The first week with my host family has been better than I could have hoped. My family is great, a bunch of women really, makes me feel like i´m in an older version of Newberry. Evelia is our host mom, she is a retired elementary teacher. She has a daughter Cynthia, who isn´t around much do to school and work, but her daughter, Evelita, (little Evelia) is five years old and adorable. She teases us and we play with her, its amazing how childhood play and the imagination are almost universal. We also have Evelias older sister, Mecha, who is a little off her rocker. Then Mecha´s goddaugthers, Evette and Pancha help with a lot of the household chores. Mike and I each have our own room and mine used to the nursery, as it is decorated with Whinnie the Pooh. Those of you who have known me for a while can guess how comforting this is to me! I love Pooh! We share a bathroom and the rest of our family has a seperate section of the house. They have a TV and a phone, and even hot showers, which I wasn´t sure I was going to get. They have a computer too, but no internet. The TV has no cable, but we watch movies, which are insanely cheap down here, copied illeagaly some of them, but cheap. The family also speaks some Quechwa, which is the native language of the Inkas. It is very hard but I am catching on to a few key words, about as much as the five year old knows! The food is my biggest complaint. They eat rice and bread and potoates in the same meal, and all I can think is where are the veggies! I try not to eat all of carbs, and there are always bananas on the table, so I will eat one of those instead. I´m not going hungry though, that is for sure.
On Tuesday Mike and I went to four of the main cathedrals to tour. They were amazing. The alters were up to fifty feet high and made of wood, then plaster, and plated in gold. The cathedrals had alters to all their different patron saints that were just wonderful. We learned a lot about the mix of native and catholic culture, and our guide were point out where Pachamama, the mother earth in the incan religon, was present on the alters. Pictures were prohibited, but I snuck some from my pocket, and a lot of them have the no picture sign in them, so I will get those up later. They also had a painting of the last supper, done by cusquen artist Marcos Zapata, who repalced the bread at center of the table with cuy, or guinea pig and is the delicacy of the native culture. It was cool to see how the people have kept their tradtional believes and mixed christianity with it. For example, the apus, or mountains are sacred to the natives. Knowing this, the catholics put a bunch of crosses on the mountain tops, to symbolize the message and spirit of the catholic god was the spirit being recieved from these sites.
We got up early this morning to play ¨fronton¨. It is basically raquetball against a single wall. So at six thirty we got up, ran to the park with Evelia, and played for about an hour. The only issue was that there was a construction site behind the wall so if it went to the side or over we had to crawl through the side, looking for our ball. Their dog, Pituco, which means little gentlemen, was great and would retrieve the ball if it was within his sight. He is very cute and well behaved.
School so far has been just okay. Four hours a day of one class is a bit much, but I am starting to get used to it. Today we have a field trip to the incan mueseum instead of class, so that will be a nice change. Our class is Andean Culture and while some parts of it are great, at other times I can´t imagine why I care about comparing pottery that was created five thousand years before Christ.
We felt really bad yesterday, as it was laundry day. They wash all the clothes by hand, and we had some stinky stuff from the Inca Trail. We are going to give Evette and Pancha, who did the laundry, a tip when it is all dry and done. That is customary but also it was not a pretty sight.(mom think ty´s soccer socks, after being in his bag a week... eww). School plans activiites for us during the night.
Tomorrow night is a class on making chocolate, and of course i´m psyched! I haven´t had many sweets in the past two weeks, im talking one ice cream cone, three cookies and some jello, so i am ready for some chocolate! We live quite a ways from school, almost forty five minutes of walking, so we take a taxi most of the time. We have noticed the taxi drivers try to rip us off, saying that the price is almost double of what it should be if we dont correct them. I guess that is part of being a tourist. Peru does not have much racial diversity, almost all of the people are either strictly natives or a mix, but is almost impossible to tell the difference. I get a lot of stares when I talk in spanish, as they assume that most white people are one toursits, and two, english speaking. The truth is, the kids from Alma are the only people from the US at our school. There are a bunch of English, French and Germans too and they all speak spanish!
Mike and I are planning on making dinner for our family, a traditional USA dinner, but we are having trouble thinking of anything besides steak or hamburgers, and were hoping to be a little more creative, so let me know if you have any good ideas.
Well that is all for now, their big family meal of the day is lunch, so we must get back to our house.
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