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How to Prepare for an Earthquake in a Third World Country
The devastating 8.8-magnitude earthquake that ravaged Chile on Saturday could easily have happened here in Lima or anywhere else along the Pacific coast. Sooner or later another big one will hit Peru, as one did in July 2007, and there are only a few ways to increase your odds that you won’t get killed when it happens. Living in a well-constructed, “earthquake-proof” home is the best way to protect yourself. I put quotation marks around that phrase because no structure is guaranteed to withstand the most violent earthquakes. Still, as engineer Andy Johnson notes, a well engineered building should hold up long enough for the people inside to escape before it…
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Writing on Bullfighting for HuffPo
I’ve been away from An American in Lima for a little while (understatement) but thanks to my friend Levi Novey, aka Mr Green HuffPost, I’m getting a bigtime nudge to return to blogging. Which I do love doing, by the way. Levi let me hijack his column today to guest rant about bullfighting (The Twisted Temptations of Bullfighting in Peru). It’s a confession about the thing I experienced at Acho that I never wrote about before. Call it my testosterone moment in the bullring. The column includes nice photos by El Fotografo, by the way. I only went to the bullfights twice in Lima but I still think about what…