Street art street art and more street art

Hey folks,
I love street art. I miss my acrylics, I haven´t painted in three and a half months, which is effectively forever! Here´s a bunch of pictures of walls from Santiago, Chile.
-tessa

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

My socks are made of llama

Ok i´ll start with the obligatory apology for not having posted in so long. Since the last time I posted, I´ve had two more charming bouts of whatever is wrong with my stomach, seen more ruins than I can shake a stick at, and wandered through the most beautiful mountains I´ve ever seen. They were cold. There was snow. I´m currently in Cusco feeling a bit overwhelmed by how touristy the city is, I keep doing double takes when I´m walking down the street and hear people talking in English. Everything here is crazy expensive (relatively speaking) and bilingual and I don´t really like it, but thankfully with the crazy pace I´m moving at, my surroundings are never a problem for more than a day or two at a time.

I have been feeling like I want lots more time to travel, ideally months and months, and had come up with a really brilliant plan that involved selling a car I partially own (long story, don´t ask) and changing my ticket, and the only thing that stopped me was some assinine airline rule about not being able to change tickets if it means you´re staying for more than 120 days. So it´s only by the grace of airline beauracracy that you´re getting me back on time.

My four day hike around Chachopoyas was amazingly beautiful and amazingly wet. We started out walking along an old inca road and descended through miles of cloud forest. Because it´s the wet season, the views were mostly obscured by clouds, but occasionally things would clear up and you could see endless fields of trees draped in orchids. Which I neglected to take pictures of. I´m bad at taking pictures. But here are some:

when the guidebooks say that the wet season gets muddy, they´re not kidding....we hiked to a little village whose name I have forgotten and stayed in a hostel called Jesus is the Light of My Salvation and I met the pet monkey that lived there. At first I though ¨How cute, they´re friends!¨ But then it became clear that there was a definite one sided affection thing going on, and the monkey was not riding the dog in the most chaste fashion.

The ruins of Kuelap. I don´t know why, but Keulap might have been the single most tranquil place I have ever been. Maybe I´m just weird, but I find ruins strangely calming. This one was way up on top of a big hill, and it was covered in big trees and wildflowers. And grazing llamas. I tried to make friends with them, I made a daisy chain for a little one.

After Chachopoyas I headed for Trujillo/Huanchaco. Nothing too interesting to report there... I got really sunburned and felt overwhelmed about being in a big city again so I got a little drunk by myself and went wandering through the shopping district. I went and saw more ruins, this time the ruins of Chan Chan. The city is made of mud and everything is the same color. It´s a rather surreal experience to be surrounded by mud walls that are thousands of years old, makes you really think about what on earth people are going to make of the remains of our civilization when they find it (tangent-- read the book The Motel of the Mysteries, it´s about just that). Hardly anyone was there when I went so all you could hear was the background noise of the ocean.After Trujillo I headed for Huaraz and took off for another four day trek, this time through the Cordillera Blanca mountain range. It´s the most beautiful place I´ve ever been, so I forgive it for being horribly, horribly cold. I half killed myself halfway through the hike with a combination of food poisoning, altitude sickness, and a rather wicked hangover. I spent the next two days of hiking running off into the bushes every 15 minutes. It was lovely. Cold. So cold. All of us in this picture should have thought bubbles that say, ¨just pretend you´re enjoying this right now.¨Aíght enough of this... I´m going to head out in search of food. Until next time,

-tessa