Today officially ended my first full week of classes in my new home of Cuzco, Peru. Its been a long, difficult, humorous and generally engaging week with ups and downs and quite a few visits to various bathrooms. Yup, you heard right, the bathroom. Not only did today mark the completion of 5 days of classes but it also marked the completion of my first week of complete and total environmental sickness. By the end of the first day of class I was beginning to feel a bit funny, a lack of appetite, a constant rumbling in my stomach and the occasional rush to the bathroom. By day 2 my body decided to pick it up a notch, really raise the bar and after a trip to the plaza during the night I found my self popping out of bed at about 12:30am and lets just say I had to make a quick decision on what to aim at the toilet...so is life in a foreign country. In any case the next few days were interesting and really peaked when I was asked to leave class early on Thursday after really outwardly expressing my discomfort, projectile vomiting in the bathroom and more or less passing out during our very important lecture. Suffice to say that night was spent watching a bootlegged Social Network, sleeping and having my host mom fret over my every pain...so is life with a middle aged Peruvian woman.
Moving away from the graphic details of my immense bodily discomfort, the day after my in-class debacle the entire program departed on a two day excursion to Calca, the same town where my market adventure developed and now the site of a 2 day music and art fest. We arrived at the sprawling house of a Swedish art professor and her Peruvian musician husband. The art professor had already been a lecturer earlier in the week for class and its safe to say that no one stayed awake for the entire talk, she is that kind of speaker. The house was of course gorgeous, the two dogs were cute and their daughter was a handful but beyond that the experience was a bit too much like elementary school for 25 independent, intelligent college students. For about 6 hours each day we "practiced" 3 different songs using our professional voices, natural talent on Incan percussion instruments and heightened aptitude for the zampona, more commonly referred to by Americans as the pan-flute. 36 hours later we were ready to perform our masterpieces around a bonfire with a grand audience of ourselves. Our teacher, thinking we were preparing to perform in Carnegie Hall forced memorization for all songs and displayed the general attitude of Johann Sebastian Bach. Well I can say with complete faith that I do not think we lived up to the expectations of Mr. Holland's Opus, but we had a lot of fun, danced around and got to yell in foreign languages (Quechua and Spanish).
After our unforgettable performance everyone was ready to leave and luckily we were able to get out a bit early and get back in time to enjoy some time at the infamous Plaza de Armas discotecas. Today was the best day yet with the family, upon waking up I ate a few hardboiled eggs, yum, and read a bit, quite exciting if I say so myself. Then it really got exciting, a couple hours after my eggs my family took me out to eat in a nearby town and they ordered me what they called a "Peruvian Platter" which is really nothing more than 6 different types of unidentifiable meat and a corn bread type substance. One type of meat was easily identifiable though, if not solely because there was a clear rodent leg sticking off the back end. Cuy, or guinea pig, tastes like a really salty type of meat with a stringy texture and strikingly resembles the actual live animal. While eating I attempted to explain to my host family that I used to have a pet guinea pig named Hunter so this was quite an emotional rollercoaster for my soft, emotional self. Either way I plowed through it and enjoyed almost every bite, except maybe the foot. After polishing off my former pet we took off to a little town nearby for desert and I could not resist buying a piece of the Obama cake, which of course in Peru where political correctness is nonexistent, was made up of a mix between brown and vanilla cake with light brown frosting. As I finished my slice o' Barack, my mom asked me if the cake was as good as my President and I had to say no because my god it might have been the most amazing thing I have ever eaten. Anyways it was quite a week filled with all types of foods, all types of people, only one type of music and a really good piece of American political history.
alpaCasey
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