You Ain't Woman Enough To Take My Man

Last night, and for the first time in a long while, we hit the town on a Friday night. A friend of Alex's inexplicably arrived in Peru, so we met him, his friend (a Yalie,) and his friend's boarding school roommate for dinner in Barranco, the poetic crumbling capital of lovers' sighs. Dinner was followed by drinks, and by midnight all seemed lost. You could read it on everyone's face - it was the time of night when most give up and retreat to the constant comfort of a made bed. But Jeff and Alex and I fought on, and when our friends the Irish arrived, all turned for the better. The three Irish women have names, to be sure, but are so completely alien to my English tongue that they remain part of a collective. Anyway, they were drunk.

But, when Irish eyes are smiling, Peruvians play good music. Our bar was a run down brick room that Jeff believed to be a jazz club. It wasn't, but they played American music and seemed, dare I say, legitimately cool. When the DJ switched to Britpop, Alex and I did our best to adjust. (Jeff was so many sheets to the wind it didn't matter.) We failed to remember the chorus to Blur's "Boys and Girls." We didn't know a single word of a Pulp song. I don't know if they played Oasis or not, but it wouldn't be a bad guess.

In a year in Peru, I've seen very few hipsters, if any. Lima is, in many ways, the Omaha of South America, a capital without cultural capital, seemingly two steps behind the times. But after this bar - I don't know - maybe even sleepy foggy Lima is changing.

Also, on the wall was a poster of a couple of river otters frolicking in the Amazon with the caption "Lobos del Rio - Madre de Dios." Alex and I kept turning to each other and - with mock seriousness - literally translating the poster: "River Wolves....Mother of God."Spanish seems to have a unique difficulty describing marine mammals: otters = "river wolves" seals = "ocean wolves." Do they not have otters in Spain?