Kari Grande, the street we live off of.

So, Amy and I wake up at 6:30 am every day to get ready for Spanish classes. We both moan and groan and Amy makes lots of homocidal faces because it is freezing here in the mornings and getting out of our sleeping bags seems like the worst thing ever...going into the bathroom long enough to brush my teeth is enough to make my jaw chatter like a jackhammer. Somehow we get ourselves down into the kitchen, where Manchi makes us each a fried egg for breakfast. We eat it with flat, white bread (bread in Cusco doesnt rise because of the altitude) and instant coffee (for some reason, Peruvians dont drink real coffee, but its not as crappy as instant coffee in the US). Then we catch either a taxi (if we are running late) or walk a couple streets over to catch a combi (Doradino and Arco Iris are the combis we use, but there are many different ones with random names like Batman). Usually getting off the bus is interesting because there are so many people on it that we have a difficult time seeing out the window and finding our stop. At times, we have been dropped off far enough away from the school that it takes us many moons to walk there and we end up late and sheepishly apologizing to our teachers. But then again, most of the time we are late coz we cant get ourselves out of bed, haha.

So, once we arrive at the school, I go into a classroom with my gramatica teacher, Mary Luz, and Amy disappears into a different classroom with her teacher, Ana. I like gramatica...Im a visual person so having everything im learning written out on a white board is much easier for me than conversation. Mary Luz is a tough teacher (she is one of the only profesoras who assigns homework and actually expects her students to do it), but shes very organized in her instruction and makes a lot of sense to me. And she knows bits and pieces of English, so if she says "perro" and I say "huh?" and she cant get her point across by barking like a dog, she will say the word "dog." Shes super cute...she is short and curvy and has freckles across her face. She has a 10 year old son. I like gramatica a lot.

After gramatica ends at 10 am, I have 2 hours of practica with my profesora Eliana. During this time, we stroll about Cusco and use the Spanish I have learned in actual conversations with each other, which is super difficult for me but also super important. Eliana has taken me many cool places during practica...she took me to the market (notice I uploaded a pic of the butchered cow heads), the Cusco cemeterio, a couple musuems, parades, Corpus Christi, and both of her childrens dance performances (she has a 15 yr old son and an 8 yr old daughter). Usually we have to push our way up Ave. El Sol, a main street in Cusco, to get to the Plaza from the school...pushing is required because for the last two or three weeks, there have been dances and parades blocking the streets EVERY DAY. Cuscos birthday is June 24th and every year there is a huge celebration in the Inca ruins outside the city called Inti Raymi where people dance traditional Peruvian dances and reenact an old Incan ceremony that celebrates the sun, which was very important in Inca culture. Anyway, we saw a shit ton of dancing...children, teenagers, adults, even elderly individuals....it was awesome but made it difficult to get anywhere fast because of the crowds. Anyway, Eliana is wonderful...she is also short, cute, motherly, and stretches her words out when she thinks I cant understand her Spanish. I ask her lots of questions, like "Why are there so many stinkin parades here?" and she gives me nice, slow answers. I feel more like an insider with her around.

After classes end at 12, Amy and I usually walk back to our homestay, which is a good 45-60 minute walk...it helps us feel like we are burning off all the starchy rice and potatoes we are being fed. We are always super hungry/hot/cant breathe by the time we get home because the days in Cusco are pretty warm and we have a bigass hill to climb up on the way back. We pass the street where people wash taxis all day and family-owned convenience stores where women peel apples and oranges to make juice and leave the peels sprawled out and spiraling upon the sidewalk. We pass several universities that, from the outside, look purely functional...no beautiful green campuses here. We pass vendors on the street selling chocolate bars and tabloid magazines and bootleg DVDs. We pass empty lots where holes have been dug and the dirt lies in gritty piles on the sidewalk, waiting to be turned into bricks for someones house or fence/wall. We pass walls where the family behind them could not afford to string barbed wire across the top so they have broken a million glass bottles and adhered the jagged shards to the top...its quite a violent-looking way of keeping people out. And we pass a million dogs, most homeless, all dirty, eating trash and sleeping in the sun. There is a dead dog in the canal near our house that has been there for over a week...once they fall in, the walls are too high for them to climb out. But no one has removed it, so it just lays there in the water, looking more and more dead. I am NEVER drinking water that has not been boiled here.

Once we arrive home, Manchi serves us lunch, which usually consists of soup (corn soup, noodle soup, potato soup, barley soup) and a main dish. The main dish ALWAYS has white rice and some form of potato, most often potato chunks covered in sauce...occasionally there will be other vegetables and about twice a week there will be meat. We eat, thank Manchi, feed Gatita, and spend the rest of the afternoon doing various things...going to museums or shopping, using the schools computers, hanging out with friends from school. Every so often we wash our clothes in our bathroom sink...we cant go to the lavanderias in town because of Amys detergent allergy, so we wash everything by hand. We take showers, probably not as often as we should because the water is either cold enough to give one hypothermia or scalding enough to burn through 10 layers of skin...its kind of a toss up. I am soooooooo excited about coming back to the states and being able to take a real shower...its one of the things im looking forward to most, sadly enough. Then at 7 we eat dinner (always the same thing we had for lunch) with John and the other homestay students, who are usually fun and interesting and always changing. We will sit and talk to them for hours, so grateful to be speaking to someone who knows English, haha. Then we either go out with friends (dancing or drinking or both) or sit in our room in our sleeping bags in bed doing our homework and freezing our asses off like two old people, haha. Whatever, we always have school the next day...2 am bedtime and 6:30 wake-up time are not a happy combination. Im pretty satisfied with our lives here for the most part...the only thing i really REALLY want is a normal shower. Can someone please send me one in the mail?

All that being said, my schedule is now changing rapidly. My last Spanish classes were Tuesday, thanks to studet loan-induced financial setbacks. Amys last day is Friday. After that, we are off to explore other parts of Peru! We will come back to Cusco around the 19th or so because Amys mom is flying in and we need to meet her. Im happy for a break though...as much as i like some parts of Cusco, its really kind of dirty and overwhelming at this point...i think im getting mid-trip homesickness, so hopefully new places will distract me from that. Anyhoo, I best be going now...have to meet up with my friend who will sadly be going home next week...she contracted typhoid and wants to be sick at home rather than here (by the way, the 60 dollar vaccination was TOTALLY worth it). Much love, more later.

written by  kfox on June 29, 2010 from Cusco, Peru
from the travel blog: Peru Adventure!
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Sigh...I got completely lost (the good kind) in that description!

written by  Dawn on July 1, 2010

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