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A Puppy Named Arena
Last month a Weimaraner named La Bruja gave birth to six puppies including Arena (“sand”), above. La Bruja belongs to one of El Fotógrafo’s cousins who lives in Jesus María. We had heard that La Bruja was embarazada but we weren’t keeping track of the due date or even thinking ‘puppies on the way.’ This past Sunday we went to a family almuerzo, and one of the kids brought this little velvet-furred creature in a cardboard box. I was kind of floored. The puppy has a wrinkled old-man face and a fat panza and a tail like that of a chubby rat. Who knew Weimaraner puppies were so tragically cute?
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Day at the Spa
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 United States charge $50 and up. If they’ll do it at all. (I used to go to a salon in Florida whose owner refused to straighten my long, thick hair, claiming the effort aggravated her carpel tunnel syndrome.) Ditto prices for dog grooming. Lola went to the dog spa today. They bathed her, cut her nails and put a ribbon on her and then drove…
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The Sport of Dog Poisoning in Peru
I wish I never had to write this post, but since my Labrador nearly died from ingesting poison in a Lima park this week, I must share what I’ve learned to alert other pet owners. A surprising number of people in Peru like to kill dogs and cats with veneno(poison). Municipalities such as Barranco and Miraflores use highly toxic insecticides in public gardens that routinely poison pets. And poisoning a dog or cat is not a crime in Peru. El Fotografo and El Hijo took Lola to Leoncio Prado park, in Miraflores, to play fetch on Wednesday. They had her running after the ball, something she never tires of, for more…
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Cemetery Dog, Buried City of Yungay, Peru
Dog at Yungay National Cemetery; Mount Huascaran in background (photo by Barbara Drake 2009) Last Sunday, El Fotógrafo, El Híjo and I toured the cemetery above the buried town of Yungay, about 30 miles north of Huaraz. We were with a group of scientists and historians taking part in a glacier adaptation conference, and there couldn’t have been a more stark reminder of nature’s destructive potential than to wander about this picturesque yet oppressive site — a place where nearly 20,000 souls perished in minutes from a massive avalanche that trapped them in mud, ice and rocks on May 31, 1970. Stuart of En Peru explains the catastrophe vividly. We stood on the uppermost tier of…
