How did a girl from Montreal get to Lima, Peru?
I’m here for the International Festival of the Peruvian Cajon. I barely play cajon. So why am I here? Turns out that cajon blends wonderfully with other instruments, one of those being marimba, of which I play a whole lot more. So I trekked down to Peru to give a percussion concert of marimba, multi-percussion, and percussion ensemble music, and to fake my way through half a concert of cajon.
Yesterday, after almost two weeks of rehearsing, not rehearsing (marimbas not being overly abundant), and figuring out logistics I gave a concert with a new percussion friend here – a teacher at the National Conservatory – and some of his students: Bach on marimba, a salsa, a tango, a contemporary piece about a Canadian tree (and Emily Carr painting), “Music For Pieces of Wood” (because somehow you can never seem to have a percussion concert anywhere in the world without some Steve Reich…), and a piece I originally wrote for taiko but rearranged for cajones.
Last night it finally happened and now it’s done and I get three days of vacation. The audience didn’t boo me when I shanked up a good portion of the salsa, played a whole lot of extra accidentals in Bach, and pounded the heck out of a cajon taiko-style. They even cheered. A little girl came up to me and asked to take a picture with me and kissed me on the cheek.
So to celebrate such an amazing evening, immediately after the concert I took the other percussionists out for a drink, because independent of the continent you’re from (like Steve Reich’s percussion music) that’s just what you do.
The party area of the city is Barranco. I hadn’t been there yet. Two weeks of concerts and parties and I never made it out past midnight. It’s half my fault and half the fault of the fact that it’s a little dangerous for me to be taking cabs home after midnight by myself and is also incredibly hard to stay awake that late at night when you can’t sleep well in the muggy pollution and spend the entire day exhausted. But finally I made it to Barranco, specifically to a restaurant that specialized in Anticuchos – generally the grilled organs of cows, but sometimes a restaurant throws some chicken on their anticucho menu to branch out a little. Take that, Montreal snout-to-tail movement. This restaurant was a three-floor anticucho castle, with glass walls and open windows – a sprawling, quasi-open-air terrasse.
The meat was cheap (organs generally are) and plentiful, and there was enough salt in the aji amarillo and rocoto chili pepper pastes to help get the animal past your gullet. No, that’s not fair to say, since the meat is marinated for a long time in a whole lot of garlic and oil (and more salt). The order of grilled chicken is basically an entire flattened double chicken breast served with soft baked potatoes and the huge halves of Peruvian white corn that are everywhere here. No sweet yellow baby corn in these parts.
Green vegetables and salads are generally avoided, except maybe cooked salads, since you shouldn’t drink the water here and washing all those vegetables would be a big waste of a valuable commodity. Besides, why would you want lettuce when you can have cow? There’s a reason a lot of Limenos are not quite supermodel-thin. It’s refreshing, but also a little worrisome, especially whn you look up a recipe for tamalitos and see that it calls for half a pound of bacon or pork fat, and the vegetarian version “lightens it up” with the equivalent weight of vegetable oil (by the way, they make their own olive oil here, and it’s delicious. At two organic markets I’ve tried some really interesting kinds of fresh and dried olives in oil and been blown away).
So after the restaurant I got a mini tour of Barranco, which is where you pay 20 soles (about $7) for a fancy cocktail, I got a mini-tour of Barranco. That’s the equivalent of a $15 cocktail or wine bar in North America, but you feel bad spending that kind of money here (at least I do) on a drink when that can buy you two 3-course lunches. There’s a bridge called the Bajada de los Baños that overlooks a path leading to the beach. On both sides are levels of dance clubs, bars, lounges, and restaurants. It’s a perfect picture spot, and my friends started telling me the story of a woman and the bridge. There was something about love, and something about the name of woman being the name of the bridge, but somehow, though I asked twice, I couldn’t get the story out of my friend. So I googled it, because that’s how you learn things these days it seems. It’s a nicer story than the one about the bridge in Miraflores that’s known for its suicides (it’s next to the “Park of Love” so the story goes that you fall in love in the Park of Love and commit suicide at the bridge next to it when your heart gets broken).
The Barranco Bridge story goes like this…
There is a beautiful walkway to the sea that runs through Barranco, called the Bajada de los Baños. Crossing over this walkway is the Puente de los Suspiros, or Bridge of Sighs. A wealthy man’s daughter who lived in the area fell in love with a lowly street sweeper. Her father didn’t let her be with him, of course, and so she lived out her days as a spinster, waiting at her window for a glimpse of her beloved sweeping the street below. They say you can hear her sighs as you walk across the bridge even to this day.
I didn’t hear any sighs. Only dance music, unfortunately. But maybe that means she found someone else and the only sigh you’ll hear on the Puente de los Sospiros is the wind moving through the morning air, once the fancy bohemians have finally gone to bed.
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