An American in Lima

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 [...]

[Read more →]

Lola, coiffed and perfumed (actually, smelling like someone’s abuela)

A perk to living in Lima is that you can have your hair cut and styled for ridiculously low prices. A salon down the street from us charges S/.20 to do a full blowout, for any length hair. That’s less than US$7 for something that stylists in the [...]

[Read more →]

An ear of fresh Peruvian choclo

I’ve been doing a lot of thinking this week about obesity in the United States vs. weight and nutrition in Peru.  We’re currently exploring these topics in the conversation class I teach at UPC (see class blog, here), but really, they’ve been on my mind since I moved to Peru from Florida in July [...]

[Read more →]

I’ve been neglecting this blog lately as a result of work overload — preparing to teach a writing class at UPC, which entails putting together loads of English-language course materials. Last night I got only three hours of sleep, then staggered into a meeting with El Hijo’s teachers at school, where I received a wonderful [...]

[Read more →]

I get emails from time to time from people abroad who want to know about resettling in Peru.
Is the job market in Peru good, they want to know?  (Tough for a foreigner, unless you’re okay with teaching English at $5/hour.) Can an American buy property in Lima? (Yes.) Is it true that if you put $20,000 in [...]

[Read more →]

Skimming through Expat Women today, I learned that a new citizenship law about to go into effect in Canada will make some Canadian children born abroad ineligible for Canadian citizenship.
Expat Women writes:
Hi Everyone, If you are a Canadian, especially if you are an adult TCK or you have children who one day will be adult [...]

[Read more →]

El Fotógrafo has an erratic relationship with his hair. He goes for weeks without doing much of anything to it, letting it sprout in extravagent clumps, and then one day, he will be struck by a severe urge to cut his hair Now.
This can be hazardous because EF has a cowlick. It’s not something a person can [...]

[Read more →]

From time to time, I like to check in with the blogs of U.S. Peace Corps volunteers working in Peru. The volunteers are mainly young, single people who are both idealistic and pragmatic, and their blogs provide fascinating glimpses into volunteer life in the provinces.
The blogs also are useful roadmaps for armchair adventurers who daydream about “someday” making a [...]

[Read more →]

The slow-motion collapse of the U.S. economy is harming consumers and businesses across the country – well, almost every business that is.
One industry is enjoying big sales gains thanks to the stress experienced by ordinary working people. North American sales of “savory snacks” (potato chips, Cheetos, etc.) by Frito-Lay are up 9% for the third qurater, reports Potato [...]

[Read more →]

Who is Peruvian? Who is Andean?
 
Can a Peruvian dancer who’s made a new life in New York City return after 15 years to her remote hometown in the Andes to reclaim her heritage?
Can a young American of mixed Peruvian and Puerto Rican heritage find her “inner Andina” (as I like to call it) by studying folkloric dance techniques in towns throughout [...]

[Read more →]

Crowds at LAX, photo by Philip

Figures from Peru’s National Statistics Institute (INEI) show that increasing numbers of former expatriate Peruvians are returning to live again in Peru.
The immigration numbers from August 2008 alone show a signficant rise in Peruvians choosing to repatriate. About 12.7% more Peruvians (180,000 people) left other countries to return to Peru in [...]

[Read more →]

 
By Barbara R. Drake
On Sunday I posted Part I of “Should Americans Consider Moving to Peru?” (click here for link).
I floated the idea, proposed to me by a Scandinavian expat who’s lived in the United States as well, that because Peru and the United States are so dissimilar, it’s difficult to evaluate which country’s lifestyle [...]

[Read more →]

Today my opinion piece “Escaping the U.S. Credit Nightmare” appears in the Sunday Miami Herald, Money section (10/12/08).
The teaser reads: “An American who now lives in Peru finds that she no longer must fend off unwanted offers for credit cards and loans,” which highlights one of the unanticipated benefits I gained from our move to [...]

[Read more →]

Note to readers: My opinion piece “Escaping the American Credit Nightmare” appears in the Sunday (Oct. 12, 2008)  edition of the Miami Herald, in the “My View” column of the business section. Here’s my original piece below — Barbara Drake: 
One of the pleasures of moving to Peru last July (2007) was escaping the flurry of credit [...]

[Read more →]