Cuy

Cuy, aka charred guinea pig

Anyway, back to being in Cusco...Amy´s mother Melisa arrived Tuesday morning to accompany us on the remainder of our trip with us, which has been new and fun. We´ve been showing her around Cusco for the last few days...we took her to the Museo Inka, which is a really interesting museum dedicated to Incan as well as pre-Incan cultures. There, we watched a group of women as they made traditional weavings...the process is so intricate and fascinating to me...first they tie two parellel groups of strings (that they have dyed and spun themselves from alpaca and sheep wool) to a large pole. Then they stretch the yarn towards them and weave a third length of yarn in and out of the two parellel lengths of yarn to make the most intricate patterns...I have no idea how they have memorized which strings to go under and which to go on top of, but the weavings come out absolutely beautiful. Occasionally they push all the string together using a sharp piece of bone or readjust the parellel layers of string with the pieces of wood separating them. Each weaving takes about 3 months to complete and the women receive about 50 US dollars for each one. Can you imagine spending 3 months of your life working on this very complex and beautiful weaving and then only receiving 50 dollars for it? I don´t think it´s fair, but these women make a living somehow. Also, one more cool thing about the weavings...the third length of yarn (the one that goes in and out of the two parellel layers) is completely invisible in the final weaving...somehow, the women weave it in and out in such a way that you never see it. Cool, huh?

Okay, so now that I am done babbling about the weavings (I just think they are sooo cool), I am going to talk about another interesting experience Amy, Melisa, and I had on Tuesday. Upon arriving home for lunch, another homestay student (a Belgian named Maxim) told us that he and Manchi were going out for lunch at a cuyeria, a restaurant specializing in cooking the regional Cusquenian dish of guina pig, and would we like to come? None of us had ever tried cuy (aka charred guinea pig, which is quite a luxurious food in Peru) so we decided to accompany them. First, we took a bus waaaaay up into the hills of Cusco...the cuyeria had an amazing view of the city, and for a few minutes, I was fairly relaxed just sitting in the sun and staring out over all the red-tiled roofs. Then the waitress brought our appetizer...a soup full of unknown types of meat. Fortunately (or unfortunately, depending on how you look at it), I have been to the market enough times to be able to identify odd cuts of meat that we would not eat in the US and recognized them floating about my soup. For example, the spongey, white meat covered in tenticular villi on one side was intestine. The gray, somewhat translucent, fatty meat with little black things poking out of it was pig skin (the black things were HAIR). And so on and so forth. I went into denial mode and ate most of the soup, just so I could add intestine and pig skin onto my list of bizarre meats I have consumed. Most of the meat was far too chewy for my liking, but kudos to Peruvians for not wasting ANYTHING.

Then came the next big challenge...the cuy. Shortly after clearing our soup bowls (all of which were not empty except for Manchi´s, haha), the waitress brought us five plates of what looked like giant barbequed rats stuffed with a large quantity of greenish black herbs. They still had teeth and eyeballs and tiny little paws with tiny little nails, and suddenly all I could think about was my childhood friend Kyle Kavanagh´s guinea pig Henry who used to squeak excitedly at us from his cage. But being me, I ate it anyway. Once I got over the my memories of Henry, the hardest part was penetrating the charred skin and ripping the poor dead thing open with my hands (I had tried to do it with a knife and fork and was promptly corrected by Manchi, who told me I couldn´t rip the bones from the meat without using my hands). The meat had the consistency of chicken, but was more flavorful...don´t ask me how, it was just good. There wasn´t much meat on the poor thing though, so as tasty as it was, I don´t think it was worth killing the poor animal, seeing as I was still hungry afterwards. Poor Amy just kind of poked at her cuy like the biology student that she is and couldn´t really eat it because it still had a face, among other things...I had to tell her that she was awesome many times in order to make up for the fact that I dragged her up there to eat what had once been a giant, cuddly hamster. But it was an interesting cultural experience, as most of Peru has been.

written by  kfox on July 22, 2010 from Cusco, Peru
from the travel blog: Peru Adventure!
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