These Days

(Pics: 1st-5th, Our apartment. 6th, Girls of the rueda performance with one of the guys.)








June 12, 2009...
Susie and Anke and I have decorated the apartment to our liking. We ventured to Molino (the black market) and found fabrics and lamp shades and candles and fresh flowers, and threw it all on shelving, walls, and couches, along with recycled beer bottles and home-made paintings. Our apartment feels like a montage of color and life—and all for under 40 bucks! I love the environment I live in.
Also, I found a job! Or should I say I got really lucky and a job found me…well, it’s actually two jobs. One is teaching private English lessons. I have two students and they are at a very basic level. So we are beginning with daily-life vocab, present tense, and telling time. They come over, generally, on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday nights and I serve them cinnamon tea and then we begin with checking their homework. The lesson goes from about 7:30 to 9:00 p.m.
My second job is also a work-from-home gig. Okay, get this: I met a guy on the bus, traveling home from Urubamba in my last week working for Projects abroad. We got to talking and he asked me what I do. So I told him I’m a writer…unpublished, but an aspiring best-seller. His jaw sort of dropped open and he then imparted that he is also a writer. A published one. And he has a book he is in the process of writing, a historical novel about the last Inka of Cusco, Pachakuteq, which he needs translated into English. Would I be up for the job? Ha! Are you kidding me? I was doing that anyway, reading Once Minutos for pleasure and for improving my Spanish! Heck yes! (This was not my reaction while in front of him. I responded very professionally, assuring him that I am 100% capable of such a task and would be honored.) So, I am translating a book! I get paid by the page and my name will be on the publication as the translator☺ ☺ ☺ Happiness.
Besides my two jobs, I have been getting even more involved in salsa. First, Anke and I performed in a rueda for the 4th anniversary party of the local salsa school, Salseros Cusco. Now, we have both been asked to be part of a dance group for the same salsa school. There are four couples in the group (Carlos is my partner, then there’s Anke and Renato, Romina and Hector, and Raquel and Kevin) and we have been preparing a routine that will be on reserve for regular performances. This is such a cool feeling, being a gringa who somehow found her way into this salsa world and will now be performing an amazing dance for local audiences. I love it.
I wake up around 10:00 a.m. everyday, work for about four to five hours, then usually go to Salseros Cusco or Renato’s place for rehearsal, come home and have a bite and maybe teach an English lesson, then head to Inka Team for a night of dancing.
These days are good days.

¡Feliz Cuy-mpleaños a mí!

(Pics: 1st, Bday dinner on the patio. 2nd & 3rd, Celebrating at Trotamundos Cafe. 4th & 5th, The cuy experience.)





May 17, 2009...
I had a wonderful 26th birthday. I was with Anke and Susie, of course. It began with dinner Saturday night. Susie made pasta and bruschetta and we ate on the patio with candles and wine and chatted about our memories of 19, 20, and 21 and how old we’re getting when we’re really not, but we kind of are because we’ll be 30 before we know it considering how quickly the last four years have flown by, but then again 30 isn’t really that old so, at 26, we’re still okay. Phew. At about 10-ish we went to the usual place, Inka Team, to ring in my bday at midnight. When the clock struck 12:00, the girls disappeared to the DJ booth, where they made an announcement, “Alanna, we love you! Happy birthday!” and then the DJ played a birthday song while I danced and pranced to the music with my friends and a little Peruvian club-full of strangers singing along. We stayed out dancing ‘til 6:00 a.m. It was splendiferous. The next day, we did our usual Sunday brunch, barely awake, and then slept all day. I went with the girls to eat dinner at Pachapapa, and then to Trotamundos Cafe for cake, where I made glorious use of the Birthday in a Box Tashi and Manz sent in my birthday care package from home☺ (Thank you, girls!) It was so fun. The people in the café must have thought we were nutty. Us three silly girls, blowing up balloons, lighting candles, sprinkling confetti everywhere, disrupting the quiet cafe atmosphere with our birthday noise-makers and fits of laughter.
It is customary here to commemorate the passage of another year of life by eating cuy (cooked guinea pig). But since it is generally served at lunch--and on my actual birthday I slept through lunch--we went to eat cuy later in the week. I hadn't tried it yet. Frightening...cuy is literally a cooked rodent on a plate. You could pat its head, count its teeth, give it a kiss, shake its paw. You can see the horrified expression it was making just before it was skewered. It's disturbing, really. Getting past the fact that it should have a coat of fur, and little black eyes behind those empty slits, and should be in a cage, running on a wheel, is not worth the taste. Not. Worth. The. Taste. Ehem, in my humble opinion, anyway. An experience, nonetheless.
So I'm 26. Twenty-six...I've heard, though, that you are as young or as old as you feel.
I feel fantastic.

Peroomies

(Pics: Top, Anke and Susie wishing me a happy birthday. Middle, Sunday brunch. Bottom, out for dinner.)


Who has more awesomer roomies than you?
I know of a girl who lives in Peru
Whose peroomies inspired this little Haiku
Although a Haiku it cannot really be
Lo que te digo is still plain to see
‘Cause no one has awesomer roomies than me

May 15, 2009...
A little bit of background information: Tyler was ready for other things. Things back at home. So he left at the end of April.
Now, there’s Anke and Susie…
Anke was coming to live here anyway, with me and Tyler. I met her through Projects Abroad back in January. She is from Holland and I always had a feeling she was truly awesome.
Susie, I met through Tyler. She’s from Chicago. He worked and lived with her via his org in Lima, Cross Cultural Solutions. When he knew he’d decided to leave, and knew that she was planning on coming to Cusco for 2 months, he asked if it would be okay if she lived with me and Anke, and I said, “Is she cool?” and he said, “Yeah. And really easy going and fun.” Boy, was he right. She’s an amazing cook, too. So I said, “Sure, the more the merrier! Plus, it makes rent cheaper.”
And now, I really feel like I couldn’t be living with better people.
We’ve begun decorating the apartment and really making it ours. Susie and I ventured out one day and found pieces of scrap wood and bought paint in order to create our own personal gallery (One is a broken piece of tinted glass that used to be our coffee table top, but cracked when the space heater got too close—we got a new piece of glass for the table.) So now, we’ve completed a few paintings to hang up around our place, with many more to come.
We have dinners and Sunday brunches on our patio. Susie usually makes dinner…wontons, pasta, bruschetta, salad, and always cuts up the pineapple for the brunch mimosas; while I usually make the brunch…pancakes and eggs.
Now that I have completed my six weeks working in Urubamba, I can stay up late-ish. So the three of us go out salsa dancing just about every night to the discotec, Inka Team. All the friends we’ve made, Coco, Elvis, Renato, Raymi, Amilcar, Jimi, Mariella, Viviana, are there from 9:00pm until about midnight. (If you enjoy dancing, I strongly encourage you to find the salsa niche wherever you live. It is so fun, I can’t even tell you.)
Anke works every day, walking distance from our place. Susie goes to Spanish classes for four hours a day, and I am having “me” time, while looking for another job. I’m reading Eleven Minutes, by Paolo Coehlo, in Spanish—Once Minutos. (He is the author of The Alchemist, which I read a couple months ago in English.) And I’m painting, and writing again, and dancing alot.
Us three girls, Anke and Susie and I, are getting to know each other: learning each other’s stories, talking about everything that passes from day to day—Peruvian boy trouble mostly—and sharing the truth about where we’re at right now in life. And somehow, we’ve found each other at the same crossroads, in more ways than one.