The Kosher Eyes

As much as I would love to blog about the next item on our itinerary after lagoon 69-after all I`m still about 2 weeks behind-I quite enjoyed writing random observations in my last entry, so I think I`ll do a bit more of that and hopefully give you more of an idea of how this vacation is going.

The above creature, as I assume you will already have figured out, is a pig. I can almost hear you asking ¨what is it doing on this blog which only features kosher food??¨ Well, to that I would reply: ¨He is alive¨. :P The more important and interesting question here is why I took his picture. Well, it turns out I`m a really holy person and I wanted to share that with you.

Peru is a large country. As such, one spends a lot of time on the roads. A journey of 5 hours is considered short, which to the Turk in me is not such a wonder, but my Israeli identity and my Israeli travelling partner find this quite remarkable. Actually long journeys are a whole other issue that deserve another post, so I will try to get back to the pigs for now. When one travels around little villages near Huaraz and when one sits near the window of the bus, one apparently notices many of these animals along the way. The same cannot be said of the person sitting in the aisle. To be more specific-we spent a good 3-4 days on the roads, repeating the same scenario: Rikki would see a pig, get all excited and try to get me to see it as well. I would keep missing it. That is when we decided that I must have kosher eyes, the kind that blocks out unkosher animals... Sadly though, my kosher eyes proved to be only temporary and eventually I saw one and had to document it to mark the event...

Once my eyes were opened, there was no stopping them. I even saw a whole roasted pig in a market once, alongside chickens dangling upside down on ropes and huge, stinky blocks of cheese. Unfortunately I have no pictures of these lovely sights, for reasons I will disclose in a few more sentences. You see, in our endless searches for fruit and vegetables, someone at some point was kind enough to mention to us that every city in Peru has a market where one can easily find fresh produce! We promptly made our way to the market in Huaraz when we obtained this information. While we did indeed find what we had been looking for, that day also happened to be Shabbat so we could only look at the produce and sigh. It pains me to record here that just as we left the market, Rikki pointed out to me an upside down turtle that had been carved on the inside. :( We had heard of locals eating guinea pigs, but poor, cute little turtles??? I was not happy. After that day, somehow or other it always happened that we would arrive at the market just as it was about to close down, with only some miserable looking potatoes and corn left for sale, so no squeamish market photos for you. I can just hear your disappointed sighs. :P

We spent a few days in Huaraz astonished with the popularity of the Orthodox Union before we finally asked a cab driver what the sign stood for and it turns out it´s a sports team of some sort... Oh well, no kosher guinea pigs for us then. :P The truth is that we really are astonished by the stretch of the OU into this part of the world. We`ve found anything from Pringles, Philadelphia cream cheese to Schulz brand pretzels with the ubiquitous OU sign. Oh and that reminds me-whoever told me that I would lose weight on this trip clearly did not share my weakness for chocolates... Or try the new almond flavored Snickers... Yum.

We have a saying in Turkish ¨It´s a festival every day for the crazy¨. Not sure what the folks in Huaraz would say to that, considering that EVERY SINGLE DAY that we were there, there was some other celebration in the city. In the beginning I got all excited and started snapping photos, by the end of our stay it was all I could do not to roll my eyes when I saw another parade. The funny thing is, I´m not even sure what they were celebrating. Something to do with education one day. Something to do with a historic figure. I lost track after a while. Don´t make the mistake, though, of thinking that Peruvians are these exciting, jovial people (this is a point I´m dying to dwell on, but it will have to wait a few more posts).

This picture is here to help me express my frustration over why there aren´t more ¨people pictures¨ on my camera. It`s extremely difficult to snap a picture of a person who is looking directly into your eyes, unless you have managed to establish some sort of connection with them and you can get their approval. With our whirlwind itinerary, which, again, will be the subject of another post, it´s been almost impossible to establish such connections. Children are relatively easier to deal with in that sense. This cutie was just wandering around the streets of Huaraz one evening when we were agency shopping. Which brings me to....

Carlos, ¨our man in Huaraz¨! Note the feeling of movement in this picture, an effect produced by taking the photograph in the diagonal, a trick I learned at the photography workshop I attended right before I left Israel, courtesy of Mosaic (thanks guys!!). You will hear more about Carlos, hopefully, in my next entry. Until then...