Tuesday, March 18, 2008

I´m in Arequipa taking a glorious week to just hang out and not really do anything. It´s a welcome change of pace, I´ve been going for long walks around the city and doing my best to get as lost as possible in interesting neighborhoods. I´m staying with an architect named Paolo who is hands down one of the most awesome people I´ve ever met. She plays the bass in a band called Die, Tulip! and her house is full of fascinating architecture books and music. She has a crazy dog named Pelusa, which translates into fluff or lint.
I don´t really feel like writing and pictures are of course so much more interesting, so I´m just gonna post some pictures.

This is a hut on one of the floating islands on Lake Titicaca. The floating islands are made by tying together blocks of reed roots and then laying down lots of layers of reeds. The islands are small-only about 30 meters across- and most of them have between 5-8 families that live on them. During the wet season the islanders have to make new ¨ground¨one a week, once a month during the dry season. The thing on the roof of the hut is a solar panel. It powers the TV´s inside the huts. It´s a pretty crazy juxtaposition.

This is Lake Titicaca from the highest vantage point in the city of Puno. There were 816 stairs involved in getting up here (I didn´t count, there was a sign).
Procession for Santa Semana (the week before easter) in Arequipa.
Girl on Taquille Island. Fascinating place... I´ll write about it eventually, maybe.
Cusco.
Street art. I love street art.
It´s hard to update this thing because I always feel like I have so much that has been running through my head, but it´s all already in my sketchbook and I don´t really want to rehash it. I guess that makes me a bad blogger because I don´t make much of an effort to write with an audience in mind. I think I´m a little old-fashioned and too accustomed to having a honest to goodness paper journal. Maybe at some point I´ll feel motivated to actually write something substantial in this thing, but I kind of like it just as a glorified slide show.
-tessa

1 comment:

Rebecca said...

yaay blog! it was good to see pics of you and your adventures.