La mejor decision de mi vida

Y no miento.

Peru is absolutely amazing. I am not even going to try to explain. Well, I am going to try (oh, and no apostrophes for me, I cannot figure out how to use them on this keyboard. So this is going to be a very grammatically proper post).

Anyhoo, I am sitting here in an internet place in Cusco on la avenida de la cultura, looking outside at the crazy driving tactics of the gazillion taxis through the window. I have had two days of classes so far, which is not so much, but already we are being expected to hold conversations in Quechua. We learned a song yesterday, it goes like this:

Urpicha, urpicha
Maypin wasichayki,

Wasichay, wasichay,
sach(apostrophe)a patachapin.

Which roughly translates to (aggh! no quotation marks either!) Little bird, where is your little house? I live over the tree (I know, very exciting. We use lots of other animals and locations in the other verses, too). What is really nice is that my host mother speaks Quechua, and so does Aleja, who works for the family. She has a daughter named Veronica who is absolutely adorable and who lent me her Quechua notebook the other day.

Speaking of my host family...
Their name is Flores Rodriguez, and I have 3 siblings; Maria Angela, 28, Marcela, 26, and Juan Carlos, 21. And they all like to dance! Marcela actually teaches a specific kind of Bolivian folkdance to a whole troupe, they have a perfomance next weekend that I really want to see. They also have a little puppy named Checho, after the futbol player, who follows me around everywhere I go trying to lick my feet. Or bite them. But he is precioso!

So I have a ton of pictures to share all ready to go on a disc I just burned, but of course the only computer in this room that has a CD-ROM drive is occupied. So you are all just going to have to wait. I have some pretty awesome pictures of el albergue, where we stayed in Ollantaytambo for the first week, and some amazing ones of Machu Picchu.

Sorry about taking so long to get online. I do not really have an excuse, internet here is dirt cheap; the most expensive I have seen is 4 soles and hour (about a dollar and twenty cents), and in Cusco it is usually only 1 sol an hour. Food is pretty cheap, too. We are talking maybe 15 soles for a full meal, which is under 5 bucks. Pretty sweet. Unfortunatley, laundry is costing me 5 bucks per load, which kind of sucks.

The weather here actually is something to talk about. Every night is freezing, maybe 40 degrees, tops. Then by midday it is easily in the 70s or 80s, and it usually rains around 1:30 for about half an hour. But that is lunch time, which basically everyone has off (I mean EVERYONE) for about an hour to go home and eat with the family. And boy, do we eat. They keep telling me I eat like a bird because I can only finish completely 2 of the three courses we have at lunch. Luckily, dinner is usually just an egg with rice, or a slice of quiche, or something relatively light. And I am having no trouble at all being a vegetarian, I actually feel like I have more options here. Definitely bringing recipes home.

Well, I have a lot more to say, but I promised to write email, too, so I am going to sign off for now. Please email me and let me know how you are doing, esp. if you are not abroad. Miss you all (but not too much ;) )!

Amanda