Objectify This

I was on the red eye to La Paz, Bolivia last night. Perhaps everything was going too well: the previous flight had had free refills and personal tv sets for each passenger and offered me both Before Sunset and I Heart Huckabees in addition to an episode of the Simpsons where Bart and Lisa switch roles of goody two shoes and troublemaker, which I had planned to blog about.

Then things took a turn for the worse. There was turbulance out of a horror movie and our capitan diverted our flight to the tiny airport of Viru Viru in Santa Cruz de la Sierra, Bolivia, where I have been bonding with my fellow passengers for the last ten hours, and at this rate, indefinitely.

On the plus side, though, I just spent most of the night discussing race and gender with three Peruvian risk analysts from Cuzco and Lima.

The highlight was that they were insistant that women are more likely to become professionals in Peru than men are, and that sexual harrassment is a punishable offense, which are definitely minority positions in any mainstream Latino-Catholic culture that I’ve encountered so far.

But their flight was cancelled, so they were released from the airport, while a friendly Canadian high school student and I remain stranded in fluorescent purgatory indefinitely. She doesn’t speak much Spanish, so we’ve just been hanging out in English and laughing at how stupid everything is when you’re tired and get redirected about eight times when looking for a telephone que pueda hacer llamadas internacionales. Ah well, por lo menos intentamos. I’m going to go listen to what the airlines people are saying.