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.