Ohiodave

Wednesday, February 11, 2009

Pisco, Paracas, and the Ballestas Islands

This post is based on a journal entry originally recorded on May 25, 2008.

I stumbled downstairs at 3:00 AM and into the empty dining room. A minute later a waiter stepped in and asked if I wanted toast. I stared black off into space as I ate, sipping strong coffee with milk and trying to wake up. Jiri and Alena came down a few minutes later, looking bleary eyed. Jiri gave me a gruff good morning. I went upstairs to brush my teeth, and when I came back down the whole group was waiting. At 3:30 a van pulled up; we loaded our bags and climbed in.

Lima’s streets were deserted at such an early hour. We drove through the southern suburbs and headed south on the Panamerican Highway. Night gave way to a hazy blue morning, enveloped in thick fog. Most of the time we were just up the hill from the ocean, but the fog was so thick we could rarely see the water. The landscape was stark and sandy, dunes scattered with mounds of pebbles, rocks, and garbage.

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Wednesday, February 04, 2009

Lima, Peru (Part III)

This post is based on a journal entry originally recorded on May 24, 2008.

Inside the Church of San Francisco, I bought a ticket and waited around in a lobby with wooden benches for my guide. The English-language group had just left and wouldn’t be back around for a while, so I joined the Spanish tour.

Our guide was Julia, a thin, serious-looking woman with enormous bushy eyebrows. She had the brisk demeanor of a lawyer. Julia marched us from room to room in the monastery, pausing occasionally to announce, “Ahora apreciamos…” (Now we will appreciate…”). We saw paintings of all shapes, sizes, and styles, beautifully carved wooden altars, and intricate Spanish tiles called azulejos (“Brought from Seville,” said Julia).

In the monastery’s library we saw prayer books big enough for an entire room of monks to read from them at once. Finally we made our way down to the catacombs, but I found the atmosphere there disappointingly neat and tidy. Sure, there were bones, but they were all hygienically disassembled and put away. There were no armored conquistador skeletons moldering in niches or macabre Inca burial displays. Instead, the bones were sorted by type and stacked neatly in square holes. The whole thing looked more like a well-run timber warehouse than a charnel pit. The one truly impressive sight in the catacombs was a thirty-foot deep well filled with bones arranged in a spiral pattern. But of course they didn’t let me take pictures of that.

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Tuesday, February 03, 2009

Lima, Peru (Part II)

This post is based on a journal entry originally recorded on May 24, 2008.

On my first moning in Lima I slept very late. It was almost noon by the time I took a shower and went downstairs to see about a taxi.

“Where can I find a cambio (money exchange)?”, I asked the front desk girl.

“Just a minute,” she told me, and shortly thereafter a small man wearing a bright orange vest walked in. The desk girl explained to me that this man was a roving cambista and would give me a better rate than the bank or a casa de cambio. I gave the man a handful of 20-dollar bills and he counted off a roll of worn soles. I thanked him and he disappeared out the front door as quickly as he had come.

“You should never do that on the street,” the desk clerk cautioned me. “We only deal with that man because we know him.”

The bellboy hailed me a cab. The driver’s name was Charlie, and he greeted me by blasting a “New Kids on the Block” tape.
“This is from the 90’s!” he said.
“I know, I remember it being on the radio when I was a kid.”
“How old are you?” He asked me.
“Twenty-four,” I said. He stopped the tape and put in some 80’s music instead. I think it might have been INXS.

We got on the freeway.
“This is called the freeway!” Charlie announced, pointing at a sign indicating, “Via Libre”. I nodded.
Charlie’s driver’s seat was surrounded by a wire cage. His windows were down and he was driving at 60 or 70 miles an hour, so half of his words were drowned out by the roar of traffic. He asked me lots of questions, and I nodded a lot.
Charlie asked me what life was like in the United States. I never know how to answer this question. How do you sum up an entire life’s experiences in a couple of sentences, especially from the back seat of a taxi going 70 down the Via Libre?

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Monday, February 02, 2009

Lima, Peru (Part I)

This post is based on a journal entry originally recorded on May 24, 2008.

On the plane from Fort Lauderdale, most of my fellow travellers seemed to be Peruvian (or at least not American). I sat next to José, a friendly accountant who looked like a young Hugo Chávez, and his pretty daughter María. María was upset because a snippy male flight attendant made her check her bag. They both spoke excellent English, but they allowed me to answer them in my rusty Spanish.

It was a long flight, and I slept fitfully. We landed early in the morning and I waded through a crush of tour drivers, taxi touts, and assorted other people with signs. I waved away shouts of, “Taxi! Amigo, taxi?” until I found Walter, a tall man with grey hair and thick-rimmed hipster glasses. He held a sign with my name on it, and the name of “Greenberg, Eric”.

I introduced myself and we chatted a bit while we waited for Eric Greenberg. Nearly an hour passed and he didn’t come. The arrival lounge emptied out and employees began roping off and cleaning areas of the floor. After verifying that there was no one stuck in customs and paging him repeatedly, Walter finally decided Eric Greenberg wasn’t coming.

We left the airport and got into a small white van. As we drove through Lima’s suburbs, Walter named each one for me. Callao, where the airport was; San Miguel, home of brightly-lit casinos and “Pollo a la Brasa” restaurants; Pueblo Libre, a slum; San Isidro, a residential neighborhood; and finally Miraflores.

On the way there we talked food. Walter laughed when I told him most Americans would never eat cuy (guinea pig). He told me about the native food ceremony called a Pachamanca. I told him that Peruvian food was gaining a reputation in the United States, and that the restaurant T.G.I. Friday’s had just introduced a new menu item called “Peruvian Pollo y Papas”. As I was trying to explain the meaning of “Thank God It’s Friday”, we turned a corner. Walter smiled wryly and pointed out the giant neon sign a T.G.I. Friday’s. I laughed, but I was more than a little appalled.

It was 4:00 AM when we pulled up to the Hotel Carmel. I was dirty and tired after many hours of travel. For the first time in 25 hours I slept lying down.

Full set: http://www.flickr.com/photos/daverodriguez/sets/72157605445867877/

Fort Lauderdale River Cruise

This post is based on a journal entry originally recorded on May 24, 2008.

I almost didn’t make it to Peru.

10:00 at night, on the way to the airport Ramada, Michelle was reading off a last-minute inventory of things I need. “Clothes? Check. Money? Check. Passport? Hmm… Umm… Shit.” Did I pack it or not? We pulled in to the hotel and I ransacked my bags. Not in my backpack. Not in my daypack. Michelle looked very grave. She assured me in her loving way that if we had to drive an hour back to Toledo to get it, we would. That would have put us back at the hotel after midnight, just in time for our 4:00 AM wakeup call.

My work bag was sitting on the back seat. Ordinarily I would have taken it inside before going to the airport. I looked inside, and by some miracle, the passport was there. I don’t remember putting it there, don’t even know why I would have. Maybe the cat put it in. At any rate, I was more relieved than I thought humanly possible.

Twelve hours later, I was in sunny Fort Lauderdale. I stepped out onto the humid air of the curb and a minute later my parents pulled up in their HHR. They looked the same as ever, my dad upbeat in shorts and a t-shirt, my mom looking tired and comfortable and glad to be someplace warm.

We drove north into the city and stopped at a place called Las Olas Riverfront. Las Olas is a two-story open air shopping plaza with restaurants, a small museum, and a boat that tours Fort Lauderdale’s many canals. After a breakfast of pizza, my parents and I sat at picnic tables outside a bar and sip Cokes and catch up. Not a lot happens Later that morning we trooped back upstairs and went to see “Bodies”, an exhibition of brightly-colored rubbery corpses in a variety of inappropriate poses. I have now seen what a skinless body looks like when playing basketball, and I can confidently report that a preserved body, sliced very thin, looks an awful lot like pancetta. To cap it all off, they had a complete circulatory system floating in a tank of mineral oil, quietly flaking off little bits of rubbery venous fish food. I was reminded that there’s a reason people have skin.

After our mid-afternoon grossout we got onboard a large boat called the “Riverboat Cruises I” and sat on the upper deck to take a cruise of Fort Lauderdale’s canal system. The so-called “Venice of America”, Fort Lauderdale’s watery back alleys are lined with giant mansions owned by everyone from Leonard Nimoy to the family that brought America Vicks Vapo-rub. We went as far as the dock where cruise ships depart for the Caribbean (sadly, there was no one in port that day except for a single “mega-yacht”), before coming back and eating dinner at an Irish Pub called Briny’s.

I spent several more hours with my parents and then then drove me back to the airport and dropped me off for my overnight flight to South America.

Full set is here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/daverodriguez/sets/72157605439487916/.

Thursday, January 29, 2009

Photowalking in North Toledo

On Saturday, John and I went to shoot pictures for a freelance job and then went up to North Toledo to walk around and take some pictures.

Approximately 15 seconds into the walk, my camera died, so I borrowed John’s Canon 30D. I’ve used this camera before, but this was the first time I had taken it for an entire outing.

The lens John had on the 30D was a 16-35mm wide angle job. I think he may have had other lenses in his bag, but it was extremely cold and I didn’t want to stop and change them out, especially not knowing what the hell I was doing.In hindsight, this particular lens probably wasn’t the best suited to landscape photography. We shot a lot of buildings, and while I was able to get them entirely in frame from only a few feet away, I was surprised by how much barrel distortion I got.

We walked up and down Sylvania Avenue, checked out a couple of thrift stores and antique shops, and then headed to the north end of downtown to photograph squalor.

All in all it was a pretty successful afternoon. I got some more practice with the DSLR, got a little exercise, and capped it off with a trip to White Castle.

Full set is here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/daverodriguez/sets/72157613102131846/

Wednesday, January 21, 2009

My 16 Favorite Photos of 2008

Why 16? Because that’s the smallest number I could whittle it down to.

Each of these photos says something about how my technique improved in 2008, where I still need to improve, or just something cool I did.

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