I often wax gloaty (what, I can say that) about the amazingness of the view from my apartment. Since living in Chile I’ve lived in four apartments, two of them with views stunning enough to take picture after picture and post them hither and yon. I’ve made a whole twitterstream of tweeters jealousish of my spectacular mountains, falling-down buildings and other assorted pretty. What? you don’t follow me on twitter? Must rectify. I’m @bearshapedspher (someone ate the last e).

Anyway, while I was in Arequipa, while I was not saluting gallardo (write that down, it’s the same as praying to the porcelain gods), nor taking my mother to the clinic, I was wandering around, and thinking about the mountains. They’re so massive, so present. You can’t get lost with them always to your side, and you can know the temperature just by looking at the snowline. Misti, for example, was snow-free, indicating summery weather, or as summery as you get that high above sea level. (That’s the mountain and photo of a photo in the last post).

Luckily, I’ve got some contacts in Arequipa, and they live at more nosebleedy altitude than the city itself, and we taxied up, past streets and then fields and then streets again. And we played games and ate “lentejas” which are like Smarties, which are like M and Ms, and then we went up on the roof.

First of all, in Arequipa, we keep our giant, 80 plus-pound dogs on the roof. Such that when the gringa comes and plays with them, the woman of the house asks her husband to please make sure everyone is ok. Everyone was fine, just playing with a very large dog who I got along famously with. I did not bite him, and he did not bite me. See? I do like dogs.

And then there’s the view.

And more view:

And then the sun went down:

And I had to concede that that view rivals mine, though it pained me to say so. And that we don’t get chocolate lentejas in Chile, and that’s sad, too. And then we took a taxi back from the main strip and said goodbye to all the houses with rebar hanging out and additions being built and back to the cobblestoned downtown where dogs don’t live on the roof.