After a week of Spanish classes, I am so ready for a vacation portion of our vacation. This past week has been great for reviewing my language skills from years past, but I am also realizing that I am SO DONE WITH CLASS. Sitting still and learning for four hours a day is brutal. I guess three years of graduate school will do that to you. Luckily I have had two field trips to museums, and who doesn´t love field trips?? I got to visit the coca museum and the chocolate museum (yum!). The chocolate museum gave factoids here and there about chocolate but is more of a restraurant and store. Don´t get me wrong, that is wonderful! I enjoyed the coca museum more because it had a lot on the history and uses of coca. For those of you who don´t know, coca is huge in Peru because it is used in practically everything. We use it primarily to combat altitude sickness by either drinking the tea or chewing the leaves. It also gives you a nice little jolt of energy, which makes sense since it is also the principle ingredient in cocaine! I also got to learn about its cultural uses, which we had a taste of during the Salkantay Trek. Our guide gave thanks with coca leaves to Pachamama (mother earth) for our safe passage. I think I even threw up a few desperate pleas to good ol´ Pachamama when Jack was so sick that first day.
Other than that, class was class. I am getting much more confident in my speaking, so that is a plus! And by more confident in my speaking, I just mean more willing to make a million mistakes and sound ridiculous. But you know, tomay-toe tomah-toe. (Get it??) There are about 20 students here and about a bajillion volunteers. Our school coordinates volunteer programs throughout the city, so we all get to hang out in the dorms and in the school common areas together. A majority of the kids here are pretty young...just coming into college or having only been through their freshman year. It is definitely making me realize I am closer to 30 than 20 haha...I have started to joke with Jack about the age differences between myself and my classmates. I am literally a 4th grader older than half the people in our school. A FOURTH GRADER! That is how I have started equating years of age difference to make it more dramatic than just saying "10 years", although 10 years is pretty freaking dramatic, too. UGH. They stay out until 6am drinking all night and then come back screaming, bouncing off crap in the halls, and hacking up what I can only assume to be large pieces of their lungs because everyone here parties so hard, their bodies can´t keep up and they are most likely dying of tuberculosis. As I huddle in my bed trying to warm up the blankets and listen to their incoherent ramblings, I repeatedly tell myself "you were like this once, right?" in an attempt to not run out in the hall, screaming at them all "you crazy kids, get off my lawn" style. My, how the tides have turned.
In addition to referring to age in terms of small children, we have also started referring to the cost of thinks in Snickers bars. This is due to the fact that an adorable14 year old on our Salkantay Trek was obsessed with Snickers bars. Every time we would stop along the trail for water refills at local shops (yes, there are stores all over the trek where you have to buy your water), this kid would buy a bunch of Snickers bars. Whenever he would want something else, his mother would say "Well, that is worth about three Snickers bars,so you decide". Snickers won out EVERY TIME. So we now refer to costs in Snickers bar units and age differences using elementary school children. It happens. What gets you excited in life has also changed dramatically. For example, I bought 2 ponchos and an individual roll of toilet paper today for a total of 11 soles. That is SO EXCITING SLASH IMPRESSIVE. That is like, $4!! TOTAL! FOR ALL THREE THINGS! Plus, NOW WE HAVE TOILET PAPER FOR THE NEXT WEEK. I can´t stress enough how important that is in Peru. Adjusting back to the states will never be the same...
Tomorrow morning we leave bright and early for our next adventure to Lake Titicaca and Colca Canyon. The lake will be great, the canyon trek may kill us. And I am basing that solely on the various blogs I have read about how difficult it is. We have been climbing small mountains to and from basically everything for the past few weeks, so maybe it won´t be so bad? I know I exaggerate a lot in this blog, but when I say small mountains, I´m not kidding. In Cusco, everything is uphill...both ways. There isn´t even a word for hill that is used to describe streets around here. I´m not kidding...I asked my teacher and he looked at me like I was crazy. He was all "If we used that word here, we wouldn´t have streets, only hills". So yeah....thighs and calves of STEEL!
Pictures to come later, crap internet, same old story blahblahblah. Anywho, that is enough blabbing on for today. We will probably have no internet for the next week,so see you in 7 days!
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