A day in the life

Hello friends,

I'm not sure that I can say that any day here is what I'd call 'normal' in my usual life, but I thought I'd tell you about a 'normal' day for me here in Moquegua.

I generally sleep until 7:30 or so, then shower and get ready to head out by about 8 or so. I have a good breakfast at my favorite place (I told you about the avocado and cheese and bread breakfast, right? It's lovely. I alternate between that and scrambled eggs with bread. Both meals come with coffee (Nescafe) and freshly pressed papaya juice, and the egg meal has yogurt too.) From there, I head to the museum lab by about 9am, and work there until 1ish, when I break for lunch.

The museum has collections on three levels, and in various rooms. It's a bit of a challenge to figure out where to look for which box. Space is at a premium, so many of the isles between shelving units don't have enough space for my shoulders if I stand perpendicular to the shelves. That makes pulling boxes in and out an interesting logistical problem. There's no Container Store here, so when it was discovered that whisky boxes could be purchased in Tacna in bulk, the shelves were designed to their proportions, and to walk the collections would make you think that there was a whole LOT of drinking going on by those archaeologists (even archaeologists can't drink THAT much). The shelves are high too, so there's a trick to finding a chair that actually fits between the shelves so that I can climb up and down. Once I find my boxes, I have a table to spread everything out on to examine it. It's not a huge table - only about a card-table sized space in the middle of a long stretch of other tables. The small size makes it interesting when I'm trying to lay out a full sized skeleton, but it works pretty well for mummy bundles - they are generally seated with their knees drawn up tight, so they don't take a lot of room. The other tables are occupied by other folks doing research, and we usually have a good soundtrack of contraband CDs going - Bob Marley, Cat Stevens, and Cold Play get a lot of air time.

Lunch varies day to day. It's the big meal of the day here, so assuming I'm in the lab all day, I'll often go to a restaurant and have a big plate of chicharones (mixed fried seafood) or chaufa (Peruvian Chinese food) or something. Whatever you order here comes with fried potatoes and white rice. These folks have never heard of the Atkins diet.

After lunch, it's back to the lab, where I generally work until 8pm or so. Then I find some dinner, maybe stop at the internet place and the phone place, and head back to my hotel.

About internet places and phone places...it seems that almost nobody does these things from home. Internet places are everywhere - each featuring several little cubbies with computers. They charge for time, but the rates are cheap. I'm currently paying about 35 cents per hour. Not bad. Phone places are similar - they build several little phone booths inside a storefront and you go there to make any sort of long distance call. The nicer ones have a wooden bench to sit on and a little desktop with the phone on it and a little box on the wall which tells you how long you've been talking and what it will cost you.

My new hotel is much better for me than the old one. It has a garden and I wake up to actual sunlight coming through the high windows. There were more angles involved in building the room than the carpenters could manage - some of the window frames follow the slant of the roof rather than the plane of the floor - but everything seems to open and close properly and it's cozy enough to call home for another week or so.

I'm excited today because I sent my clothes out to be washed. Hopefully I'll come home to actual clean clothes! After a few weeks of working with dusty boxes full of things that came out of the dirt (and still carry a good bit of dirt with them) and also traipsing around at some local archaeological sites (I owe you stories), everything I have was filthy. But (hopefully) it will all be clean now. Yippee!

On that happy note, I'll say good night.

Good night!

Karen