Building My Building Pt. 1 - Two Steel Hands On My Wooden Woman

The decision to build a home on the roof was an easy one, made in between meals when I'm at my most confident. Just a little wood, a little roof, and I've got a little home for my humble, little life. I drew up plans - more for show, so I thought - and though I'm not trained as an architect or an engineer, I figured my experience living in buildings was experience enough for this.

Turns out, there is something to be said for professional knowledge.

My design - unlike Jeff's ashen tower - is much less grandiose but much more complicated. I wanted a futuristic Japanese tea house with a black facade, all made from a combination of wood, plastic, and metal. Problems arose immediately on my first trip to Maestro Ace Home Center, the Peruvian Home Depot equivalent. Wood in Peru has to be imported from Brazil (so that's where the rain forest goes...) and is much more expensive than in the States. Many items, like various cuts of lumber and sizes of metal, simply don't exist. Some sizes of screws are missing, just for fun.
I should take a moment to describe the reason for these buildings in the first place. Our house has three bedrooms, though the double is enormous. Jeff and I are, apparently, bold enough to take advantage of Lima's constant dry weather, relative cheapness of materials, and lack of responsibility. Once we move onto our roof terrace, Alex will slide into Jeff's old single, and our old double will become the new office. Our current office, in the adjoining room, will be given over to classes, our fancy new digital projector, and a nice couch. Wonderful!
Anyway, here's a general list of my problems, each one representing a day's worth of worrying and anger:

No power tools except a drill with a broken chuck.
No screws longer than 1 1/2 inches
No wooden slats longer than 7 feet
No metal flanges
No angle iron
Mis-hewn lumber
Poorly fit pipes
No black paint

I won't deny my culpability in my design's resulting problems. While I stick by my plan, in retrospect, I couldn't manage the hundreds of small and large changes I was making on the fly at the hardware store as my carefully written parts lists were smashed by the hard realities of Peruvian DIY.
Leading up to all of this, I had been making plastic panels, over a hundred of them, out of plastic bags heated with an iron. Though time consuming, the panels are superb things, slightly opaque, and unique like little melted plastic snowflakes. Plus, I didn't burn myself with the iron; my memories are dull but pleasant ones. Stapled to wood slats and connected to aluminum tubes, they made beautiful walls.
The facade, which should have been rather straight forward, almost doomed the whole project. First, the lack of long screws meant I tried to get buy nailing everything together; this worked, briefly. But when Alex and I tilted the half-finished construction upright, it almost collapsed from its own weight. Apparently, you can't nail 2x2s to plywood and expect a reliable 3-d structure. I felt a little like Wile E. Coyote, and it was back to the drawing board.
Four 6x1 planks later, all was well, though my plans had been further altered. You could say architects shouldn't compromise their vision, but I'll trade vision for mechanical stability. From there, it was only a matter of putting up the walls, measuring out fifty nails, and zip-tying the roof to the frame. More to come...

Like our new cat, Renata Comandante Espinosa de la Huaca Catface Mittens.

The Chincha Itch

[I wrote this a few weeks ago, but forgot to post. I don't have any pictures, so I've included day-to-day scenes. - ed.]

Halloween limped into Lima, spoiling a good holiday for another year. Last year, I remember sulking in a dark coat on the dance floor off Crown Street with an increasingly frustrated girlfriend, watching hungry-eyed seniors look down blouses and past four years of faults. It was the beginning of devilish days in the New Haven chill.

...

"Go on, try it."
In a foreign country, this is an especially dangerous phrase. Alex White, Diego, and I have crossed to the other side of Miraflores to attend a Canadian Halloween party hosted by someone we don't know and may not have met. It's apparently a costume party. I'm in a t-shirt and jeans, so Alex and I head straight to the impromptu bar stuffed with Johnny Walker Red, the standard Peruvian party gift. One bottle catches our eye: it's bigger than a wine bottle, and has the acronym "S.V.S.S." as its only label.

A madman dressed a monk sees us feeling up his bottle and dares us to drink it.
"You know what this means?" We shake our heads. "'Siete Veces Sin Sacarla!" Haha! It's from la selva. Go on, try it."

Some may say I'm adventurous for being in Peru, and I may agree with them. But nothing will convince me to try the unlabeled Peruvian aphrodisiac jungle hooch "Seven Times Without Taking It Out." Alex, already walking with Johnny, took a swig. Results: Inconclusive...

...

Jeffrey Warren was missing, lost on a week-long romance with America and the romantic Americans. Diego, Alex, and I celebrated by rocking the hardest early 90s pop we could find on the office stereo, defiling this hallow jazz space with power chords. The masses were happy.

The center of Afro-Peruvian culture, Chincha is a one-caballo town three hours of south of Lima; a dry dirty place tucked between the ocean and vast tropical deserts. The town itself isn't worth visiting unless you enjoy unpaved roads, litter, and unstopping glare. Beyond all this, tucked on back roads in the vineyards past the highway, is the true sight: dozens of massive haciendas, remnants of faded colonial glory reborn as lavish get-aways for Limenos in the know.

Diego, Alex, two Canadian girls, and I took four uncomfortable hours to get to Chincha (and beyond...) at 11pm on Halloween. The six of us are jammed in a taxi flying down more dirt roads looking for an obscure estate, a sprawling complex hosting an all-night party produced by one of Diego's friends. In exchange for the graphic design work on the invitations, Diego has gotten us all free tickets. For free, it's hard to argue.

Thirty dirty minutes later, we step out of the cab in the middle of nowhere; no lights, no sign, just a high white-washed wall and a gate. A bouncer checks out wristband, and we step through to the other side, a long walkway of similar white walls, with no real end. The architecture is somewhere between sugar plantation and cocaine baron, which was probably the point. And then, around the corner, the first sounds of music and the first chandeliers, wagon wheels and sconces; a chess-board arcade. The home opens up before us with dim lights and rich wood, spilling forth into an inner-courtyard several hundred feet on each side.

The dancefloor is empty, but the sounds of the cajon bring the first pioneering group of girls out. One of Diego's friends explains that the men wait, not to drink up the courage, but because the specific dance is so complex, only the most foolhardy would try to attempt it. Upon further review, I'm not sure these two things are necessarily different.

Nine hours later I'm sitting on the main street of Chincha, my eyes squinting in the rising daylight. A mototaxi goes by, and then another. I'm down to my last sol, and the only breakfast I can afford is a chicken soup at a cheap and dirty luncheonette. Someone finds a spider in the broth, and we stack the bones in the center to be reused throughout the day. We catch the first bus out of town, and I stay awake the whole three hours back, three hours on the Panamerican between the lonely ocean and the endless desert.