Peruvian media: ¨Vecinos¨and ¨El Rey de Pop¨

One thing I can´t really get used to here is the total lack of newspapers and my diminished connection to ¨the outside world.¨ At home I read at least two print newspapers a day, plus a variety of online publications, and the occasional radio or tvbroadcast. I feel like I´m constantly in a race to keep up with everything that´s going on in the world.

Here, it´s a different story. There are no print newspapers where we are, and even in Cusco, one of the largest cities in Peru, the main newspaper rivals my hometown Bethesda Gazette for hard-hitting news coverage. I picked up a copy when we were there last weekend and the front page story was about senior citizens taking classes at the University. Not exactly Pulitzer worthy.

Supposedly only Lima has a decent newspaper, and transportation costs are too high to ship them to other cities in Peru. So most Peruvians get their news from the radio. I´ve tried to listen to it myself, but it often covers futbol games, plays popular love songs, and shouts in rapid Spanish that I can´t understand. It´s rough.

Television is another way people get access to the news, but it´s only mildly more informative. It´s usually tuned to the soap opera channel, and Kelsey and I have gotten very attached to ¨Vecinos,¨ or Neighbors, the popular telenovela here. We can´t always understand much of it, but you really don´t need the dialogue to follow along. The basic plot is that all the woman wear little clothing and have torrid affairs with doctors, policemen, doormen, other women´s husbands, or pretty much any man they can find. They then get caught in the throes of romance by someone else, and drama ensues. It´s extremely entertaining, and our family follows it religiously.

As for the news broadcasts, they´re pretty limited to local news. We haven´t heard much about the struggle in the Amazon between the government and the indigenous peoples, and I´ve had to check out the New York Times online to learn more. I did watch Peruvian televisioncoverage of Michael Jackson´s death, which was pretty interesting. They kept showing clips of the Thriller music video and yammering about ¨el rey de pop,¨ or king of pop.

No mention of the child molestation stuff. I don´t think Peruvians are very open talking about that kind of thing. Some Peruvian pop singer just died and it turns out she was a lesbian, and people here are very shocked by this. Interesting.

Online newspapers are great, but with internet a dollar an hour and high-speed a rarity, it´s hard being connected. So as much as my Spanish has improved from ¨Vecinos,¨ I´m excited to head back to American newspapers and more reliable news coverage.

Read Full Post »

My Love-Hate Relationship With Clase de Español

I just registered for a Spanish class for the fall, and am having seriously mixed feelings.

Over the course of my academic career, my Spanish experiences have been spotty, to say the least. I´ve taken 12 semesters of Español since seventh grade, with varying levels of success and quality of instructors.

On one hand, all this Spanish has served me well. I´m often suprised by the extent of my vocabulary. Someone will ask me how to say something and the Spanish word will just pop into my head for no reason. Sometimes I won´t have used the word in years, but I´ll find it hanging out in my brain. This is the best case scenario.

But the downside of taking so much Spanish with so little consistency is that I have verb forms floating around my head like T-Pain on a boat. I can always come up with the verb, but whether I can conjugate it is anyone´s guess. People are forgiving, but there are times when it can be disastrous.

For instance, I was coloring with Jarrard´s host sister, Paulita, who is two years old. She was drawing a cat, or gato, (creatively named gato,) when I asked her why her cat didn´t have a head. But I used the wrong verb form and ended up asking her why she didn´t have a head. Whoops.

It´s certainly not my various Spanish teachers faults that I can´t conjugate verbs. That´s on me, more or less. But when I got here, I realized that I´d spent the last year of Spanish at UNC doing virtually no speaking in class. Aside from one or two formal oral interviews, I had not really been asked to formulate ideas in Spanish on the spot.

It definitely took a couple of weeks to get used to talking and thinking in Spanish, and it´s something I wish I´d done more of last year. My classes were heavy on grammar, which is great, but if you can´t produce this grammar in a conversation, what´s the point?

So I´m heading back to UNC Spanish, if somewhat reluctantly. It seems pointless to go back to learning the imperfect subjunctive when I just need to nail down the preterite and expand my vocabulary. But by the end of my eight weeks here, I´ll be on the cusp of actually being pretty functional in Spanish. It would be stupid to quit when I´m ahead, especially if I´m going to another Spanish-speaking country next summer.

So I´m going to do it, although not at 8 a.m. I figure I just can´t go around asking little girls why they don´t have heads.

Read Full Post »

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?

Read Full Post »

¨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.

Read Full Post »