Day 15: LIMA!

went to lima yesterday! and i had CEVICHE. what is ceviche, you ask? well, the best way for me to describe it is to think of sushi. now pretend sushi is a pirate. now pretend the pirate has an intense fear of scurvy and drowns himself in lemony lime goodness.

that is ceviche. and it's awesome.

besides the greatness of ceviche, our trip to peru began at 7:30am and we met at the center to take a coster there (basically, a bus-van). it took roughly an hour to appear in central de lima and our adventure there was basically the same as when we were in chosica, in that we had to interview random people on the streets to practice our spanish and to learn about the area and the people. there's a gorgeous cathedral and tons of museums, but i basically had zero time to spend admiring the area. once our interviews and things were over, we took a taxi to miraflores to do pretty much the same thing again. again, no time to look around the area until after our work. however, after our interviews and things, we basically just ate as much as we could.

heads up, lima is the gustatory capital of the WOOORRLLDDDDDDDDD!!!! seriously. but we went to a nice, kinda pricey restaurant (where i ate my ceviche), moved to pinkberry for desserts (froyo with chirrimoya as a topping. i freakin love chirrimoya.), and ended in starbucks (iced grande caramel macchiato with soy milk. not the best, my coffee was kind of watered down? ah well, i finally got a hit of coffee that isn't nescafe). too soon, it was getting kind of late and we needed to get a cab back to chosica, which we lucked out on and found a taxi guy who hailed a nice, van-y one for the group i was in.

i immediately passed out and woke up today for church, followed by family activities! today was the day my host great grandmother passed away. we all piled into a van and drove to lima, where the cemetery is located. after paying our respects, we went to a park and had a picnic lunch (chicken, potatoes, and ocoba- delicious except it's made with msg...), and then we went to a place that serves pachamanca, not to eat, but to drink and dance. so drink and dance i did! well, mostly hydrating because i hadn't had a lot of water all day, but i did have a small glass of this mix of beer and coke, which is a bit strange but it's not bad. then we danced to different music, slow music that is played around junin and later, faster music from the region of santiago. personally, i prefer faster music but i had a good time trying to figure out how to dance to more traditional music than i'm used to. plus, i danced with mi famila so that was fun! grandparents, mom, uncle, aunt, cousins (one other PCT lives basically next door to me, and is currently my cousin! haha, awesome). the festivities ended and we needed to return home (my host sister has finals this week and she needed to get back home to study. her birthday's coming up this week and i'm going to attempt to make a cheesecake! hope it goes well... i wonder if sour cream exists at the supermarket called plaza vea. this market is basically a walmart and i can find most things here, except for a few random ingredients so i hope sour cream isn't one of them!)

in totally different news, i've just been elected president of PC Peru 17! a junta directiva is basically a small governing group that exists in basically every different organization and area. it's super serious and can get pretty intense at times, according to the instructors, but our PC JD exists in order to get a few matters done, like figuring out PC Peru 17 souvenirs and organizing a thank you party for our host families. i've never been president before, so i'm gonna do my best! it helps that everyone here is just so freakin awesome, and the PC JD is composed of those amazing people.

PC Peru 17: these next couple of years are going to fly like no other, and it's gonna be totally awesome.

day 13: dead dogs make me sad

title says it all. yesterday, a bunch of mis amigos were chilling at a bodega after classes and meetings when they watched a dog get run over by a car. apparently, it got up, walked over to them, and lay down under their table. a man at another table walks over, picks the dog up by its legs and drops it off to the side of the road. another man walks over and pets it until it dies.

i feel like i've written this before.

in any case... super sad. i'm really glad i wasn't there cause i would have been a mess, especially considering how easily i cry and i'm a sympathy cryer so i'd have just been incredibly sad.

how easily do i cry? well, today i was ignored by my tech trainers, who were running a session, about 9 times. literally, i would put my hand up, they would point to every other person around me and then go on to the next question. at first i thought, maybe they can't see me? except i would be acknowledged, as in they would hold out one hand and do that thing where they point at you and you know you're speaking next, except then they would stop to elaborate on a point that someone made, totally forget about me and move on. tech trainers behind me were even like, "what? but wait, sue didn't go" and then just look at me apologetically, to which i would respond with a shrug.

i felt like i was going to burst into tears. not because i was sad, to be honest, but mostly because i was tired of being ignored and i know bursting into tears gets me attention. how ridiculous is that? i am so ridiculous. and today, i threw a mini tantrum because we went to chosica for class and i had eaten a quick breakfast of a glass of yogurt because i didn't want to be late (teachers had stressed that we had to be punctual). once we got there, we were sent on these little missions, left and right, to find information and the winners would get like chocolate or something silly. first of all, my group should have won. seriously. i could go into the reasoning behind it, but that would be a waste of your time and mine. let's just say, i'm extremely competitive and we should have won >:P lol~

but anyway, i was STARVING by the end of it. and we were reviewing the information we had gathered, and i just felt like so much of it was unnecessary. like why ask 4 different groups the exact same question??? wouldn't it be better to give the answer and then discuss what difference we had found? it was just so inefficient... i am not a fan of inefficiency... anyway, it was taking forever, i was really annoyed by how redundant everything was and how much time was being wasted, and i was mad hangry. they asked me a question, and my brain felt like it stopped. i couldn't think anymore, i was getting a terrible headache, my stomach had growled nonstop for nearly an hour, and i just wanted to walk away and go get the food located literally less than 10 minutes from me. ugh. i'm the worst. so anyway, questions kept being asked until finally i was like, "no puedo pensar mas. lo siento." and sat there until we were done. it freakin hurt to move and my usual reaction to hunger is to sleep, until food was around me so i was exhausted on top of all of this. FINALLY it was all over and we got food, which i demolished. i also finished part of another amiga's plate.

yea, sometimes, i can be pretty awful. i'm gonna have to stop being a brat one day : /

ahora, i have to finish this and go to SLEEP! running at 5:30am is gonna be tiring, but we're visiting a school tomorrow! and i want to be ready to observe and play!

day 11: pooping yourself

currently, there is a "last wo/man standing" pool going on. it's S/.2 (aka 2 soles. i think the currency exchange rate has been hovering around 2.75 soles per $1) to enter and basically, the last person to poop themselves wins.

it's been said that 70% of PCVs in peru poop their pants, but the doctors here believe that percentage is higher. apparently, there were only 2 or so volunteers by the end of last year's group to not poop themselves.

i thought this was hysterical, until i found out that someone "peru'ed" themselves today. no names, mind, but it's now definitely a reality.

to quote doctor jorge, "never trust a fart."

ok, i'm gonna do my best to stop talking about poop now. seriously though, this has become a usual conversation piece at lunch and it kind of makes me laugh, like a lot. i never talked about anyone's digestive system so often back in the states, and now it's a thing. hilarious.

in other news, i've started a small running group with other peace corps trainees in the morning! i'm now going to be getting up at 5am to meet runners in front of my house at 5:30am. i think my host sis natali is going to be joining us as well! yaaaay~ this way, i can get some exercise and not feel like a major slob cause all i do is eat delicious things and sit around in front of the tv or at the table, chatting away with my poor castellano.

speaking of delicious things, i ate pacay and chirmoya yesterday! it was after i went to watch pachamanka a la tierra, which is basically a meat dish that goes through an intense process in order to get cooked. the ovens are located underground, so you put rocks from the river (they've been washed first) into a hole in the ground. you somehow get them really really hot, then you put a metal rack kind of thing on top of it with meat on it. there're herbs put on top of the meat, which is then covered with corn husks. more super hot rocks are placed on top of that. there's another layer of meat, more rocks, and some potatoes too. more rocks and more rocks and then you just leave all of that alone for a few hours. later, rocks and things are all removed and the pachamanka (the meat dish) a la tierra (of the earth) is removed and eaten. i didn't try any cause i had another dish (some pork thing called chicharron) moments before at my grandparents' home.

the pachamanka a la tierra was located in santa eulalia, and i walked with my host sis natali and one other PCT, jessica. on the walk back, nati introduced us to pacay and chirrimoya, both of with are super delicious fruits. pacay looks kind of like a gigantic pea pod, except you crack it open and eat the sweet, fibrous white flesh inside, discarding the gigantic seeds on the street. oh! so good! and then chirrimoya. oh my god. chirrimoya. it's this weird, not quite round blob of green thing but inside is a super soft, white piece of flesh with small black seeds. again, you don't eat the seeds, only the white flesh, but jesus christmas on a cracker. that thing is the sweetest fruit i have ever eaten. ever. i've never had it in the states, which is just stupid sad. it basically tastes like a soft lump of pineapple/orange/banana/guava and dear baby jebus, que rico. i was in fruta heaven and wished i could just shove the entire thing in my mouth, but that's not at all lady like, so i refrained. sort of. eh. i might have failed at the refraining. whatever.

once i'm not a lazy bum and i post my pictures, i will do so. right now, i have TONS AND TONS of castellano hwk that i need to do because i want to go to bed early so i can run again tomorrow. i like running so much more than i used to. i don't know why. i literally woke up around 4am today and just rolled around until my alarm went off, so i would have an excuse to get out of bed. something's wrong with my brain, maybe. that's ok. i like it.

chao for now! more to come!

day 9: lente y seguro

slow and steady. it's a chant that goes through my house pretty often, usually accompanied by "poco a poco" or, "little by little."

this is usually in reference to my inability to speak castellano (aka spanish). turns out, i was right about the whole 'language is gonna be my biggest weakness' but it's one i'm working on every day. currently, i'm at the point where i can basically understand what's being said to me, with some confusion here and there, but my ability to speak is, at best, awful. i can piece together a few phrases but it's really frustrating when i want to describe something and the only thing that comes out is, "what movies do i like? well, i like... movies... comical. uhm. what? oh! yea! comedies. i like comedies. what else? uhm. i don't know." errrggghhhh. sigh, poco a poco.

in other news, last night i went out to chosico, which is like the bigger city, to meet up with youth development volunteers and some small business development volunteers (we were split up cause our group is so huge). i was surprised that so many SBDs showed up! it was super nice seeing them all again, but i'm terrible with names and clearly forgot a few of them : / it's ok, i had a few drinks (gaseosos are sodas, of which peruvians drink a lot of. cerveza is beer, but cusquena is the brand here and i think it tastes a bit too much like natty light, but maybe that's just me.) and managed to remember quite a few after a bit of yelling. we went to this loud, chill place where i found myself shouting instead of talking, because i could barely hear myself speak. which doesn't really mean that the shouting was necessary, just that i couldn't hear myself cause i'm practically deaf and i took to shouting to make up for it. we went to a karaoke bar afterwards, where i tried a pisco sour and discussed the finer points of pisco. i tried to sing 'hey jude' cause it was there, but we left before it was my turn :( ah well, my friends will have to endure my singing voice some other day. entonces, we crammed ourselves into a little taxi and took it back up to buenos aires, just before my curfew~

what a way to end a week! my brain has been kind of dead for a long time as it's been focused on trying to figure out what's been going on for so long, so it was nice giving it a break and letting it basically turn off for a few hours. now i'm recharged and ready for 9 more weeks of training!

actually, i woke up this morning (kind of late... it's saturday!) and washed my clothes by hand. i don't know why i'm so proud about this, just that it's the first time i've done it and now i have clean clothes! mi mama showed me how and now my clothes are drying on a line. it's kind of weird having my underwear just hanging outside for the world to see, but meh. so's everyone else's, i guess. it's kind of a strange metaphor for my adventures here. i'm really hoping my 2 years in peru will expose parts of me that are intimate, that even i am currently unaware of. how do i react to stressful situations, where nothing seems to be going well? do i have the ability to initiate programs in a community that i have no history in? how do i react to these kinds of experiences? what other stories can i create in this life of mine? i don't know, but i'm excited to know!

i should probably calm it down a little though. i'm definitely mildly ill right now, with a cold or something that makes me cough like i'm on death's door and talk like i'm a pack a day smoker but whatever. i'll take some nyquil and hope for the best! tomorrow is father's day, so i hope i can coordinate a skype chat with my dad. i think i'm going to try to speak with mi papa in espana too. dunno what i'm going to say but it'll be fine. anyway, i'm going to sit in front of skype and wish really really hard that my family in cali decides it's a good idea to maybe check if i'm on!

chaufa (which is slang for bye, but is also a type of food).

edit: p.s. here's a fun fact: there are wild turkeys running around the place i train at in santa eulalia. four of them. 3 dark ones, and 1 pale turkey. they do NOT gobble. i would, in fact, say the scream. also, the horse that was tied up in front has broken free and was last seen running up and down the street. there's also a chicken with like 10 chicks pacing that same street. there used to be an alpaca, but it died. damn, i want an alpaca.

day 7: after a week in peru...

ahhh! so it´s been a few days in peru now and i feel like i´ve lived here for months, not just 4 days. it´s a strange feeling but at the same time, i´ve found that i´m extremely spoiled here! i´m living with a family of 3- mi mama anfitriona and 2 hermanas . the dad currently lives in españa and i had the chance to talk to him on the phone, but both of us were like... erm, i cant speak spanish... so that talk did not happen.

in any case, i will be living in a very small town close to where our training center is located for 3 months. in that time, i will have running water with hot showers available, and possible wireless internet sometime tomorrow. yea, this is very spoiled. most of the other volunteers definitely do not have hot running water and if they want to take a non freezing shower, they bucket bathe. there are internet cafes, and i know some volunteers live very close to them but HOW LUCKY AM I???? i am well aware. so i´m gonna go ahead and thank the dear baby jesus for all of this.

especially my family. i don´t want to leave theeemmm because i looovvee ttheeeemmm... en serio. they have been absolutely amazing, both in helping me with my spanish, or rather my castellano, and in making sure i know wth is going on around me. they´re just so amazing and i wonder if this is what it feels like to be the youngest with 2 older sisters, although one is younger than i am but right now, i´m definitely the baby of this family. for goodness sakes, mi mama makes me lunch and walks me to the corner every morning to make sure i get there safely to meet my other compañeros. i freakin love it.

besides feeling like i used up all my karma chips to live in such an amazing place, i´m doing pretty well. i walk with others who live near me to class every morning, which is located roughly 30 minutes away, and we learn some spanish, sometimes medical things , sometimes about peru history , and sometimes about youth development. ´

i understand that i´m going to be in my current location of buenos aires for 3 months, but i´m already getting really nervous and excited about my 2 year site. i wonder if it´ll be coastal, mountains, desert, or ...???? dunno. anywhere. i don´t know if i´m going to be the first PC to be stationed there, or simply taking over and continuing in a region that has had members before. i know nothing.

knowing nothing doesn´t bother me. the one thing that continues to irk me is my inability to speak castellano. i can undrestand it much better now and my language abilities are starting to return, but i´m def still struggling with conjugations. i mean, i´m sure things´ll be fine but until they ARE, my nerves will continue to fry at the edges.

something that i find interesting is that the PC really stresses how to be safe in Peru. We have had some instructions on keeping our things safe, which is mostly common sense but i wish there were some more instructions regarding taking cars from our cities to neighboring places. i definitely got a little lost tonight, but thankfully one of my compañeros lives next door to me and happens to now be my cousin because his host family is related to mine and he is also a super chill guy who just doesn´t freak out like i do, so that was nice. less me running around screaming BUENOS AIRES??? and more calm, rational thought.

anyway, it´s nearly 10:30, i have a cold and i need to sleep because i wake up around 6am every morning to do my workout before a shower and breakfast. by the way, i´m going to gain like 50 lbs while im in peru so don´t freak out when i get back after my time here. the food is amazing, and it´s mostly carbs and starche. also, peruvians drink soda. not water. so i might have a rather toothless grin greeting you...

i´m hoping to start running in the mornings with my other compañera but we´ll so how that turns out. i like to sleep. i´m gonna go do that now. chao.

Day 3: Meeting the training site family

This morning, I woke up and realized a diet of carbs laced with carbs is probably not going to be the best for me. Not only because I'm going to gain so much weight, I won't fit in my clothes anymore, but also because I get these energy spikes, super charged one moment and crashing the next. Not much I can do about the latter, but I figured I could get in a morning workout to help slow down the onset of the former.

Except I don't want to run. Running is, it seems, one of the biggest forms of exercise that the Peruvians have accepted as a crazy weird thing the American volunteers seem to enjoy doing. Unfortunately, 4 years of rugby and not seeing a physical therapist when I really should has resulted in knees that get a little rough if I push myself for longer than 30 to 45 minutes. Time at the gym, working on my lower body, has really helped keep a lot of the pain in check but there are no free weights or a gym to be found where I am located. If I'm really determined, I might consider using my luggage (at exactly 51.5lbs, according to American Airlines) to do some squats. I'm not that determined.

So for cardio this morning, I decided that I wanted to jump rope and do some boot camp-y workouts. First of all, can I just let you know how amazing Peru looks? There are these gorgeous mountains and at 6:30am, they're covered in fog. About 20 minutes later, the sun is rising, casting rays of light onto the peaks as fog slowly evaporates, revealing more and more mountain. I was jumping rope and wondering on how it felt like I was watching some special on National Geographic, when sure enough, those who work here file back and forth, up and down the stairs, watching the crazy, sweaty, Asian PC girl jumping around. What? Yes, I did look a bit mad, my hair just all over the place, doing burpees and leg lifts and all that. I mean, this stuff looks weird when people do it at a gym, where everyone does this stuff. I can only imagine what it looked like beside a pool that's never used, and the mountains in the background.

Weird.

Still, the cold shower in the morning felt SO GOOD after that, especially compared to the same experience I had the previous morning. I'm going to go ahead and accept that my community will think of me as strange, if it means I will get a cold shower that is actually welcomed.

In other news, today is the day I meet my training site family. There are 2 families I will be living with while I am here: One family for 3 months while I am at the training site, and another family for when I am actually on SITE to work for 2 years. I have asked for children in the families I will be living in because I've found that chatty children will probably work best for me while I am trying to learn Spanish so let's hope that works out!

Alright, time to start the morning meetings. I'll post again once I know what my internet situation is going to be like for the next 3 months.

I WANT MY SITE FAMILY TO LOVE ME. because I am a needy person.

Day 2: 1st official day in Peru!

AHHHHH. TODAY HAS BEEN AWESOME.

So, yesterday was a blur of, as one PCT put it, just a whole bunch of waiting. Waiting to get on the bus, waiting to get on the plane, waiting on the plane, waiting to get off the plane, RUNNING TO GET TO THE NEXT PLANE BECAUSE WE HAVE 3 MINUTES, waiting to get on the plane, waiting on the plane, pacing because the ride from Miami to Peru is 5 long hours but finding the time just passed by super quickly because PCTs are the friendliest and chattiest people to ever exist, waiting to get off the plane, waiting to get through customs, waiting to get on the bus to get to the retreat area, waiting on the bus and feeling weird about it because it feels like I'm still not in Peru yet but in San Diego, waiting to get off the bus, and finally, waiting to get to your rooms because it is now 1am and I'm exhausted.

yea. waiting. lots of it.

And last night, I was so discombobulated and tired that I just didn't notice anything going on. We ended up in our rooms, which are pretty awesome. They kind of remind me of the rooms I had in Guatemala. My roomie and I were in a room with 2 beds and a bathroom. After socializing way too long, we were starving and got sandwiches composed of:

2 pieces of bread. 1 slice of cheese.

and it was the greatest sandwich ever. honestly. delicious.

after that, we went to bed and woke up bright and early, eager to take a shower to wash off the stench of travel. roomie went first because I wanted to stay in bed for as long as possible.

"How's the water?" I ask.

"Not bad," she answered.

I stood in front of the shower, holding my hand out to test the water go from freezing cold to really cold until the guilt of wasting water took over and I braced myself and shoved my head under the running agua. Later, I remarked that I screamed out but my roomie informed me, this was not a fact. Apparently, the screaming was all in my head.

Training went by. We got some cool info, played some silly ice breaking games, met lots of people and etc. You know what? I honestly can't remember exactly what happened. I got my picture taken, I got this super awesome bracelet from the doc, I got moolah, I ate awesome lunch at some point, I learned how to differentiate between fake money and real money (sorta. not really. I'm going to be like an epicenter of fake money. Literal monopoly money. I am going to be the banker of monopoly money. fun fact: apparently, peru is known for its really real looking fake money.)

Now, I'm trying to connect with my family on skype while there's just a few rays of daylight still out but guess what? NO ONE. NO ONE IS ON SKYPE. WHAT. THE. EFF.

Finally get myself some internet aaaannnddd nothing. bah. If my fam decides that one day, they will use skype, then I am going to show them the most amazing mountains, and you know what they're going to see? DARKNESS. because it's night time. I'm going to show them that night in Peru looks exactly like night in cali.

peace.

p.s. please mail me things? mostly pictures of your face. because i have nothing to put on my walls because i'm an idiota who forgot to bring anything that reminds me of home. well, minus the bottle of sriracha, which is worth its weight in gold.