at 4:30am so that both Amanda and I could be showered and breakfasted in time to leave.  Gettting up at 4:30 wasn't hard -- I was so cold in our unheated hotel that I was sleeping only fitfully anyway, and I was looking forward to getting into the hot water.  Unfortunately, when I went into the bathroom, there was no hot water.  I let the water run and run, but all I accomplished was to freeze my hand.  So I piled all of my clothes back on and crawled back under the covers to await the signal that breakfast was ready downstairs.  Finally that signal came, and I asked the woman why there was no hot water.  She assured me that she had just turned it on -- and sure enough, there was hot water.  The problem, of course, is that we now only had about 10 minutes for both Amanda and I to get showered, dressed, repacked and downstairs for breakfast and out the door to the canyon.  I was SO annoyed.  Amanda decided to go ahead and take the shower, but there was no way that I could have both showered and breakfasted -- and I decided that it would be more important for me to eat than to be clean. 

The drive to the canyon was long, dusty and bumpy (there are no paved roads), but we were rewarded with a spectacular show from the condors.  Andean condors are huge birds, with wingspans up to 10 feet across, and they can live for between 50 and 80 years.  The young birds have brown foliage, while the adults are black, with a white collar and white bands on their wings.  They are primarily carrion eaters, although they can be aggressive (especially the females) and attack living animals as well.  Here's a professional photo of one close up:

We had about 90 minutes to watch the condors.  I managed to take some pictures and video of the birds.  None of them is as good as I'd like, but I discovered that taking pictures of flying birds is really hard.  So here's the best of what I ended up with.  Fortunately, even when I missed the birds, or it was too far away, the canyon formed a dramatic backdrop anyway.

young condor (note the brown)





Video

Canyon Shots