Small-town life

I'm no stranger to small-town life - at home on MI, a trip to the grocery store pretty much guarantees you'll see someone you know. However, Cajabamba is a town with less than half that population, so the small-town feeling is much more noticeably present. Even I, the new-in-town gringa who doesn't know that many people (relative to those who've spent their lives here), cannot leave my house without running into some acquaintance. And, since this is Peru, every friend I encounter means a pleasant little saludo, some niceties, and a talk about what we're up to.

Sometimes this guaranteed run-in is extremely useful, such as when I happen to find a socio that never answers his phone strolling towards me in the plaza - score! Other times it's less fortunate, mostly as it concerns my running habits. I have seen exactly one other person running in Cajabamba, ever. This means that not only am I the (almost) only gringa in town, but I am also the (almost) only crazy person that goes running. And as route options are, to put it kindly, limited, all the shop owners along the main entrance road to town see me run by pretty much every day. It has now happened multiple times that someone I meet for the first time has said, "oh, I've seen you running!" Since me running at 8,700+ feet of altitude closely resembles a person dying a slow, sweaty death, this is not a comment I am pleased to hear. But alas, such is small-town life.

Small-town living also means that I usually say buenos días even to people I don't know. It's just the polite and normal thing to do. In the town center, where there's more people around, sometimes the stranger-greeting isn't necessary - you learn to read people's faces to see whether or not they're expecting a "buenas" from you as you approach each other on the sidewalk. But in the campo, I greet 100% of passersby - if you're the only two people in sight on a dirt road, it'd be quite rude to pretend you don't see them.

What prompted this blog entry though is the thing that really made me notice the difference between living in Cajabamba and living in say, Washington, DC. Here, when I walk around I look at people's faces. In DC, I'd be scoping out buildings, storefronts, and random people with some characteristic of interest - only occasionally faces. Why? Because when you walk around a big city, it's unlikely you're going to run into someone you know, so you don't always have to pay attention to who's walking towards you. When I first arrived in Cajabamba, my bigger-city habits in this respect got me into a couple embarrassing/amusing situations where I should have seen an acquaintance coming, but was busy looking at the juice shop. So I've learned to be a little more present when I'm out and about, and I keep my eye out for all the potential conversations and "buenas tardes" coming my way.