That Devil Time

Some ruins that we randomly happened across in the
forest last night during our explorations.

I’m here to do you all a very huge favor. I’m here to debunk a myth that we’ve all been fed since day one, a myth that I refuse to allow to continue to propagate. I’m doing this because I all care about you, so please pay heed.

Time does not fly. 

Nope, it sticks with you, walks beside you, chats with you, laughs with you. And then one day, you’ll be minding your own business casually walking along when you realize that Time has done it again! It’s snuck up when you least expect it and shoved you in a wormhole and now days or weeks or months have gone by and you have no idea how! It’s a sneaky devil, to say the least. It hangs out with you all day every day, and lulls you into a steady routine in which you can’t imagine that it would every do anything to hurt you, and then BAM! It’s done it again. And you suddenly realize you’ve been living in freaking Cusco, Peru for five weeks.

 

Wut!?!

So moral of the story: Beware of the sneaky devil named Time, because he WILL sneak up on you just when you least expect it.

However, despite my frustrations with Time’s mind games, I really have been soaking up every moment and taking advantage of muchisimos opportunities, and so I have quite a few stories to tell and this blog is going to be a long one. Feel free to stop reading at this point, it’s fine. You’ll be missing out, but whatever, see if I care. Really. Just try me.

Estoy Empleada!

Making friends with a sloth!

First and foremost in the realm of seized opportunities… I am now officially a Peruvian bartender! Friday was my first night of work at an Irish hostel-bar called the Wild Rover. And it was an absolute blast. It’s really mostly for fun and a few discounted drinks, so I won’t be working much more than once a week or so, but I have no doubt that there will be many crazy stories coming out of that facet of my life here. Essentially it just gives me the chance to meet a thousand awesome people from a thousand crazy places all in a night’s work.

“Horrible”

Other great news… I have officially rolled my R’s in casual conversation for the first time ever! It may or may not have been when I was calling my host brother names, one of which was “horrible,” but no me importa. I might forever have a horribly American accent, but I’m at least one step closer to not sounding like a complete idiot (ha).

Between a Rock and a Hard Place

The ingredients needed to move a Peruvian rock:

1 massive boulder

10 willing people

9 endless feet

2 exhausting and tense hours

We moved this thing from the orange-ish
pile of gloves... so like no distance
at all.

And that’s not a metaphor. This week’s service project involved the reorganization of a school yard so that it would be safer and cleaner for the children attending the school. This reorganization, for some ungodly reason, involved the superhuman feat of moving a boulder from one side of the yard to the other. Clearly necessary.

All ten of us would push with all of our might and prop it up as much as we could, then we’d shove a rock underneath, and repeat until it was supported enough to roll it over a little. Two hours later we had moved it to where it needed to be. A morning well spent…

BUT despite all of my dramatic hysterics, it was a beautiful sunny day with an incredible view from where we were working and I made myself a doggy friend and it was nice and stuff. J

Cuy

Who wants to chow down on some
teeth?! Anyone??

And the cherry on top of my excellent two weeks was this past weekend. It was my friend Erika’s last couple of days before she had to go back to the states after ten weeks of volunteering, so we decided to make it a good one.

After having the absolute privilege of holding a sloth, we decided to head down into the valley to try some of Tipon’s famous delicacy: guinea pig. Is everyone picturing the cute little furry face of their childhood pet right now? The way his little nose twitched and how he had that spot right behind his ear? Got it now? Yeah? Well I ate his cousin. And he was absolutely delicious.

But in all seriousness, cuy (the Quechua name for guinea pig because of the little squeaks that they make) is quite tasty. They bring the entire animal out, head and all, and you just kind of dig in! I didn’t go as far as to try eating the head and whatnot, but I did try a lung and I must say it was quite scrumptious.

The Magic Dog

One of the more adrenaline pumping highlights from this weekend occurred in a small town called Huasao. This is a town that’s famous for its shamans and mystics, so we decided to wander through it in hopes that someone (or something) would pop out of a random hole in a wall somewhere and tell us our fortunes. Didn’t happen, but a girl can dream.

Dalton looking a wee bit embarrassed after the incident,
and you can just barely see the dog in the background!

So as we were walking down the main street, we kept seeing doors that seemed somewhat magical, so we would jokingly be like “ah! There’s definitely magic behind THAT door!” and such things. We were having a great time, making light of the fact that no shamans had appeared before us yet (dammit), and walking off all of the cuy that we had consumed earlier when suddenly someone seemed to forget that we were joking about the magic doors…

Now, just so everyone is clear, my dear friend Dalton has the worst luck in the world. Some might say he’s clumsy, some could some other things (Sorry Dalton) but really he just has the worst luck. He’s been bitten by a dog, then the subsequent day surrounded by a pack of dogs, he’s gotten food poisoning, his host family had a death in the family, the list goes on. I have faith that his luck will turn, but unfortunately not in time to save him this past weekend.

So anyway, back to the door. Dalton, for some reason believing that there was indeed magic behind one particular door, and also believing that it was somehow okay to go push on that door to see if it was open (now looking back on it, I’m beginning to think a shaman most definitely jinxed him) decides to go and see for himself what magic was present. He pushed the door open not more than three inches or so when suddenly out burst two viciously snarling dogs running at full speed. Right at us.

Despite the fact that we all nearly died from sheer panic, we soon realized that the dogs were only posing as death’s personal henchmen and we began breathing again. As I had time to reflect on the faces that I had witnessed just as each one of us thought that we had met our end, I realized how funny looking my friends are. Just kidding, but actually I would have killed to have snapped a picture at that exact moment because I’ve never seen five faces with such a petrified and absolutely flabbergasted look in my life.

So in love with this place. 

In conclusion, as much as this might come as a surprise to many, Peru still rocks. What gets me the most is how literally every day comes with a new and crazy experience that I could never have predicted. Some are good, some are bad, some are scary, but the point is that every single day I get to experience something new to me, and that’s my favorite part of this whole ridiculous experience. So in the spirit of continuously seeking out new horizons, I’ll leave you with a quote from John Krakauer:

“The very basic core of a man’s living spirit is his passion for adventure. The joy of life comes from our encounters with new experiences, and hence there is no greater joy than to have an endlessly changing horizon, for each day to have a new and different sun.”