(Pics: 1st, View from our living room. 2nd, Tyler and guests in our entry foyer/patio. 3rd, Our street--walk through that archway and our place is 5 minutes along. 4th and 5th, Plaza de Armas. 6th, At work.)
April 14, 2009...
DON’T SEND MAIL HERE!!! It won’t make it. My mom tried and the mail she sent will remain forever and mysteriously lost. Maybe there is a paper graveyard, for letters and packages that never reach their destinations and never get returned to their senders. I don’t want any young letters, full of life and potential, reaching an early grave. So, if you just so happen to want to be a nice U.S citizen and send me a letter, here’s where to send it to:
Alanna Brown
c/o Juan Carlos
Urb
Quispicanchi
Av. Nicaragua
H-9
Cusco, Peru
This address is tried and true (thanks Mommy!).
So life has been like a tornado since we got home from Bolivia. Our bus from Puno was painfully slow and wretchedly pee-smelling to have to sit on for eight hours. The potency of ammonia may have permanently singed my nose hairs. We got in past midnight, unpacked a bit. I was sleeping by 2:00am. Up the next morning, and every morning thereafter for the following six weeks, by 5:40am. I have to eat breakfast, shower, get dressed, and be out by 6:30am to walk the fifteen minute walk to the bus station. I arrive in Urubamba at 7:50am, with just enough time to walk the ten minutes from that bus station to the office by 8:00am, which is when I start work. I really enjoy my job and the people I work with. I just don’t enjoy the distance.
So, the Peru Projects Abroad is the top program of all of them as far as volunteer satisfaction and productivity go. And they have programs in several countries...Ghana, India, Cambodia, Argentina, Mexico, Costa Rica, just to name a few. Many of these countries don’t have the resource supply that the Peru volunteers are provided with. So my job over the next month and a half is scanning and/or recreating the games, flashcards, worksheets, posters, and various other supplemental learning material to put in PDF format and put online so that they are printable and therefore accessible worldwide. It feels like a really important job and I have fun doing it. For example, a lot of the games have their gameboards in tact to be scanned, but are missing game pieces. So I spent all of Wednesday drawing up game pieces in Paint!
Back to the apartment…I enjoy it so much. Bad news first though: the building is pretty shabby. It houses a gross, second floor hostel and bottom floor restaurant that I wouldn’t dare to try while I value my life. The hall outside often reeks of pee (though I've now complained to our landlord about strangers using our doorstep for a toilet and the smell has vastly improved), and there are always other UFOs (Unidentified Foul Odors) while venturing out of the building and into the street. However, I find these things livable in comparison to the perks: Our apartment is only a ten minute walk to the Plaza de Armas. It's also a really nice size; three bedrooms, one bath, fully furnished with all the towels, bedsheets, blankets, kitchen utensils, and appliances you could ask for. We have a nice flatscreen television with cable, a telephone line, and we’re working on getting wireless internet. The place is $250 per month including all utilities, so we each pay $125. It has an amazing view, too. From the entry foyer and kitchen and living room windows you can see the mountain that reads “Viva el Peru Glorioso.”
One thing we didn't have that we really wanted was a DVD player, so we went to Molino (the black market where I bought my awesome hiking boots) and found one for $40. Then, of course, we needed movies...each DVD costs $1, and since there's no cinema in Cusco, they pirate all the new movies. So far, our comprehensive list includes: Australia, Seven Pounds (a beautiful story of atonement which comes highly recommended by yours truly), Marley and Me, the Emperor's New Groove, Slumdog Millionaire, Bride Wars, The Wrestler, Revolutionary Road, The Boy in the Striped Pajamas, and all five seasons of The Office, which was $3 per season. (If you think you sense a tone of braggyness here, you're right. This is my consolation for dealing with the UFOs.)
It's been really fun living here. I'm getting in touch with my inner baker/chef. I've made a few big breakfasts, a nice Easter dinner (which was deferred to Monday because, just when I'd seasoned the Lamb and had everything ready, the stove/oven ran out of gas), and I've baked a couple of pies, crust and all from scratch (still bragging).
I can say though, that despite the great view and all the cheap DVDs, I will never again take the small things for granted (okay, there's a little bit more bad news)...Like hot water. Or running water at all, for that matter. At first, only Tyler was getting hot showers and I would only get them when he turned on the water for me and I swore he had magical shower powers, or that the shower hated me. But eventually, after many days, the shower warmed up to me (no pun intended). Still, most days from about 10:00am to 6:00pm and 9:00pm to 5:00am the water shuts off completely. Some days it doesn't work at all. The thought of turning a left knob at an untimed moment and getting hot water, or warm if you give a nudge to the right knob, has become like an apparition or a hallucination, or a thing I dreamed of once that has yet to be invented. The dishwasher, too, has slipped into some synapse in my brain where all the unfathomable things go, or things that are seperate from reality; dishwashers and easy hot water now share a synapse with cartoons, Michael Jackson, and dinosaurs making a come-back (but only the nice ones, like the Bronchiasaurus, Steggasaurus, and Triceratops). On a miraculous and mystical day like today when I'm able to do dishes and fill the kettle from the faucet at 11:30am, I feel much like a caveman handed a lighter to play with. Oh, the joy!
But I'm really at home here. I think even more so than Nacho (nickname for Ignacio), the tiny gray mouse we found living in Tyler's room.
So, we store reserve water in a big plastic container and set up trails of Doritos to lead Nacho to his demise (he was really fast and smart, just not enough for cheese-wrapped, sprite-soaked poison). And we cook and clean and work or study Spanish and host overnight guests and watch DVDs and go out dancing, and that's life!
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