Dia 91 en el Imperio Inca

I´ve started to come to think of Cusco as my city. A lot of my friends here don´t share that particular sentiment. I´ve heard a lot of greivances about Cusco and while, of course, I have a few of my own, I´ve loved being here the last 3 months and think this place is charming and know that I will always think of it of fondly. What has brought on this expression of affection? Tomorrow is April, which means I only have one month left here, and part of me is freaking out a little bit with that knowledge. There´s another part of me that is really looking forward to grocery shopping in the U.S., eating American Mexican food (real tacos!) at home and seeing a long list of people who I really miss. But at this point I have no idea what the summer will bring when I go home, but I´m sure the transition back into my ¨normal life¨ will be interesting. In the vein of reflection, here are some things (some good and some bad), about my city and this country that I´ve learned in the past 3 months.
1) There are copy stores everywhere here. They literally line the blocks and I´m not really sure why.
2) Bread is an acceptable meal for breakfast and dinner. Also, carbohydrates are out of control. In one meal it is common to eat potatoes, rice, AND bread.
3) If you are sick (whether legitimately or even if you just have a headache), you will be told by everyone you meet to ¨abrigate¨ (cover up). If your throat hurts, you must wrap a scarf around it. If your stomach hurts, wrap a blanket around your body.
4) Taxi rides are commonly terrifying though not as much as in other places I´ve been (for instance Amman or Cairo). People don´t slow down for pedestrians or stray dogs in the street.
5) The pharmacist can and will give you antibiotics without a prescription from the doctor.
6) There are lots of random parades to lots of different Virgins.
7) Hot drinks are always better. Not only that, but cold drinks with ice don´t really exist.
8) Cocoa tea cures EVERYTHING.
9) Milk comes in a box and doesn´t need to be refrigerated. Same goes for yogurt, which is drinkable, and butter.
10) On a typical night out, you might get asked if you want to buy drugs 3 or more times. You will also get asked if you want a massage at least 5.
11) The weather can change from sunny and hot to rainy and cold in a matter of seconds.
12) Everywhere you look, the mountain views are incredible.
13) The sun here is intense. Cusco literally has some of the strongest UV rays in the world.
14) All of the artesans claim their goods are made of alpaca. It´s not true.
15) Compared to other Spanish speakers, Peruvians have a really clear accent. This doesn´t mean I undestand everything all the time, but it does make my life easier.
16) Anything that goes wrong can be blamed on the altitude.
17) Cusqueñas (at least my parents) think that their food is better than everywhere else. They even claim this about their pizza and Chinese food. Sorry, but also not true.
18) All food is described as ¨rico¨ (rich).
19) It rains often, but there is very little humidity. I´m very grateful.
20) Cusco is called el Umbligo del Mundo (the belly button of the world).

Over the weekend, I went to el Museo de Arte Precolumbino, which is really nicely kept up and has a really cool range of artifacts. The Humanities geek in me was really happy. Also, I´m now taking culture and civilization class and we´re learning about the Mexican and Cuban revolutions, which really makes the sociology geek in me happy as well. This coming weekend hopefully I´ll be taking a trip to the Paracas National Wildlife Reserve. I´m keeping my fingers crossed for sea turtle, sea lion, penguin, and condor sightings, all of which my travel book say are possible to see there. I also really want to go sandboarding and see the desert oasis Huacachina. 33 days left. My plan is to make the best of it. It´s already been a wonderful adventure.

Con amor de mi cuidad,
Ashley

Dia 83 en el Imperio Inca

I started volunteering last Tuesday at an orphanage for girls called Buen Pastor. So far, I have mixed feelings. For one, it always takes me a little while to warm up in situations like that. I am generally pretty extroverted but, in all honesty, I don´t always know how to relate to children especially in a foreign language. My first day I worked in the kitchen with 3 girls and a cook, peeling potatoes and mashing garlic. When I left, I realized how much the walls reminded me of Copprome, the orphanage I volunteer at in Honduras and felt really overwhelmed and ended up walking home trying not to let my tears flow freely. The second day I learned how to knit with the girls. There are a few different workshops there where the girls do different crafts like ceramics or knitting. There´s also a green house, which they took me to see during our break, a volleyball/basketball court and cows. Also, shortly after I´d gotten there, a girl tried to escape. The director got up abruptly and ran out of the room, leaving me with a ten year old girl named Melanie who told me a girl was trying to escape because she didn´t like it there. That day I also got to play volleyball with the girls when we were done knitting. I wasn´t very good and made them glad. I´m happy that I at least amused them. When I went on Thursday, the coordinator wasn´t there and no one really knew what I was supposed to be doing so I helped the girls cover their notebooks with plastic. Today I knitted again and asked the girls what they wanted to be when they grow up (police officer, professor, veterinarian) and learned that the volunteer coordinator was also an orphan herself.
Two weekends ago we went to the town of Ollantaytambo, which ended up being really fun. I didn´t feel like buying another tourist ticket to see the ruins so I ended up walking around and exploring with Ashley and Emily. We stepped onto a side street and found a ridiculously small monkey hanging on to the back of a dog which was trying to attack another dog.

The monkey was adorable. We also decided we wanted to try chicha (corn beer) so we found a place that had a red bag hanging outside, which means they have chicha, and went inside where we found a courtyard of animals. We shared a cup between the three of us with a small group of locals, including a man who sang to us in Quechua. Afterwards we got dessert and wine in the plaza and were sitting there enjoying our treats when Hilde and Trey pulled up in a taxi and told us they were staying the night so we decided we would too because we were enjoying ourselves. Trey invited two Chilean guys who were on their way to Machu Picchu to sit and chat with us for a while which was nice. After they caught their train, we found our hostal, which was really nice and had a great courtyard with lots of pretty flowers. Unfortunately, Trey, Hilde and I sat on the hammock together and broke it and the thick log that was holding it up, fell on top of my head, which was really painful.
Back in Cusco on Monday we met our Chilean friends again and went out dancing pretty late even though it was Monday night. The following night was St. Patrick´s day so we went out again to a bar called The Real McCoy filled with lots of gringos and played beer pong, which is about as gringo as an activity as can be.
This weekend we took another little trip to go camping in Urubamba. Also unfortunately, we asked the school for help in planning and we ended up staying in some random family´s backyard after at least a half an hour searching in the dark for the place. Nonetheless, despite the fact that it wasn´t really camping, it ended up being a lot of fun. Jeroen and Cameron played their guitars, we sang, ate lots of roasted marshmallows and hot dogs and I foregoed sleeping in a tent in favor of sleeping by the fire under the stars. It drizzled lightly in the morning which woke me up, but I didn´t mind too much. We also decided around 1 in the morning to climb a high wall and go frolicking through the family´s corn field. It was slightly terrifying, but really fun. It was hilarious because everyone kept falling over in the ditches in the dark. The next morning, we had a slight problem because one of the sleeping bags was missing. We determined that one of the girls who´d come with us who was a friend of a friend from school had taken it. Which is pretty lame if you ask me, but in the end we got it back so I suppose it´s ok. Nada màs for now.
Hasta luego,
Ashley

Dia 71 en el Imperio Inca

Strangely enough, it is now March and I have seven and a half weeks left. Last weekend Maggie got here Sunday morning and we had to rush to try and make our train to Machu Picchu. By the time we arrived at the station in Ollantaytambo about an hour and a half from Cusco, we were about 5 minutes later than the time the train was supposed to leave. I was so afraid we´d missed it. We ran from the taxi and miraculously the train was still there, though it literally started moving once we were on it. The landscape on the ride to Aguas Calientes was beautiful. There were really steep, green mountains and a rushing river. Aguas Calientes is a really gorgeous little town as well. It reminds me a bit of what I imagine a coal mining town in West Virginia would be like, but prettier. The clouds hang over the mountain tops and the river runs right through the town next to the train tracks. Thankfully the train ride was pretty short because we were starving by the time we made it there and immediately went to find lunch. During lunch, it started to pour so we decided to find the nearest hostal possible which actually turned out really well. We stayed at Hostal Jairita for about $11 per night for a double room and the people there were all really friendly. Later we checked out the market and ran into some of my friends from Cusco. We also found out at the train station that no trains would be running the next day because of a strike and so we´d be stuck in Aguas Calientes an extra day. I knew about the strike beforehand when we booked the tickets, but I´d been hoping for the best. The next day we took the bus and went up a scarily, steep mountain to Machu Picchu. We walked up some steps, rounded a corner, and then there it was lying before us. It really was incredible. After walking around a bit, it started to rain on us, which was a minor irritation, but if anything, with the added clouds hanging over the ruins, it made the scenery even more picturesque. Unfortunately, it would have been too slippery and dangerous to climb Waynu Picchu so we didn´t. When we got back to Aguas Calientes that night we found a restaurant to eat cuy (guinea pig, an Andean specialty) in and were serenaded by 80´s music on the radio. Maggie ended up with the head, and I with the feet. There was very little meat on the bone, and what there was of it was not that great tasting. I didn´t eat the skin because it was tough and freaked me out. After dinner, we walked around a bit. We went over a suspension bridge and suddenly discovered another town. It was the real Aguas Calientes, I think, where the Peruvians live. The Aguas Calientes we´d seen previously was the tourist part. It was a bizarre moment, realizing that what we´d seen before was more or less a fabrication. I would have liked to explore the other side of the bridge some more, but it was dark and it didn´t seem like the best idea at the time. The next morning at an internet cafe, I happened to look down and there was a gigantic long, brown winged bug on the modem. Apparently cockroaches in this country have wings. Like the way there, the next day we had to rush back to Cusco in order to get Maggie to the airport for her flight back. I was disappointed that I didn´t get to show her more of the city, but it was so good to see her and have her around for a few days.
Wednesday morning, I woke up early and took the cumbi to the airport and flew to Lima, where I had about 4 hours of a layover. During this time I got a donut from Dunkin Donuts, read about Chris Brown and Rihanna in a magazine in one of the stores without buying it, and ate a delicious chicken and french fry lunch. Then I flew to Trujillo, the city of the eternal spring as it is called by some and also the second largest city in Perù, where I met Patrick, Amanda, and Louisa, but not until I´d first been accosted by literally probably about ten taxi drivers who actually surrounded me as I walked outside of the airport into the desert sunshine.
We took a taxi to our hotel in the centro about a 20 minutes ride from the airport. It was really nice and relatively cheap for having air conditioning, really comfortable beds, and breakfast. We walked to the Plaza de Armas and discovered that it was Trujillo week, which meant they had concerts and other events going on in celebration of the city. The buildings surrounding the plaza and all around the city are all painted in bright, vivid colors. For instance, the main cathedral was yellow. While in Trujillo we visited the beach town of Huanchaco nearby. It was not the nicest beach I´ve been to and the water was cold, but it was definitely appreciated after the rain and cold of Cusco and it was particularly beautiful at sunset. At the beach we rode these boats called caballitos de totoro (little reed horses), which you can sit on while a man paddles you out a bit and then brings you back in to shore. Also, at the beach I tried picarrones, which is fried dough similar to funnel cake but not quite as sweet and comes with a nice fig sauce. I also tried ceviche, which was good and included purple tentacles. In Trujillo we found a really nice restaurant very close to our hotel that had a cheap menu so we ate there quite a few times. My first night I had churrasco, which is steak. My first day there, I ate churros from a vender on the street which tasted pretty incredible.
Trujillo, and the northern coast in general, contains a lot of arqueological sites from pre-Incan civilizatons. It is located in the northern desert, and therefore, a lot of the sites have been really well preserved. We visited three temples and also Chan Chan (¨Sol Sol¨/¨Sun Sun¨), which is a UNESCO world heritage site and the biggest adobe city in the world. We went to the Temple de Arco Iris (Rainbow), Temple Esmeralda and Huaca de la Luna (Temple of the Moon), which was really impressive and reminded me a lot of some of the things I saw in Egypt last year. At both of the first two temples we saw Peruvian hairless dogs which I think are not very attractive, but they are a special breed here. The Temple Esmeralda had carvings of otters, but the guide explained that when it was discovered in the 90´s the team from Harvard that was excavating weren´t sure whether they were otters or squirrels, but decided on otters because of the proximity to the sea. Huaca de la Luna was actually 5 temples that had been built one on top of the other and was really massive. There were paintings there that were 1,800 years old.
Friday night we decided to go out dancing, but the place we went to ended up being kind of lame because most of the people there weren´t dancing, and those that were, were couples. Afterwards we left and went to the Cheops casino and each got 10 soles (about $3) in coins for the slot machines. Being slightly intoxicated, I didn´t really know how to use the slot machines and just pushed a lot of buttons. However, my technique worked out for me and I ended up winning 45 soles ($15) from a machine, which I was very excited about. Saturday, our last day there, Patrick and I went to the mall which was very bizarre because it reminded me so much of home. There was a food court with McDonald´s and Kentucky Fried Chicken, a movie theater, and a store that was very much like a Peruvian Walmart called Tottus. When we got there, there was even a go kart race going on in the parking lot and a live aerobic dance presentation going on inside as if it was an infomercial. We ate dinner and then watched the movie My Mother´s New Boyfriend in English, which was a little strange but amusing. We got back to Cusco on Sunday and were greeted with cold weather and rain. Today, for instance, it was really sunny and nice in the morning but later in the afternoon it started to pour and hail. I was in a market and the hail was falling through the holes in the tin roof. Also, my friend Ashley and I have decided we are going to be ¨new women¨ which entails exercising more and going to cultural events. I´m doing good so far (I went to the gym Monday and Tuesday and to a video dance presentation at Allianza Francaise last night) but we will see. That´s all for now.
Amor de Cusco,
Ashley