home away from home

Below are some pictures of our new apartment...home away from home for the next year!

607 Siete Angelitos

Cusco - Perú

P.S. My street is Spanish for "Seven Little Angels." How sweet is that!!??

Below, our kitchen.  They do not have regular sized refrigerators here.  Only mini ones.

Below, the living room.

One of our sweet new tapestries on the wall.  Note the alpacas in the bottom.

Our other tapestry.

This is our little table with our gloriously bright tablecloth.

Here is the little box that holds our ghetto hot water switch, pictured below.  We have to flip this Frankenstien-looking switch about an hour before we think we will need hot water for a shower.  Unfortunately, there is only enough hot water for one shower at a time.  So we have to wait at least one hour between showers.  All I can say is, I am glad to only live with one other person. 

Below is my bedroom.  My matress in on the floor and I have some pictures by my bed to remind me of my wonderful family and friends. :)

Below is the other side of my room.  I have a window that looks out onto the plants in the courtyard and a table which I put all my clothes on.  I don't have a closet, but that seems to be fine because I also don't have much clothes.  I have enough space on my floor to spread out my yoga mat and do a little Shiva Ray DVD.  It's awesome.

Below is our little kitchen.

crazy weekend, part II

So, after the dance competition, we went to this "BBQ" in the middle of no where with a friend of ours, Gabo.  There was no barbecue sauce to be had at this little shindig, however.  We ate an entire chicken that was cooked on this dirt field with some neighbors in this small village outside of the city.

Above is a picture of Alex, Gabo and his new dog, "Mayu" (Quechua for "river").  She is a little angel and she comes every where with us.

At this BBQ event, I made friends with a 50 year old woman from Lima who just moved to Cusco and wants to practice her English with me.  She was so happy to be my friend and I was happy to have someone be so excited about me!

Then we went to Gabo's "Cusqueñan family's" house in a nearby town to celebrate a 75 year old man's birthday.  His name is "Papa León" and he is incredible dancer and an even more incredible drinker.  We sat in the living room and they said "SALUD"  ever minute or so and we had to drink.  Very intense drinkers.  They all then proceeded to dance around the living room to some seriously Peruvian music.  Someone caught the last few moments of my dance with Papa León on video.  Unfortunately, it is not uploading right now but I will keep trying.

dance competition

So this weekend was crazy.  We started off Saturday at 8:30am (which is ridiculously early for us).  We went to this dance competition hosted by one of the schools we teach at.  Our girls were there in their super elaborate costumes and so happy to see us.  Made my heart melt.

Some of the dances were rather interesting.  Because most of the dances were based on the native culture here, some very obvious gender roles were displayed.  Example: In dance #13, the boys get out their whips and whip at the girls.  In dance #26, the girls lay down on the ground, the boys straddle them, a brief bit of humping ensued.  Not pornographic, but definitely odd to see 7 year olds enacting a sex scene in their ethnic garb on the dance floor. 

Dance #28 had a graphic scene where the Spaniards killed the Incans and an elaborate funeral procession ensued.  Heavy stuff. 

The only dance that was notably less male-dominated was the llama/alpaca dance.  Llamas and alpacas are an integral part of Peruvian culture.  The boys dressed as llamas and had grass in their mouth the whole time, while the girls trimmed their fur and drug them by leashed tied around their necks.  We loved this one.  See pictures below.

Girl feeding the llama/alpaca boy some grass.

Here the girls are trimming the llama/alpaca's hair with some fake plastic scissors.

These boys were pretending to be birds and were quite cute.

Here is one of the more indigenous dances.  The little girls wore teeny-tiny little skirts and bare-midriffs.  The boys wore these short orange shirts/dresses that had slits up the side.  Very revealing, let's just put it that way.  Alex and I laughed at the thought of that ever happening in the states.  NEVER.

a day in the life

I snapped some pictures of my favorite things while bumming around the apartment.  We eat fresh avocados almost every day and they are incredible.  We sprinkle them with a bit of salt and a squish of lime and they are heaven.

They have adorable little limes here.

This is the infamous coca tea.  It is quite good and we drink A LOT of it.  It helped with the altitude adjustment and now we just like it, so it has become a staple.

Here are the incredibly HUGE beautiful eggs that I eat most mornings.  The don't refrigerate them (the hardly refrigerate anything - not milk, not cheese, not much).  But they have the hugest yolks I have ever seen and are quite yummy.

Here's a little chick I found bopping around at the market on Sunday...cute, huh?

pacca

Young Peruvians mold some adobe bricks to build thier homes.




These boys were covered in dirt from the adobe brick making.







Look at the new teachers - Profe Alex and Profe Yenni!!



Mi amiga.

Pacca is a small agrarian town in which lies an adorable little boarding school at which we teach. Every Thursday, we take a taxi to a bus stop on the edge of the city, a bus (which is basically a station wagon) to a small town about 30 minutes away, then to a motorcycle taxi for another 15 minutes. The whole trip takes about an hour, but it is well worth it.

We teach the girls (ages 7-17) English in the morning and then sports in the afternoon. The first day we were there, after teaching English the other teachers asked us to hike up a mountain with huge bags of white cement. The girls were to draw the initials of the school on the mountainside in honor of the school´s 10th anniversary. So we hike up this mountain, we find some donkeys to help us carry some of the cement...it was all so bizzare. But oh, so typical. You never know what you are going to get thrown into!

lo siento!

So, I am now in the new apartment! Of course, there are problems with the internet so I am now in an internet cafe. I have some great new pictures to post but cannot do it for a few days. We went to an incredible market yesterday and I got every season of sex and the city for about $5. Incredible. Of course, we do not have a TV, so Alex and I watched a few episodes last night bundled in our sleeping bags in bed.

The air is so thin here and the nights get so, so chilly. It is the middle of winter here, but I don´t think I could have predicted this frigid temperature. During the days, it is sunny and gorgeous. If you are standing in the sun it is actually really hot but when in the shade, it is chilly. So wierd.

Anyway, I can´t wait to post pictures from the school we went to on Thursday.

Stay tuned and thanks for reading!!

el mercado

bags of grain and such. there are bugs flying and crawling around everywhere, so I can´t imagine actually buying such grains and using them, but they do.

yes these are frogs and no, i don´t even want to know what they do with them.

a big beautiful tub of olives!

this lady sells every little trinket you can imagine.

I love the colors in this picture. The vegetables are so fresh and tasty!

what am i doing here?

A few of you have asked me, "What the heck are you doing in Peru for a year?"  Well, I probably should have mentioned it earlier.

I am working for GirlSportWorks, which is a non-profit based in Cusco, Peru. My job as the program manager is to facilitate after-school programs for Peruvian girls at four different schools in and around the city. The program focuses on physical education as a means for promoting self-esteem, physical and mental health and cooperation in a welcoming all-female environment. I will be working here until late August 2009.

Check out our website (a work in progress):

http://www.girlsportworks.com

la ciudad

Some other pictures I took of the city.

where do we sign?

You would think "departamento" to mean, oh, um...department??  Well, no.  It means apartment.  And that is what we got today.

There were lots of issues with the old "rustic" one I described in my initial post - crazy landlord, no running water in the kitchen sink for 2 months, the fact that we were being kicked out in october, etc - so my accomplice Alex and I took it upon ourselves to seek out a new one.  No baggage, no messiness.  Turning a new page.  A fresh start.  A Tabula Rosa. You get what I mean.

So we did.  Through our powers of networking, we heard of a powerful Irish ex-pat that owns a few bars and properties in town.  So, we go to his bar last night and inquire as to this Gary's location and eventually find him.  We tromp right up to him and introduce ourselves.  He tells us he has no properties available at the moment, but if we stop by the bar Monday night at 6pm he will take us to meet this woman that has an apartment available.

In the meantime, we roam the city looking for apartment postings and get a few leads. We arrange to take a look at a 2 bedroom in San Blas (AWESOME neighborhood) at 5pm on Monday.  We walk into this place and it is - to put it simply - perfect.  It is super private, has a gorgeous little courtyard with lots of plants.  Huge living/dining room, fetching kitchen, one moderately sized bedroom on the bottom floor and another good sized room on the second floor.  The blue-tiled bathroom was absolutely charming and it even had a mirror (which is actually quite hard to find here, for some reason.)  We walked through it and said..."Where do we sign?"

The owner is Peruvian and her mother lives in the apartment beside us, her sister in the one above and her brother across the way.  There are a few other non-Peruvian couples that also live in the little complex and everyone there is super "tranquilo" (translates to "chill").  

It is going to be home tomorrow.

Will post pictures muy pronto.

cusqueños

The Cusqueños have a very interesting life. From what I have gathered from those that I have met thus far, it is a city with an interesting dynamic...and it is visible instantly.  They live in this historically rich and internationally popular location that acts, among other things as the landing pad before Machu Picchu. For this reason, their economy has grown to depend on tourism and the people have grown to resent that.  Non-Peruvians, whether you are a tourist or not, are treated differently no matter what.  Even Ex-Pats that have lived here for 20 years have to deal with it to some degree.  Being a non-Peruvian means you will encounter higher prices (unless you happen to know better and have great bargaining savvy), constant begging and persistent salespeople.  

I have found that after living in Quito, similar in many ways, I have developed an ability to distance myself from it and not let it bother me so much. It still is annoying, I admit, but I just try to be aware and accepting of it. That being said, I have no problem standing my ground when I know someone is trying to rip me off.

One thing worthy of note is that it is quite a safe city.  There are policemen and security guards all over, keeping watch over the dark little alleys and the touristy plazas - all day and all night.  They work very hard to keep this city safe because it does rely so heavily on tourism, and tourism will trickle if crime rates increase substantially.

There is no one statement you can say about Peruvians in general, as the men are so drastically different from the women. The men are out all night long and constantly trying to get me to pay attention to them.  Machismo is so very alive, it is shocking. The women are, on the whole, no where to be found. They sell things on the street, but very few go out at night and even fewer seek to become friends with "touristas" (aka everyone that looks non-Peruvian).  

This is sad news for me, as I would hate to leave here without having made some friends.  

That being said, I already have about 20 Peruvian male "friends" that have proposed marriage, begged me to be their girlfriend, etc. We will be having a perfectly delightful conversation, Spanish just rolling off my tongue, I am happy as a lark and then they begin with the faux compliments and the reciting of poetry and then comes the declaration that "you are the most beautiful woman I have ever met!"  So, moral of the story, I can no longer carry a conversation longer than 3 minutes with a man because after that point, they assume I will hop into bed with them.  What am I saying! Sometimes before I even UTTER A SINGLE WORD, they have convinced themselves that they will somehow convince me that we are meant to spend the rest of our lives together.  Very interesting approach.  I wonder who falls for that crap.

Nonetheless, every man I have met has also learned that I have a boyfriend and am not interested.  While that does not always deter them, it may sink in eventually.  So don't worry mom and dad - situation totally under control.  It's quite funny, actually.

To summarize, there is only one similarity that I can detect between men and women here - everyone loves Che Guevara.

In the meantime, I am going to try to make a female Peruvian friend...somehow.  

Wish me luck!