Pass The Tea, Please

I´ve been thinking a lot about food and where it comes from over the past two days. There are several reasons for this.

For one, I succumbed to the enevitable but unpleasant stomach bacteria grossness common among travelers in third-world countries. Suffice it to say, I´m currently taking Cipro and have a lot of time to ponder what I could have eaten to make me feel so sick. I´m also very thankful for modern medicine.

I´m also a big fan of Campus Health. They supplied us with a handy flow chart that tells you how to treat your stomach ailments. Actually, the chart is very much like those in teen magazines where you answer personality questions and find out which celebrity you would be a perfect match for. Except, instead of finding out that you and Brad Pitt are like, totally made for each other, you find out how many milligrams of Cipro to take. Almost as much fun.

But anyways, as my stomach has been yelling at me, I´ve had time to ponder what exactly I´ve been eating here. Plus I started reading Michael Pollan´s ¨The Omnivore´s Dilemma,¨ which is pretty  much all about being an informed eater. So what exactly are we eating?

Breakfast is by far the most mundane meal of the day. Everyone eats the same thing: bread with butter or jam, washed down with tea. The bread is a crusty roll, flat and about 6 inches in diameter. It´s baked here in Ollanta by local women who sell it in the Plaza, six pieces for one sol, or about 10 cents a piece. Sometimes Kelsey and I get eggs or freshly-squeezed orange or papaya juice with our bread, but that tends to be the exception rather than the rule.

El pan, or bread, that comes with every meal.

Best breakfast ever. Omlette with avacado and bread.

I´ve sadly found that getting coffee that isn´t instant is a challenge. From what I´ve been told, Peru produces a lot of coffee, but most of it is exported and very little is actually consumed by the populace. This is pretty tragic from my perspective, but I´ve found restaurants on the Plaza that cater to tourists and serve excellent, if expensive, ¨cafe con leche.¨ Yum.

Lunch, or el almuerzo, is the biggest meal of the day. We usually eat around 1:30 when we get home from school, and the most of the family is in attendance. The food is usually served in what can only be described as a large tureen or platter. As someone astutely pointed out, you don´t see a lot of skinny Peruvians around, and we´ve learned that cleaning our plate isn´t necessary. But the after-lunch siesta, or nap, is. 

The lunch itself is by far the most varied of all those served. On festival days we usually eat a variation of the special ¨plato tipico¨ that includes cuy, rice, tortillas, seaweed, fish eggs, sausage, and a green ensalada. But on average days, we usually get a huge pile of rice served with a thick soup of meat and potatoes, or spaghetti.  

A ¨light¨ lunch of soup and fruit salad.

The best meal we´ve had in Peru was actually served by Jarrard´s host mother, when she implored us to stay for ¨un poquito,¨or a just a little bit, of food. This heaping meal included the requisite pile of rice, along with a chopped vegetable medley of potatoes, carrots, peas, and beets in a truly delicious sauce.  It has since become hard to turn down a meal at that house.

Dinner is definitely a quieter affair than lunch, which is something I really like. Usually it´s more soup or a small piece of meat, although our host family owns a restaurant and last night we had pizza. It was delightful. Jarrard was pretty jealous, and understandably so.

El pizza!

The Peruvians love their soups, and most of the time they´re pretty good. But today, Kelsey mentioned that it might be nice to eat something more solid every once in a while. If my stomach weren´t currently operating at a reduced capacity, I´d have to agree.

As for how this food is prepared and where it comes from, we´re still figuring that out. Refrigerators aren´t yet common here, and families definitely buy their produce and meat each morning at the market. If you wander to the back of the market toward the buzzing of flies, you can see animals being butchered into cuts of meat.

Cooking is still firmly situated within the realm of female responsibility here, along with cleaning, child-rearing, and laundry. And culinary traditions are definitely passed down from mother to daughter, as our host mom explained. Peruvian women don´t have it easy, but that´s a topic for another day.

Food here is pretty varied for the highland diet, and there are lots of things I still want to sample and explore. But for now, pass the tea, please.

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It´s Like a Snow Day

Kelsey and I have discovered that one of our host mother´s favorite pastimes is talking about festivals.

When conversation at a meal gets slow, all we have to do is ask her something about Cusco and festivals and she´s off. No need to even make the sentence grammatical.

She can go on for hours discussing the ¨mucho gente¨who flock to the cities for seemingly endless celebrations, the dancers, the typical food, the religious ceremonies. And she can rattle off dates of upcoming fiestas like nobody´s business.

The four-day festival honoring Choquekillka right when we arrived was clearly the big one. We were surprised by the festival last weekend with the bullfights. But when our host mom told us yesterday that there was no school today because of a festival in Cusco, we started to wonder how anyone gets anything done here.

In the first ten business days we´ve been here, children have only been required to attend school for six of those, and most will only attend five. Granted, we gather that June is a big month for these kinds of things. And we were psyched for a ¨snow day¨of sorts. But really.

So instead of heading off to school this morning, we headed to the kitchen after breakfast to help prepare a traditional Peruvian meal, or plato tipico.

One thing I´ve learned in my two weeks in Peru is that there are certain universal principles that apply to family life, no matter where you are.

You don´t need to speak Spanish to see the humor when the family discovers half-way through lunch that they´ve forgotten about granny sitting in the garden, or recognize the complete exhaustion of a young mother up with a screaming baby.

And today I found that cooking can transcend the cultural divide as well. When I was handed a knife and a huge bunch of scallions to slice, I felt right at home. Slice some tomatoes? No problem. Mash potatoes? Sure. Crack eggs? You got it.

We spent about three hours in the kitchen helping our host mom and sisters-in-law with the cooking, as we listened to the Peruvian radio, which switched back and forth between the news and Peruvian pop songs. It was a crack-up to hear rapid Spanish with occasion references to ¨OBAMA.¨

Kelsey and I most contributed to the creation of ¨tortillas,¨which I can only describe as a deep-fried cross between potato latkes and fluffy pancakes, infused with scallions. They were awesome. And I was very proud when the family complimented me on my chopping skills.

Chopping scallions in the kitchen, muy bien.

Lucky we liked the tortillas though, because I wasn´t so excited about fish eggs, seaweed, salted beef jerky, or my cuy, which still had a little clawed foot attached. Maybe it was because I´d seen the little animals swimming in marinade in a bowl on the kitchen counter earlier, or that our host mom was gnawing away on a cuy head, complete with teeth. But my usually hearty appetite was dulled a bit. Maybe next time?

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Tasty…

I´m not one to be easily grossed out by things. But I might have hit my limit today.

To be clear, it doesn´t seem like we´re living in a third-world country. Our hostel has electricity, hot water (occasionally), and indoor plumbing. You can walk across the street to the convenience store and buy a Snapple or a can of Pringles. There is internet, albeit slow, in a cafe on the Plaza. Nothing like Facebook to make you feel like you´re in the 21st century.

But there are times where we´re reminded that things are different here.

Kelsey and I went for a walk today to the ruins at the edge of town, and to get there, you walk down narrow alleyways between stone courtyard built by the Incas five centuries ago. Instead of gutters, the Incas built narrow channels along all the streets. Maybe 16 inches across and 10 inches deep, they carry water from the mountains down to the town. Very beautiful. We´ve seen people washing clothes in these channels, but have heard the water isn´t too clean.

We discovered exactly how gross those water channels could be on our walk today, when we came upon an old Quechuan lady kneeling down next to a channel. Noticing an odd smell, we looked down to see that she was butchering some sort of animal carcass and throwing the entrails into the scenic, beautiful Inca gutter. We had to sidestep pools of blood as we watched her pull intestines out of an indeterminable animal.

Then, we headed home for lunch. Our host mother, Maria, was eating with us, when someone in the kitchen called for her in a fairly frantic-sounding voice. She ran off, only to return about five minutes later, and informed us that the cuy had been fighting.

Yes, apparently the guinea pigs in the kitchen had been fighting, so she went and put an end to it.

Now, Kelsey and I have eaten cuy already, and found it pretty tasty. But it was served to us as a very generic-looking piece of fried meat. It didn´t bear any traces of childhood pets at the time.

But when we went into the kitchen and realized that the potato sack in the corner was holding several cute, fluffy, chirping animals that would soon be lunch, it became a different story altogether.

We made a lot of noise and took a picture of our furry friends. Our Peruvian family clearly thought we were nuts. Stupid Americans freaking out of a few guinea pigs. They cackle hysterically when we tell them American children keep these things as pets.

Not going to be looking like this much longer...

But it gets even better. We come home for dinner, and Maria shows us a bandage on her thumb. It´s the cuy, she tells us. We grimace, assuming she cut herself with a knife while cooking them up. But no, in fact, she was pulling apart the guinea pig heads, and the teeth cut her hand.

At this moment I realized two things. One, I should really take a greater interest in where my food comes from. And two, we are really, really far away from the United States. Where people infrequently butcher live animals in their kitchens. Or in their driveways.

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Bailamos en el Fiesta!

Yesterday was the last day of the festival and therefore the most elaborate and wild day of partying yet. After eating cuy for lunch, which was actually pretty good, if a little greasy and gamey, Kelsey and I went down to Jarrard´s house for the festivities.

Now, to be clear, getting to Jarrard´s house requires about twenty minutes of walking through Ollanta and down these humungous steps that were built by the Incas. What were probably very intimidating to the conquistadors attacking the city five centuries ago is also intimidating to Jarrard, who climbs them daily to get to Ollanta. And to those of us who visit him.

There´s a church near Jarrard´s house that was the main site for the festivities in the afternoon. We made friends with a little girl who was fascinated by our cameras, our shoes, and pretty much everything we had with us. Jarrard wasn´t exactly inconspicuous with his large camera, tripod, and fuzzy microphone, which children found fascinating.

Side note: Some of us, ahem, Kelsey and Jarrard, seem unable to distinuish children´s ages from their phyiscal appearances. However, I consider this to be a personal skill of mine. I have now begun shouting approximate ages when I see children in the Plaza or around town, and Kelsey or Jarrard will then ask their ages to check me. It´s probably about time that we start working.

The festival was crazy. Everyone was eating and drinking chicha, and there was more dancing. The entire ceremony was in Quechua, meaning we were totally lost as to what was going on. Quechua is crazy. But after some sort of religious ceremony that involved a lot of food and stringing a chicken up on a rope, they hung a piece of maize from a rope and men on horseback rode by and tried to grab it. Drunk men on horseback is pretty much universally funny.

(Some of the dancers getting ready to climb on each other´s backs and try to grab the maize. Epic fail.)

Kelsey and I headed back up the hill of death to Ollanta for dinner, and Jarrard met us in the Plaza later where the festivities continued. All of the dancers had danced up the hill in a huge procession to the square, where the party got started around ten p.m. The three of us were watched them wind their way through the square when suddenly the masked men grabbed Kelsey and me and we found ourselves dancing in the Plaza with crazy Peruvian dancers. Jarrard was all smug that he hadn´t been grabbed to dance, when of course, he was sandwiched by two very old, very short men, and was forced into the fray as well. It was such a blast.

Then they set of ginormous fireworks that were fairly frightening considering their size and proximity to where we were. There is a reason that you´ve never stood directly under fireworks before. But we survived, and they were admittedly very cool, if loud. We called it quits around eleven, meaning we will never escape our reputation as wimps. Oh well.

This morning we headed over to the primary school where we´ll all be teaching in the mornings. Supposedly because it´s a private as opposed to a public school, it´s more organized and structured, but CATCCO hasn´t placed any volunteers there yet, so it´s just a guess. Hopefully I´ll be able to go over to the preschool, or el jardin, three days a week and do art classes for about 45 minutes, which should be great.

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