Today we went to the Star Peru office to try to buy plane tickets for our upcoming SAM Peru conference in Pucallpa. As a general rule, you can't buy anything online in this country. The in-person attempt also failed, but don't despair-- Tim's not out of ideas.

After the Star Peru fiasco, we stuck around Miraflores, the ritziest part of Lima. I've been there a million times but I guess more as a tourist than resident. I never noticed what a bizarre world it really is-- bizarre in the sense that it's a little piece of SouthPark in the middle of a country that mostly lives on $2 a day. Miraflores and Puerto Supe have nothing in common except language, and as I learned today, sometimes even that is a point of difference.

Valet parking at Starbucks. Wow. It makes more sense when you realize that our two drinks today cost the equivalent to a day's labor.

The grocery store had live piano entertainment (think Nordstrom).

Why is it that skin color is so closely related to financial status? At least half of the people I passed were light-skinned enough to leave me wondering what nationality they were. This is never the case in Puerto Supe. The only "white" person other than us and Grace is an albino kid.

As it turned out, there were two kinds of light-skinned (and light-haired) people passing me by, totally indistinguishable to me except when they started talking. Some were foreigners (German, American, Irish). The others were Peruvians who have clearly been maintaining their European bloodlines.

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