I told her it was and that I was going there next month. It was an impossible thing to do without sounding like an asshole.
"Fuck you, no you're not," was her reply. She is my favorite co-worker.
Last summer, Jaime and I had settled on China when discussing our spring break trip. He has a colleague who'd invited us to stay with her in Shanghai, and I really have a thing for the Terracotta Army and being the average height of the population.
But then his parents' friend in New Zealand reminded us that her door in Auckland is always open, and we switched gears to planning a trip there motivated mostly by the accents.
I don't remember what piqued Jaime's interest in Peru, but we decided it was a more affordable trip even if we didn't know anyone there, and we had to make the hike to Machu Picchu while he was still in good enough shape to carry me when I gave up prematurely.
When Whakaari erupted in December, we felt sort of like we'd dodged a bullet in New Zealand.
When the news coming out of China started, we felt VERY lucky we hadn't planned a trip there.
When the world started burning, we were upset that we might lose some deposits.
I also wondered how I was going to break the news to a bunch of 13 year-olds who don't give a shit that I am not going to a place that mildly captured their imaginations when we were studying the Inca. How, reader? How?
Peru's on hold for now. But if Machu Picchu and the Nazca Lines can survive the end of a civilization brought on by the cruelest forms of human greed and the rampant spread of a virus, I think they'll still be there at the end of all of this.
It took me a while to convince her, but she finally slid the book over and told me to read up for our trip. I promised to send her some video lessons I'd planned to record, so she could share them with her class.
But she was right. I am, in fact, "fucked", and no, I "am not".
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