Blog Post #9 Observations and Leftover Scraps of Stuff-Cusco

Nothing screams “American” quite as much as the shrieking baseball caps worn backwards on the heads of young men walking the streets of Cusco. These guys haven’t a clue as to how ridiculous they look, standing out like swollen thumbs just hit by a phalanx of giant hammers.

There are over 3,800 varieties of potatoes grown in Peru, with more than 600 available for purchase in the markets.

Men wear leather shoes, requiring an industry of shoe shiners manning stationary and mobile shoe shine stands.

I never felt unsafe.

Prices start about 70-80% of what I would pay at home, and then go down from there.

The police were plentiful and everywhere for all celebrations, including military types carrying assault rifles for the 24^th celebration in the main square. I was later told that show of force was because the president of Peru was among the dignitaries.

Shopkeepers scrub the sidewalk outside their shops every morning, yet a short distance away bags of garbage are left out for days until someone disposes of them.

Dogs roam the streets with abandon, but posed no danger to me or others.

I ate street food one time, a tamale, but only after a guide I trusted suggested I do so. It was delicious and I did not get sick.

Peru has a seemingly endless variety of fruits to enjoy, many of them from the tropical jungle. Corina, one of the school’s owners, held a “las frutas” night for us where we sampled over 20 varieties of fruit indigenous to Peru. To my palate some were delectable hits, others tolerable, with a small number landing in the one-small-taste-is-enough-for-a-lifetime category.

Las Frutas Night

As a group, the students and Koen went out for dinner for each of the three Tuesday nights I was in Cusco and once on a Saturday for lunch. I chose Alpaca steak, pizza, and enchiladas for each of the three nights, with all being fabulous meals. The Saturday lunch was one of Ceviche, raw fish marinated in lime juice and served with a mixture of slivered raw onions and tomatoes. It was one of the best meals I’ve ever eaten in a foreign country.

Ceviche!

People giggle when they read my first name and love to make jokes about Donald Trump.

Only the very rich eat at the local McDonald’s. The food is much more expensive than what the general populace can afford.

Blog Post #8 Winter Solstice in Cusco

Winter Solstice celebrations seem to have no end in Cusco. Either that, or Cuscans love to party for any reason, and the solstice provides the best reason for parades, music, dancing in the street, ceremonial reenactments, great food, fireworks, a light show, and plenty of beer. Both are true.

For the entire three weeks I lived in Cusco, not a day went by without some form of celebration by the locals in the main square, Plaza de Armas. Following the daily parades of costumed young students dancing the streets that I reported on in a prior post, next were middle and high school aged students performing the same as their younger counterparts, but in larger groups dancing more elaborate moves to the music of larger bands. Then groups of adult men and women dressed in elaborate costumes with masks performed acted out melodramas of evil versus good. The ancient Incas fought with and, predictably, lost to the conquistadors, while a more modern dictator intimidated the locals only to end with his comeuppance.

Bride in her Convertible

Extended Family of Dancers








Self-Made Man











                                                                                                                                                                                               Best Costume of All
On the Saturday before the solstice things really took off. The morning was greeted with an enormous parade of gigantic floats that lasted until noon. Themes of the floats went from the sculpture “Self-Made Man”, to fierce monsters, to a giant bride dressed in white riding along in her red and white convertible. Then more bands, dancers and groups of dignitaries marching along in their dark grey suits, covered over with colorful ponchos. Men wore sombreros while the women a variety of traditional Peruvian hats.

That night a rock band performed on a temporary stage erected on the steps of Catedral del Cusco while throngs began to fill the adjacent streets of the square. The music went on while the space surrounding my group of fellow students became packed with others enjoying the good time. The fireworks display finally got underway and it was spectacular. The evening was capped off with a dazzling show of flashing lights of many colors, illuminating the buildings surrounding the square. Accompanying music enhanced it all as I, mouth agape, grasped to take it all in.

The parades of dancers, musicians, marching dignitaries, and the workers of a multitude of businesses continued to occur daily until June 24, the first and most important day of the Incan calendar. That was the day when the Incans prayed
to their Sun God to come back, to bring longer, warmer days of sunshine and rain which pachemama will use to produce crops that will sustain them throughout the balance of the year.

The elaborate ceremony of ancient days was reenacted that day. It started in a sacred area of ruins Cusco which was so jammed with people I could see none of it. Then followed a procession of dancers, musicians, guards, and warriors leading the queen and king sitting on their litters being carried by twenty or more porters through the city streets to the main square. There the king walked up the red carpeted steps of a temporary throne-like structure, greeted and addressed the surrounding crowd. Quechua, language of the Incas is spoken by the king, a limiting factor in the pool of men from which the King-of-the-day reenactor is chosen.  

The queen on her litter carried by 18 porters

The procession left the square and made its way up out of the city to a place of Incan ruins where, in the afternoon, more ceremonial ritual took place. That ritual used to include animal sacrifice, but the actual killing is no longer included. Only guests holding a ticket costing the equivalent of $130 is necessary to purchase to see this final ceremony. I opted out and instead joined fellow students, faculty, and owners of Mundo Antigua for our own picnic celebration on a hill half a mile away from the main event. This is an area of peat type soil which is dug up and mounded in an arched hive formation with an opening on one side. Potatoes are buried in the ground beneath the hive and a fire is started in the hive-oven, burning the peat above and roasting the potatoes below.

Peat Beehive Fire With Potatoes Roasting Below

Koen and Corina, owners of the school, provided precooked dinners with a choice of whole fish or a quarter of a chicken, along with the fresh out of the ground potatoes. It was a delicious meal and by midafternoon the accumulation of three weeks of celebration had worn me down and I called “Uncle”. Besides all my fellow students insisted on speaking Spanish. 

Blog Post #7—Sacred Valley Part 2

Maras

A short ride on our tour bus took us to Maras for a visit to salt ponds that are operational and thriving today. It’s a simple, but complex mosaic of individual plots or pools where salt is mined. It works like this. An underground stream passes through massive sodium deposits deep within the mountains and pours forth as a spring of salinized water. That water is then channeled through a manmade ‘irrigation’ system, passing by the multitude of ponds hand-built on the mountainside.

Salt ponds of Moras







A quantity of water is allowed to flow into each pond, the pond is sealed off and the stream then flows to other ponds, making its way downstream and down the mountainside until all ponds have been filled. Nature takes the next step, evaporating the water from each pond and leaving salt deposits behind. That salt is then harvested by the pond’s owner who then sells it on the market.

Salt spring flows from the mountainside












It’s been this way for centuries and there seems to be no end in sight.   

Woman walking between salt ponds

Blog Post #6—Presidential Election

When I arrived in Peru, the election for the country’s next president was underway. Two candidates, Pedro Pablo Kuczynski and Keiko Fujimori competed for the prize. Kuczynski, born in Peru to German immigrant parents has a long list of credentials in economics, including a time with the World Bank. Fujimori, Japanese-Peruvian, is the daughter of former president, Alberto Fujimori, who is in jail for crimes against humanity. (He's also the guy when he fled the country the country to avoid prosecution, was spotted at the airport  packing multiple suitcases reportedly filled with millions of US dollars.) As best I’ve learned she has no other significant qualifications for the office. Corruption seems to run in the family

Both are from right of center political parties. After more than 17,141,007 votes had been cast and counted, Kuczynski was declared the winner with only 40,000 votes more than Keiko, as she’s known. As the votes were counted, she was in disbelief that she was not leading. Cuscans told me she thought she had bought enough votes to easily coast into victory.

When Corina, one of the owners of the school I’m attending, arrived at the polling station to cast her vote, she was handed a ballot already completed with Keiko’s name. She complained to stern looking election judges who were not happy about her protest. She stared them down until they gave her a clean, unmarked ballot. She then voted for Kuczynski.     

Not sure why, but this seems fitting. 

Note third from the left.

Blog Post #5  Sacred Valley—Part One

Moray

Located just outside Cusco the Sacred Valley is a region in Peru's Andes Mountains and during the time of the Incas was considered sacred, hence its name. Together with Cusco, and the ancient city of Machu Picchu, it formed the heart of the Inca Empire. Stretching roughly 37 miles, it’s an area of fertile farmland and Spanish colonial villages.

Moray was first on my weekend stops and it was my first WOW! of many to come. The story goes that the Incas could have chosen to live in the jungle where animal predators were always a menace or high in the Andes away from that danger. By choosing the arid highlands, they were faced with the problem of feeding themselves. They took seeds from fruits, grains, and vegetables found in the jungle and planted them in the mountains. In so doing, they needed to figure out ways to cultivate these crops so they would survive and multiply.

They didn’t know it, but there are 92 microclimates in the world and Peru has 86 of them. What they did discover is if they dug out a huge pit in the crotch of a valley near present day Moray, and terraced that pit as they dug down to its bottom, they created multiple artificial microclimates along the way. They also knew they would need water for the plants to survive, so they created an irrigation system taking water from a nearby lake and channeling it into the high point of the pit and from there the water found its way around each terraced, then to the next below, and the next until it reached the bottom most point.

                                          Perspective of the enormity of it all

This entire project was not created to grow crops for the people, but rather it was built to be an agricultural laboratory, learning which crops grew better in which terraced region. The seeds were harvested, and stored in stone granaries for use in coming up with better strains year after year until they were then used by the people to farm for their own and community purposes.

Notice the one multi-terraced circle in the foreground with its upper terraces connected to the region in the upper left with the area in between being a flatland. The overall terraced design is in the shape of a uterus. Above and to the right are terraces elongated in the shape of a penis. Neither were designed by happenstance. The Incas worshiped fertility and Pachemama, Mother Earth; from both comes all life and provides all things necessary for existence. (The rectangles seen in the flatland area are foundations from the ruins of grain storage buildings.)   

These women weavers have nothing to do with Moray, but I like the pic

The entire scheme represents much forethought, planning and execution, coupled with unparalleled engineering skills, producing extraordinary farming means and methods. Much of the story is not confirmed because the Colonial Spanish were more interested in conquest and the Incas’ gold and silver. Moreover, the colonization was invested in conversion, not learning and understanding the well-developed culture and ways of this highly intelligent people. In the end those Incas who survived fled (some say into the jungle where descendants live in isolation today), and with them the knowledge of a civilization that had survived and thrived for not even an entire century.

Blog Post #3 Cusco

Cusco, city of some 400,000 and the ancient capital of the Incan empire which stretched from southern Colombia, to Ecuador, then to Peru, and on south to Bolivia, Chile, and Argentina, is my home away for three weeks as I do my best to learn some Spanish. My school is located just off the main square of the original Incan city center and is just a ten-minute walk up a very steep hill to my host family’s house.

Cusco from Lara's house

The city is located high in the Andes mountains at an elevation of 10,000 feet, and it’s situated in a long, broad, and stunningly beautiful valley. It’s winter here, the dry season and the beginning of the high tourist season which peaks in July and August. The spring, summer, and fall seasons contain the rainy months and for that reason are not very hospitable for out-of-country travelers.

Cusco at night from San Blas Plaza


A combination of the winter months with high altitude, little vegetation, and dry cloudless days produces an unusual 24 hours. Days see highs of mid 65 degrees and the nights in the mid-30s. The house of my host, familia de Laura, is of concrete and brick construction, has no central heat and, as is the custom of local architecture, the center of the home is open to the sky and the elements.

Because Cusco is only 900 miles south of the equator (Lyons is 2700 miles north), there is little variation of the length of days/nights regardless of the season. Daylight hours are from approximately 6 am to 6 pm. So, I’m missing out on long summer days as the summer/winter solstice approaches. More about this time of year in a later post.

San Blas Plaza







Given all those conditions, it pays to dress in layers. Dress at the beginning of the day calls for jeans, and two layers of heavy long sleeved jerseys, a down vest, and hat. By midday I’ve shed one or two layers as the intense sun does its magic. When I crawl into bed at night, I wear socks, long underwear and one or two of the long sleeved jerseys. On a particularly cold night my chilly fingers will pull a stocking cap over my head and ears. I’m between sheets in a comfortable bed, layered on top with four wool blankets and a comforter. So far so good, but what really makes it all work is the hot water bottle filled with boiling water and lays up next to me the night through.

Street to school










A short walk down a narrow cobblestone street towards the main square takes me passed stone walls built by the Incas for the palace above. These stones are individually carved and held together with no mortar, mud, or anything else in between. After hundreds of years since construction, and having withstood many earthquakes, the joints are still so tight it’s impossible to slide a single piece of paper in between.

Incan stone wall.





Not only are the stones cut to perfection creating a seamless bond on sides, top, and bottom, but like Legos of today, the interiors of the rock sides are cut with convex bulges and concave insets that marry up perfectly with one another.

World famous 12 angled stone






When the Spanish conquered the Incas, they tore the palace down to these block walls and built a church above. Not too much “in your face”, heh?

Blog Post #4 Spanish and Familia de Lara  

Learning Spanish is hard-harder than I ever imagined it would be. And, I had imagined the worst.I’m taking private lessons at Mundo Antigua, just off the central square in Cusco. I could have taken group lessons of 3-4, but after discussing with the school’s owner over a Skype call what I wanted to accomplish and my complete inability to speak the language, he and I decided three hours of private lessons, five days a week would be the best option. Now, even more than before, I agree with my choice.

Teacher Sonny and Koen, the owner of the school

I start school at 9 in the morning and finish at noon. I have one teacher for the first two hours, then the third hour is spent with another one. It’s a good program, as I like the opportunity to work with different teachers and their individual methods. During the first two weeks I’ve had four different teachers, with Sonny being the best. He has shown me a great deal of patience, and during after school hours he has thought of new methods to use with this oldest student he’s ever had. At my request he will be my teacher in the final week of classes.

Interior of Lara’s home

I have homework every night, in addition doing my own review of what I’ve already ‘learned’. Before I came I was told that my host Lara and the rest of her family spoke no English. Not so much. Actually, Lara speaks fairly passable English. She works in a travel agency, so it’s a necessity. In these first two weeks another student of the school from Australia lived in the house with me, so lots of English was spoken. Mick left this morning and I’ll be living with the family alone. Lara and I have agreed we will not speak any English, only Spanish from here on out.

Lara and Alex

The place where I’m living is a townhouse with four floors. Laura’s sister, and her two kids, Luis, 25, and Fernanda, 14 live on the first floor. Laura, a single mom, lives on the second floor with her two daughters, Mel, 13, Alex, 3, and her father, Alejandro. On the third floor lives Laura’s brother and his family. (The fourth floor is rented out to English teachers.) Familia de Lara all support one another in all manner, and at any given time one or more members will be in another’s apartment. For instance, Alex goes to a preschool in the mornings and when she returns in the afternoon she stays with Lara’s sister and other family members until her mom comes home from work. Mel is a competitive swimmer, practicing both before and after school, so I hardly ever see her.  

Alejandro in at the entrance to the family home

The support they give each other includes me. While Lara is getting ready for work, Alejandro fixes my breakfast, often consisting of a fried egg, fried plantain, and rice. At 1:30 I go back up the hill and to ‘home’ for dinner, the biggest meal of the day. The daily fare starts with homemade soup, followed by the main course of beef or chicken and rice or pasta. Lara’s sister will prepare the meal and I’ll eat it with Luis, a currently unemployed commercial pilot. Alex is usually there, playing by herself in rapt imagination. Fernanda usually comes in, home from school, toward the end of the meal.

Front door to the family home

Supper at about 7 pm, a light meal often consisting of leftovers, is prepared and served by Lara. That’s the time of day when she and I will talk about everything from divorce, to Mel and Alex, to where in downtown Cusco I might find a particular item I need. Dinner might be followed by watching a soccer match on TV (it is World Cup time) and doing my homework. Somewhere in there 

Laura will fill my hot water bottle, sneak into my room, and slip it in between the sheets on my bed. 

My room