Running into the sun

Yesterday I did something really brave: I went for a run.

I haven´t gone for a run in the month I´ve been here, for several reasons. It´s not acceptable for girls to wear shorts here. I feel nervous carrying my iPod around. Peruvians do not seem to exercise. We´re reasonably active in our daily lives.

But our diet of rice, potatoes, pasta, creamy soup, french fries, and bread is really starting to gross me out. Plus the Peruvians serve mayonnaise as a condiment with almost everything. Yesterday I ate what I´m fairly sure was liver just so I didn´t have to face another plate of pasta. I never finish all the food they give me here, but it´s hard not to worry about my health a little bit.

So the combination of the lack of nutritional meals and feeling of going stir-crazy led me to head out to the roads of Ollanta. And boy, did it feel good.

I didn´t wear shorts, nor did I attempt to run through the construction zone going on in the Plaza. But I did wear my iPod, if only to drown out the occasional whistle from men with nothing better to do than stand on street corners and loiter. And I ignored all the looks from Peruvians who were clearly wondering where the fire was.

The hardest part was running on cobblestones. All the streets in town are crafted from flat rocks with cement between the cracks, but it´s pretty bumpy going and I had to focus hard not to trip or twist an ankle. I thought of the rocks as my hurdles.

I headed through town and down the long road toward Jarrard´s house and the bridge crossing the river. Once I crossed the bridge and hit the dirt road outside town, it was absolutely peaceful and easier to run on than the cobblestones.

I only made it about twenty minutes outside of town before I felt completely exhuasted. The sun was beating down and breathing hard at 10,000 feet is no picnic. But it felt good to sweat and make some tracks.

It was probably the most idyllic run I´ve ever been on. Starting with my jaunt through picturesque Ollanta, I found myself rocking out to Beyonce as I ran on cobblestones, stretching on a 500 year-old Inca bridge, and waving to the train heading to Macchu Picchu as I passed entire families harvesting corn. Kind of beats a regular old track.

I´d forgotten how restorative a run can be, and I hope to make this part of my routine from now on. Maybe I´ll even stop and work on the Single Ladies dance on the Inca bridge next time. Who knows.

Jarrard´s picture of the road outside his house where I ran.

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Bienvenidos a Cusco

Today we went to Cusco, leaving Ollanta for the first time since we arrived three weeks ago. Originally the plan was to buy our entrance tickets to Machu Pichu today at the ticket office in Cusco, but we discovered you can only buy them three days in advance. We´re going in July, so no luck there. But we decided to go anyway.

We left in the morning, taking a collectivo, or basically a taxi, to Cusco. It was about a beautiful 90 minute drive through the Urubumba valley and up through farmland and mountains to Cusco, which at 10,800 feet sits a good 1,000 feet higher than Ollanta.

We arrived around ten at the Plaza de Armas. The festival of Inti Raymi, which celebrates the winter solstice and the sun god Inti, is happening next Wednesday. It´s arguably one of Cusco´s biggest festivals of the year, and the partying had already started this weekend. We saw all sorts of crazy parades, and apparently there were fireworks tonight in the Plaza. Peruvians take their festivals seriously.

Parade through the streets, complete with llamas.

 

I deftly tore the map of Cusco in two right as we arrived. Nice.

Me and Kelsey in the Plaza.

Me and Jarrard in the Plaza.

We first headed to the Mercado deSan Pedro, which is a huge tented market a few blocks from the Plaza. It was awesome. Inside were stations selling fruits, vegetables, meat, trinkets, fabric, clothing, cooking utensils, and everything else it is possible to sell in a stall.

We saw some weird stuff. Several animals in the process of being cut up, the butchers wieldingsaws with impressive skill. A disembodied cow nose sitting on a platter. Crazy vegetables that none of us could identify, loaves of bread bigger than my face, piles of fish staring at you with their squiggly eyes, and more wheels of cheese than in the Bethesda Whole Foods. It was a foodie´s heaven.

Flower stall at the mercado.

 

Piles and piles of kalmata olives! Heaven!

 

Squash.

 

This not-so-little piggie went to market...

 

Checking out the crazy produce.

One thing I´ve discovered here is the art to bargaining. There are people all over the streets of the city and in the market trying to sell you things, and all of them are willing to make a deal. It makes buying things so much more fun when you get fifty percent knocked off the price. Then you convert the price from soles to dollars and realize you just purchased your new necklace, scarf, whatever, for the price of a soda in the U.S. Sweet.

 It´s really shocking how cheap everything. I paid for a 90 minute taxi ride to Cusco and back, a huge lunch in a nice restaurant, admission to a fifteenth century church, and a ton of gifts for myself and family members. It was maybe $70 for the entire day. I anticipate serious sticker shock upon returning to the U.S.

I can´t reveal too many of the cool things I bought, because some of our readers may be future beneficiaries of these gifts. But one thing I´m definitely keeping for myself are my ceramic chanchos, or pigs. For 9 soles, or about 3 dollars each, I got two ceramic pigs, ten inches high and twelve inches long. I am in love with them.

Me and the chanchos!

Every house in Ollanta and the surrounding area has a pair of these guys on their roof. I´m not sure what their significance is, but I´m going to find out. Kelsey and Jarrard thought I was nuts for buying them, and I probably am. I have no idea how I´m flying home with them. But the chanchos and I have now bonded, so there´s no turning back. Lily, hope you don´t mind some ceramic pigs in our room next year…

After making a bunch of purchases at the mercado, including a huge wheel of cheese for Jarrard, some earrings for Kelsey, and presents for various friends and family, we headed through the city to the Iglesia de San Blas, the oldest church in Cusco and site of one of the most beautiful wood-carvings in the Americas.

It was a long walk there, skirting around the parade route and heading up a steep hill to where the  Iglesia  sits on a hill at the edge of the city. But it was worth it. Not only was admission only 7.50 soles, or about $2.50, it was empty, refreshingly chilly, absent of tourists, and breathtakingly beautiful. The three of us had the sanctuary all to ourselves for an hour, and audio tours in English were free.

The church itself was a pretty plain, whitewashed building, but the alter at the front is a monolithic structure gilded entirely in gold and full of  statues of saints, angels, animals, and Peruvian foods and plants. But San Blas is famous for the pulpit, supposedly carved by a leper entirely out of a huge ceder tree trunk. It was the most intricate wood-carving I´ve ever seen, and looked to rival some of the similar European structures from my art history textbook this year. Jarrard snuck some prohibited pictures, and we spent way longer than we´d anticipated in San Blas. Best $2.50 I´ve ever spent.

We then headed for lunch at the outskirts of Cusco. Jarrard´s Spanish teacher, Christina, suggested this restaurant specifically, so we hopped in a taxi and hoped for the best. The guy took us to what seemed like a sketchy remote construction site, but once we walked down the street a little we found Las Machitas. And boy are we glad we did.

I finally got to taste ceviche, which I´ve been dying to try since the word appeared on my seventh grade Spanish vocabulary sheet. I also got paella, fried yucca, a mix of shellfish, and chicha morada, a popular non-alcoholic fruit juice made from black corn. Kelsey got trucha, or trout, and Jarrard had a tasty pile of fried shellfish. It was divine. And our total bill was only 75 soles, or $25.

We were the only gringos in the place and definitely got some strange looks, but the bathroom had toilet paper and it was the best seafood I´ve ever had. We made a pact to return before flying out of Cusco in July.

Jarrard and me at lunch.

 

Arguing over dollars to sols conversions.

After lunch we wandered around the mercado and the Plaza before rounding up a convi to take us home. As the car wound its way through the mountains, we watched the sun set over the Andes and had a dance party to Peruvian pop music in the backseat. Pretty much the perfect day.

Prehistoric museum in Cusco.

Tall people are not meant for Peruvian doors.

On one of the blocked-off streets in downtown.

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¨I Don´t Think I Connect With This World¨

I´m fairly certain that I could live quite happily here in Ollanta for a long time, with only a few necessary modifications, and no, it´s not because they have cheap avocados in the market. I could live with the instant coffee and the weird Spanish keyboard and the dusty cobblestone streets. I could adjust to reading American newspapers entirely online. Maybe. I could even get used to carrying around my own toilet paper. (Who knew that there are people in the world who don´t consider it a bathroom essential?)

But I digress. I think the hardest thing about living here, for me anyways, would be the language barrier. I´m starting to understand other people most of the time, and I can usually make out what I want to say. But my concoctions are usually pretty ugly, and I´ve been frustrated by my limited vocabulary.

I love words. I like learning new words and looking them up and finding out where they come from. I like trying them out on people and figuring out how to pronounce them. As my sister Julia would say, words are my jam.

So to come to a country where my descriptive abilities are limited to ¨pretty,¨ ¨funny,¨ ¨clean,¨ and ¨magnificent,¨ give or take a few words, is frustrating. I like telling long stories and sarcastic jokes, both of which are hard on a limited repertoire. Every time I learn a new word, I try to repeat it and fix it in my brain so it doesn´t leave, but usually it does. It has taken me a lifetime to build my English vocabulary, so I guess it´ll take more than eight weeks to build a functional one in Spanish. I think I´ll have to start by finding another synonym for ¨bonita.¨

And bonita just didn´t cut it for our experiences today. None of us are quite used to living at 9,000 feet yet, and we get out of breath walking up stairs. (Which I actually fell down this morning. Ironic that my first mishap was so mundane.) But we wanted to check out the amazing ruins surrounding Ollanta and not feel quite as lazy as usual. So we went up about ten minutes to the free ruins at the edge of town. Wow.

This town is situated in the Sacred Valley, but it feels like you´re in a bowl of mountains. The Incans used Ollanta as a defensive fort, building terraces from the river up to the town and on the hills of the surrounding mountains as defenses against the conquistadors. They held off the Spanish for a very long time, and it´s easy to see why. It´s freaking hard to climb those terraces. And we aren´t even carrying armor.

But the view from the ruins was magnificent. From where we were, we had a view of the entire town and surrounding hills. It was so beautiful, in fact, I was at a loss for words. In either language.

Exploring the Incan fortress. Building with stone was clearly their jam.

Looking out over the town, and the more well-known ruins on the other side.

¡Hola Ollanta!

Climbing around.

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