Day 33

Leroy here with another adventurous day of the partner -


Today is the day the mysterious vendedor de gas (gas seller) appears for the first time. I am working away on my laptop when Giovanni comes in and rattles off several words in Spanish. I wonder why she continues to speak so much Spanish to a person who obviously understands so little. I scrunch my shoulders and reply, “no entiendo,” so she goes back into the kitchen and brings me a boleta de venta which Ceci showed us when we had our bill-paying lesson—it is the last gas bill.

“What’s going on? Ah, there’s a problem with the gas?” I rattle off, answering my ‘wonder’ question by myself. Giovanni scrunches her shoulders and waves for me to follow. We go back into the kitchen and she shows me the tiny flickering blue flame under a large pot, then she goes back into the office carrying the bill and makes a brief phone call.

I am very interested to see what will happen next because we were told that when the cooking gas runs out, Giovanni can call the vendedor de gas and he’ll be there so fast that her cooking will not even be interrupted. Yeah, right, I think, this is Latin America where time has an entirely different meaning—mañana, mañana, mañana, you know?

After the call she points at the “total” area of the boleta de venta and rattles off more Spanish that I interpret to mean: “we have to pay the guy, dude, do you have the soles?” The last bill is for 34 soles so I quickly check my wallet and, to my instant relief, I find a 50 soles bill—whew! I try to give it to her but she shakes her head no and I am confused.

She leaves the office and I sit back down at my computer and, in seconds, the doorbell rings. Sure enough, it is the vendedor, and as he comes by the office doorway trailing Giovanni I see he is carrying a tank of gas on his shoulder. I jump up and follow them into the kitchen so I can watch the action—yes; this is what now constitutes ‘action’ in my narrow world where so much is so new that I’m a child again.

When I get in the kitchen the vendedor is kneeling next to the stove and is already pulling the empty bottle out of a small cupboard adjacent to the stove. There is a flexible metal hose curling out the back of the cupboard connected to the stove; the other end is connected to the bottle with a quick-disconnect fitting on top of the bottle that he twists and it pops off. He sits the empty on the floor, twists the fitting onto the new bottle, and slides it back into its little nest under the counter. Giovanni turns the burner back on and a flame flares up bright and orange. Damn! Cultural expectations confounded again! There was not more than two minutes elapsed time from phone call to stove reigniting.

Now the vendedor writes up a new boleta de venta that he hands to Giovanni who hands it to me; I hand her the $50 and she hands it to the vendedor; he hands her $15 in change and she hands it to me. Done!

For the curious, the “bottle” is a small green metal tank, 10 kg – G.L.P. (kilograms Gas Liquefied Petroleum), according to the boleta the vendedor leaves with us; it is about 12-inches in diameter and about 18-inches high, pretty much the same kind of stuff used in the US mostly for barbeque grills, probably a mixture of propane and butane.