Jade Rivera

“There is no such thing as "magical realism" for someone who never left his imaginary world.”

-Jade Rivera Biography

The boy looking into the hat that holds the universe.

The man holding his face, with a bird perched in his head.

These are two of Jade’s paintings and pictures I’ve used in this blog, he’s a self taught creator who grew up and resides in a Lima neighborhood called Chorillo’s.

He’s been recognized as one of the most influential artists in Latin American.

His murals featured world wide and have become famous for being undefined frontiers where absolute fiction, social criticism, and the need of an individual to share his emotions, move freely from one territory to another without passport.

His paintings incorporate a lot of types of birds as he sees them as a symbol of true freedom.

We walked in the art studio next to the boy looking into the hat yesterday and learned all of this.

His street art is found throughout Lima and the world, and the boy is his most famous piece in Barranco.

I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t obsessed with this artist.

Something about his work, and closeness to the imagination that fascinates me.

Something to take away from him is to remember that we all create our own reality of the world, and we’re the only ones to see the world from our point of view.

World, In The Palm Of Your Hand

Where to next?

This questions been repeated over the past 2 weeks.

We’ve been pulling up the maps, reading blogs, checking Workaway.

So many places look great, we pull up Lima’s airport and just look at the different flights out, and the prices to different countries.

It’s pretty open, anywhere between Lima and Florida.

Honestly we’ve never felt more free before, and it’s a great feeling yet kind of stressful…

I never thought I’d be dealing with the problem of “where should I go to next?”

Or label it a problem even…!

It’s alright, we’ve made a decision and bought our tickets last night (after a few more hours of scoping out the spots in the world…)

We’re gonna hit Colombia, it’s somewhere we originally wanted to go to on our trip down here, so it kind of makes sense now to go back there.

Flying in and out of Cartagena we’ll take a bus into the jungle for a week…

Then we’ll head over to the coast, and explore Tayrona National Park.

Excited to be back on the road again, it’s been a nice experience living in South America, but I’m missing the backpacking aspect of it.

Lima Beach

The beaches are rocky.

They have one sandy beach, within a cove.

The waters cold and the sunshine is non-existent here.

The beach was packed, families full of life everywhere.

Paragliders in the sky, kayaks, paddle boards, and surfers in the water.

One of the nicest parts? You have people walking up and down the beach selling ceviche, calamari, beers, ice cream, sandwiches, chicken & rice.

It’s nice, you don’t even have to pack for the beach if you don’t want to, they have everything you’d need…

5am Club

This is a great book by Robin Sharma.

I’ve been up at 5am everyday since being here, except the weekends I’ve slept in later.

This is just because maybe I need to catch up on sleep, or maybe it’s been instilled into me that we take off some days, or rest more on them.

But in truth, I feel really good when I’m up at 5 and get a start with my day…

And on the weekends when I sleep past it I feel disoriented, not ready for the day, and behind.

Waking up at 5 gives you so much time in the day, it feels like you’ve had an entire day by 11am and it’s nice.

However, Kate and I went out for a nice dinner on Friday night.

The food was delicious, we were honestly blown away by it.

But we were talking and started talking about the bar I’d open if I were to open one.

I forgot the extreme detail I have in it, what I want, the atmosphere, clientele, menu.

I didn’t know that desire was fully in me still, until I started talking about it.

✌️

We’ll be enjoying the last week and a half in Lima before living out of our packs again.

Enjoy the day and don’t forget to let your imagination flow.

Cheers,

Me