Archive for August, 2006
The Lima-based newspaper Peru21 has recently compiled a list of the 21 most successful Peruvians worldwide, from artists and intellectuals to sportspeople, businesspeople and politicians.
The list includes the renowned chef and businessman Gastón Acurio, owner of such successful restaurants as Astrid & Gaston, La Mar, and Hnos Pasquale; the Añaños brothers, owners of an amazing soft drinks company which has already conquered the competitive Mexican market; the great singer and composer Susana Baca; the graceful dancer Vania Masías; the former World Surfing Champion Sofía Mulanovich; Claudio Pizarro and Jefferson Farfán, successful strikers playing in Bayern Munchen and PSV Eindhoven, respectively; novelists Santiago Roncagliolo, Alfredo Bryce Echenique, and Mario Vargas Llosa; tenor Juan Diego Flórez; and economist Hernando De Soto, among others.
A special mention must be spend for the superb Etiqueta Negra magazine, a sort of Latin American New Yorker which continues to surprise -for its quality, design, and diversity- critics and readers all over the world. The magazine, directed and created by journalist Julio Villanueva Chang, received last march a much favourable review by the San Francisco Chronicle.
August 30th, 2006
After launching the Quechua versions of Windows and Office near Cusco in June 2006, Microsoft continues with the deployment of its Inca-speaking packages. An article appeared in SFGate.com by Associated Press writer Dan Keane (Friday, August 25), reports on the Bolivia roll-out of MS’s best selling packages.
The Quechua versions of Windows and Office were first launched during a ceremony held at the Andean city of Pisaq (department of Cusco), at more that 3,000 m.a.s.l. The ceremony was attended by Eliane Karp de Toledo (Peru’s First Lady at the time), who commented that the project would take a huge step in reverting the native’s social and technological exclusion, opening for them the doors to the 21st century.The Quechua-patch is available for download online for free. Once installed, it translates the Microsoft commands and menus into the Inca language. According to Dan Keane’s article, “Microsoft teamed up with several universities in Peru’s Quechua-speaking south to create the translation program”. This Quechua edition of Microsoft programs adds up to other versions in far from widespread languages, such as Maori and Zulu.
The project, says Keane, in spite of the fact that few of South America’s estimated 10 million Quechua speakers have regular access to a computer, has already produced dividends, as the company “recently won a contract from the Peruvian government for 5,000 Quechua-equipped computers.”Quechua, the language of the Incas and -together with Spanish- one of Peru’s official languages, is spoken by some 3 million people, mostly in the poor Southern Andes highlands. Throughout South America, however, it’s today spoken, in various dialects, by some 10 million people, including Peru and Bolivia, southern Colombia and Ecuador, north-western Argentina and northern Chile. It is the most widely spoken of all American Indian languages.
Quechua is a very regular agglutinative language, with a normal sentence order of SOV (subject-object-verb). Its large number of infixes and suffixes change both the overall significance of words and their subtle shades of meaning, allowing great expressiveness (Source: Wikipedia).
August 27th, 2006
An Associated Press article by Joan Cirillo appeared today on journalnow.com, titled Peruvian food is exploding onto the culinary scene. The article opens with the story of Andina, a sophisticated New Andean Peruvian restaurant opened in Portland three years ago.
“The year after it opened -writes Cirillo-, Gourmet magazine wrote: A rare Peruvian gem filled with folk art and weavings, this is unique on the West Coast. Last year, The Oregonian, the state’s largest newspaper, named it restaurant of the year.”
According to Cirillo, the success of Andina, owned by Doris Rodriguez, “reflects the burgeoning interest in the foodways” of Peru.
August 9th, 2006
PromPerú, Peru’s commission for tourist promotion, has recently launched a beautiful Birdwatching website. Its aim is to celebrate the amazing variety and richness of bird-life, and the surprising collection of endemic birds of Peru.
August 5th, 2006
Lima’s Chamber Music Festival arrives, against all odds, to its sixth edition, and celebrates it with a rich and majestic program that commemorates the 250th anniversary of the birth of Wolfang Amadeus Mozart.
Director of the festival, organized by ICPNA (Peruvian North American Cultural Institute), is renowned violinist Carlos Costa. The program elaborated by Costa is -most obviously- an homage to the great Austrian composer. Alexis Sykes, violinist of the prestigious Juilliard Music School of New York, will be the highest star in the festival. Other interesting names are Lazslo Benedek, María Foust, Annika Petrozzi, and Sasha Ferreira.
Auditorium ICPNA Miraflores (Av. Angamos Oeste 160, Miraflores). From August 21st to 25th, 7.30 pm. Free Entrance. More information on ICPNA website.
August 3rd, 2006
