Closure

It occurs to me that I have been home from Peru for two weeks, and since by now people have pretty much stopped asking me how the trip was, I can assume that people stopped looking at my blog long ago. Be that the case or not, I am about to overload it with several new posts all at once. There are three episodes that I have been meaning to share but I just have not gotten around to it, and since I am feeling a need for closure on the blog and on the trip too, in a way, I have decided to concentrate them all into one cluttered finale. So here goes. This is the first of many posts. I hope that if anybody bothers to stop by here again, you will enjoy the views and the commentary.

Postscript to Huasao

The day before we went to Huasao to have our fortunes read in coca leaves, we listened to this song, written in the early '90s. Because of the controversial nature of anything related to the coca plant, especially here in the States, the video was censured by MTV. Good thing we have youtube. But be warned: it's catchy, if a bit cheesy, and it will stick in your head like peanut butter to the roof of your mouth, which doesn't really ever happen to me, but I kinda like the expression anyway and nothing better is coming to me at the moment. Enjoy!

In which part of the universe's body lies Provo?

On Saturday morning I left my home in Cusco, nearly tearing up on the way to the airport at the thought of leaving and not riding down the Avenida de la Cultura again (not until I get back down there, anyway). It is by no means a charming street, it is actually fairly ugly and very noisy, and a few minutes of walking along it makes breathing difficult, not just from the altitude, but rather from the myriad little cars constantly motoring along without regulated emissions. It is funny how you can get attached to a place just because you see it and hear it and smell it and feel it every day for some number of days, and not until you leave and you are abruptly faced with its absence do you realize how much it had really become a part of you. It is like that with Cusco. I was never totally enchanted by the place itself, nor is it necessarily my favorite city, but a bit of it has definitely stuck with me. Somehow I know that I will go back someday. I think that it is just that way with places that really get under your skin.

I finally arrived home late Sunday afternoon. The transit consisted more of waiting around for flights than actually flying, and there was an afternoon in Lima involved, more on that when I get around to it. Luckily nobody seems to enforce carry-on baggage restrictions, since after I checked two stuffed-nearly-to-the-point-of-exploding bags I still had a backpack in similar condition, plus a small purse, and I was lugging around a cajón most of that time.

It is good to be home, but transitions are never easy. I am still getting used to it again. The colors, the rhythm, the flavors, the structures, everything is different and, for the moment, "foreign". I am sure that it will all seem normal again soon, but one thing is for sure: the travel bug in me is alive and well and more restless than ever. I am already itching (no, it is not just the flea(?) bites) to get out and explore again, to see and experience something different. Maybe that is part of why I am making a long drive to Idaho tomorrow, just to turn around and do it again to come back the next day. Maybe there are other reasons, too.

There are a bunch of pictures and some stories that I did not get a chance to share before I left; now that I am back I am hoping to get them up here for you to see, so stay tuned and V, get your comments ready!

Lunch in Tipón

The Huasao trip did not end just like that. Before returning to Cusco we hopped on a minibus to Tipón, the region's cuy capital. Cuy, as you might guess from the first picture, is the Spanish word for guinea pig; a cuyería, in turn, serves fresh roasted cuyes. We figured we might as well give it a try while we are here, and it made for a great outing (beats sitting in a freezing classroom for four hours).















Jeanie aka Shimmy, Timo, and Libia, playing the sapo game while waiting for lunch to be served.







There's the sapo. Beneath him is a drawer with several compartments, each giving a certain number of points to whoever tosses a metal disk into it.






What does it taste like? Honestly, a lot like chicken.

Huasao: fauna and flora

Scenes from Huasao's main road, which branches off from the highway, which you can sort of see in the last picture. You already know that I could not possibly post new pictures without including a botanical theme.

Huasao

Last week in class we were studying Andean medicine, complete with a trip to the market to learn about medicinal plants and a whole day dedicated to the Coca leaf. We also learned a bit about magical-religious medicine, the kind that the shamans practice. Just reading and talking about it in class, though, was not enough. We had to get some real-life experience, so we took a bus down the road to Huasao, where we visited a shaman who reads people's fortunes in Coca leaves. Seriously. My classmate Jeanie, our teacher Libia, my housemate Timo and I made the trip. Jeanie went first, and the poor guy had enough trouble with Spanish as it was (his principal language being Quechua), let alone with crazy Anglo names. For the rest of the day she was known as "Shimmy". When the shaman tried to pronounce her full name, which could be a tongue-twister even for native English-speakers, I was struggling to keep from laughing and would have been fine had I not seen Libia next to me covering her face and shaking with laughter herself. I lost it, and I felt terrible; Libia is sure that he is never going to let her in again. I would love to show you a picture of the room we were in, the walls covered with still-life paintings and images of Catholic saints who overlook numerous ceremonies in which the shaman invokes Pachamana (Mother Earth), but I thought that taking a picture would be terribly disrespectful, especially once I had snickered at the shaman's rendition of Jeanie's full name. It was a good thing that Timo told him that he was from "Holanda" (Spanish for Holland) and not "Utrecht" (Dutch for impossible for a Spanish-speaker to pronounce). Following are a few pictures of Huasao houses.

Machu Picchu: people

The last MP post, I promise. From top to bottom: proof that I was really there (or is that photoshopped?); our entertaining guide Julio, who walked around with an orange flag and a black umbrella, reminding me both of Under the Tuscan Sun and of the Baltimore Orioles; my classmate Jeanie being studious and writing down all the stuff Julio had just taught us; Timo trying out the Incan playground.