Carnaval

Today is carnaval down here. This means that I'm more or less trapped in the hostel, as I'm not too keen on getting soaked in the countrywide water-fight that breaks out today. I've been watching these little girls (maybe 10 years old) all day standing on the roof of the house across the street, dumping buckets of water on unsuspecting passers-by.

Dodged a couple of water balloons earler, though I've (fortunately) so far avoided the attention of the roving bands of university students with buckets that (occasionally) are broken up by the police.

All of the gringo cafés are closed today, so I'm not able to get by Belgian Waffles and carafe of french-press coffee at the "California Café." I can't complain about the food in Carhuaz--generally, I've had it pretty good over the last week or so--but I can't pass up a chance at waffles, and although the coffee here is great, they never give you enough of it (enormous, Starbucks-sized cups haven't caught on here yet).

Hopefully, tomorrow.

In other news, I finally got the registration for my copy of Stat/Transfer for Mac. This has been an onging saga for a couple of weeks, but the end result is that I've spent the day at the Peruvian INEI (National Institute of Information and Statistics) web site. The data store, as they say, is open. It's totally amazing what they've got here. Although it's weird that they seem to use SPSS, and none of their files are available in .txt or .csv format. But they have household surveys of, among other things, poverty, education, political participation, services, ninja skills... You get the idea. Forget a dissertation. One could make a career out of doing data analysis on this stuff.

I suppose they must have a reliable place where they can buy bootleg copies of SPSS. I'll have to track it down next time I'm in Lima.