June 8th, 2011

June 8^th, 2011

            The mornings in Cusco are absolutely freezing! I actually love the weather here right now. I do not like being hot, so the briskness is lovely for me. There is a drastic temperature change each day though because t does get very hot in the daytime. Today only Rosanna, Alyson and I made it in to language class today, but it ended up still being a great class. Even though there is only about six of us in each class to begin with, to have only three people today made the learning very intimate. Every body is getting sick and dropping like flies. I actually just found out one girl in our group who had been sick had to have an appendectomy because her sickness was actually appendicitis.  So many people have been in out of the hospital it feels like and it’s a bit unnerving.

            For culture class our teacher wanted to get us out of the class for some experiential learning and culture exposure, rather than reading pages of history to us, that at this point is very redundant. Our class took cabs to the cemetery in Lima for our field trip. It was pretty neat, and far different from cemeteries in the United States. This cemetery is for the wealthier people, but there is another one further outside Cusco for the poorer people. Visiting the cemetery was very interesting. There were a lot of mausoleums, but in addition to the mausoleums, there were walls and walls of above ground graves. It is a bit hard to explain. The “walls” were concrete and on each one there were dozens of windows that had space inside. Inside the glass the families put decorations, flowers, and tokens for their deceased. What was really neat about this kind of cemetery was you were able to get such a sense for who that person was and what they loved by looking at their grave because it was very personal.

            We came home for another very strange lunch. Then I showered. We also have hot water in our house, which I hear a lot of people also currently do not have access to.  So what we lack in edible food, we make up for in wifi and hot water. It’s a pretty fair exchange I suppose. Brielle and I showered up and then the boys came over to hang out before we all had to head back to Amouta for a movie about terrorism in Peru. I ended up not being able to stay for the movie unfortunately because Rosanna was not feeling very good and needed to go home but didn’t want to cab back alone so I went with her. I tried getting back in time to catch some of the film but after I walked up Calle Seucio, the big wooden doors were closed so it looked like everyone had already left.  It was only about nine, and I was hoping to catch my crew coming down the hill from the school to the Plaza, but it didn’t work out like I had hoped and I didn’t run into them. And, my phone has been acting weird lately and won’t send text messages, so I was phoneless. I just grabbed a coffee at McDonalds and sat on a bench by myself in the Plaza de Armas for a few minutes to absorb my surroundings. Then I decided just to go home early to get some work done and get to sleep earl because I feel like I am always so exhausted here!