Searching has never been this hard. Google has this annoying thing where they redirect you to a country specific site when you pull up their main search page. That’s great if you are in a country where you happen to read the native language but my Spanish reading skills are not so good. Every time I type in something in the address bar (Firefox 6.0) or right click on highlighted text and do a search I get redirected to www.google.com.pe. The Spanish search results are then translated into garbled English because I’m using Foxlingo, an add-on that automatically translates web pages from any language into English. The whole thing is a mess.
Two things needed to be changed so searches would be returned in English for me. Searching for things via the address bar was the first thing. The fix was to type in about:config in the address bar, skip past the warning and find the entry name keyword.URL. This needed to be changed to http://www.google.com/search?ie=UTF-8&oe=utf-8&q=
Next task was to fix searches performed by right clicking on highlighted text. The only good solution to this it seems is to install a new search engine. To do this click on the dropdown in the search bar and choose Manage Search Engines followed by Get more search engines at the bottom. The one I wanted is called always “.com” – Google.com (in English). For some reason after installing it the search engine order changed and put this new one down at the bottom so I just deleted the other ones (wikipedia, ebay, .etc).
I’m heading over to see if the parts for my bike are in this afternoon.
Update: After a short ride along the bumpy, congested streets of Cusco I pulled up to the bike shop and went inside to finally put an end to this madness. Clutching the worn yellow receipt in my hand I slapped it down on the counter and waited for the mechanic to bring out line item number 1… a brand spanking new Shimano LX 11-34 cassette. Alas it was not to be. For some reason the 11-34 magically turned into a 11-32 cassette. Not the end of the world though. I rode with an 11-32 for about half my trip– the hills will be just a little tougher. The other 2 things that needed to be installed, a small and middle chainring, went on without a hitch if you don’t count the grinder that had to be used to get the small chainring on. He didn’t have safety glasses to wear using the grinder (or gloves) so he asked to borrow my sunglasses. 
Here are some pictures from around Cusco.
Couldn’t resist messing with the safety notice on my door…
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