Blog #6

Greetings everyone on this the fine March afternoon (or night, Abhishek)! Can you believe it already? Wow… I’ve been here seven weeks today…  That’s crazy. I’ve only got two months left here?!? Hehe, and of those, about 20 days are officially free and 5 more are reserved for El Camino Inka (the Inca Trail). I can’t wait to travel more.

First off, since I’ve gotten several e-mails about the earthquake in Chile, I am completely fine. I was dead asleep that night and didn’t feel anything, though those who know me well know that for me to have woken up the entire apartment would have had to collapse. And I slept soundly enough that night that I’m not sure even that would have done it.

In other news…

Last week I finished my Boleto Turistico!! I went to the Pachacutec Monument (less than exciting, but I wanted the hole punch) and the Centro Qosqo de Arte Native with the Europeans I met. That was a bunch of native dances from Cusco and the Sacred Valley, which was pretty cool. After the show, we went out to dinner to this restaurant called ‘Govinda’. Yeah, I thought it was Indian too. FAIL!! ;-( My stomach was going crazy, so I got some lassi, but it didn’t really do it for me. You’re also going to think I’m insane, but I miss the heat! It’s been raining pretty much constantly for the last week again, which means that the temperature is constantly around 50F + rain +wind

Overall, I’d say the boleto is worth the money because the ruins are amazing. The museums are nice, and it’s helpful to know the history so when you go to the ruins you know what you’re looking at, but they were a bit repetitive, so going to every single one isn’t necessarily the most useful. I think if you plan well, you could finish the boleto in 3-4 days…

Tuesday and Wednesday were exercises in self-control since what we’re learning in ‘Development’ blatantly contradicts anything I’ve ever heard, read, seen first hand, or concluded about Andean women. This includes several courses, discussions with professors who have lived, studied, and researched in the Andes for decades, all of my linguistic training, a couple dozen articles, plus whatever my observations have been here in Peru for the last 6 weeks. Not only that, but also every time I brought up a counter example in class (no, women are not chained to stoves barefoot and pregnant, they basically run the markets, reconstructed roads, walls, and stoves with and without our help, are physically among the strongest people - female or male - that I’ve ever met… I could go on about this for a while) the ‘maestrA’ (I refuse to call her a professor since I seriously doubt she has even a masters let alone a Ph.D) threw one of Russ’s categories at me ‘Oh, well it doesn’t matter that a 60 year old woman took charge of reconstructing a road, she only did it because her husband was drunk’ or ‘actually, it’s only recently that women started coming into markets and out of the home, and they’re only there because they’re husbands force them’. Really? REALLY? GAH!! Open your eyes and look around. Go to the library right under this classroom, which is one of, if not THE biggest resource in the humanities and social sciences of the Andes and open up a book. Plus, the teacher got mad at me… I might have been asking for it a bit, but I have little patience for stupidity and even less for ignorance. She told me that there hadn’t been much research done about traditional views on sex-based gender… again, REALLY?! Gah.

-END RANT-

On the plus side, I did discover that canned evaporated soymilk does not taste nearly as bad as it sounds. I’m still looking forward to real milk, but at about a sol (35 cents) a can, I have to acknowledge that it’s not a horrendous substitute. Plus, that way, I can blame any funkiness in the taste on the ‘soy’ aspect. The only problem now is that my almari/armario/whatever that word is in English… wardrobe? smells vaguely of soymilk and peanuts since you can’t reclose the can and I like peanuts…

And, do not underestimate how awesome Thursday was.

Remember that trip to India last summer? While I was researching for a submission for UF’s Journal of Undergraduate Research? That afternoon, I got an email saying that not only was it accepted, but mine was one of the 2 best qualitative papers!!! Not only does this give me $250 on top of the $500 for getting published, but it also means that I’M PUBLISHED!! Can you believe it? This is incredibly exciting. Lol, I got the e-mail while waiting for class to start and I just started jumping around the room and completely startled the other students who are used to me being at least moderately preserved.

So Thursday night we celebrated, which means we went dancing, which means I stayed out until 5 am and had to get up at 7am to build stoves in Maras. That was a terrible idea, though at the same time completely worth it.

I realized once again on Friday morning how perfectly Alice describes my life.” I give myself very good advice, but I very seldom follow it. That explains the trouble that I’m always in”. For the record, staying out all night before having to do physical labor for the better part of the next day is not the best idea. Of course, the problem with bad ideas is they rarely seem so unintelligent while they’re actually being carried out. Just like things that seem brilliant at parties (and only at parties) are suddenly impossible to rationalize the next morning.

Friday was spent building more stoves in Maras… and being the genius I am I forgot my inhaler. Problem: when there is a fire in an enclosed space, smoke cannot escape. Therefore, it rises and hangs out precisely where I am on the most rickety ladder known to humanity trying to construct the chimney. Given the amount of smoke, that could have ended terribly. (Don’t worry, Mum, I’m fine now). That was also the first time I’d built a stove by myself, so I was pretty excited. I was also excited by the four teeny kittens playing with a burlap sack in the corner, and the guinea pigs running all over the kitchen. No, I have not eaten guinea pig. No, I’m not sure if I intend to, but yes, I have been told the best place within an hour of Cusco to consume said pet. Apparently they eat cat in Lima also… that was surprising to hear.

That day was actually pretty awesome. The mud forming the stove’s platform was still very wet, and since the woman whose home we were working in spoke only a few words of Spanish (Quechua was her primary language), Lalo, the project coordinator here in Cusco, had to ask her in Quechua to sprinkle sand over part of it to raise it up so I could start building. I’m not really sure how I understood that… but when I asked Lalo in Spanish if I was right, he just stared at me blankly. That was cool. I’m reasonably sure I just got the nouns, verbs, and body language to figure it out though. I really don’t know anything about Quechua grammar other than what little it has in common with Jaqaru.

 At one point, while Lalo was helping me nail in the wires that secure the chimney, the entire thing started to tip over! We both said ‘oh shit’ and started reinforcing it with mud as fast we could, but the woman started laughing hysterically at us and saying ‘oh shit’ over and over again. I don’t think she knew what it meant, but it was pretty funny. Like the Belgian who kept saying ‘demmit!’ while we were playing cards last week. After our project, the bus dropped a few of us off in the square. The other students hadn’t seen the Salineras yet, so we went back there.

Another benefit of being brown in a group of Caucasians: the man working at the boleteria (ticket booth) thought I was the guide! He wouldn’t let me pay, and wouldn’t listen when I tried to explain that I was a student too. Lol, it was actually pretty funny to watch, though I did feel kind of bad for benefiting from my skin tone. But hey, I could get used to being respected more for my sex and skin tone rather than less. From there, we walked the 9 kilometers to Urubamba and caught a bus back to Cusco. Between sleeping for about 2 hours the night before and building a stove the next morning, I slept like a log that night.

Saturday, we were up at 6:30 again to go to Oropesa and construct another wall. I now have a whole new respect for cement mixers.

Allow me to explain precisely why:

(1)   Rocks are heavy. Really heavy. And so is dirt. And so is water. When you mix all those together, you get the neutron star stuff that’s dense enough to turn the Earth into Swiss cheese.

(2)   Mixing said really heavy stuff with shovels and then carting it 150 feet to be dumped on top of giant rocks while getting sunburned inspire of 20 layers of sunscreen is far from fun.

 There were some other volunteers there from the US and Australia who were supposed to be feeding lunch to the kids at the orphanage, but some of them came to help us with the wall as well. I also found out that Oslo (‘bear’ in Spanish), a German shepherd, ate the parrot, and that the father cat ate the cute little kitten in my picture… L

I also spent about 3 hours playing foosball on Saturday night/Sunday morning. Do not underestimate how awesome that was. Even if the music was terrible that night.

Sunday I slept most of the day. This is not an exaggeration, though it rained fairly hard all then and Monday, so it’s not necessarily bad.

Oh! I also got news that I was accepted to teach in Hong Kong next summer! I haven’t heard back from the programs in India or Indonesia, but teaching physics in Hong Kong sounds better than learning Mandarin in Taiwan, so I don’t think I’m going to finish my application for that program. So that was good to hear.

More has happened in the last 3 days, but I’ll catch up on that next Monday.

Thanks for (virtually) joining me on my adventures, and I hope all’s still well wherever in the world you are.

-Geeta