Where Everything is Possible, but Nothing is Sure

Peru: where “everything is possible, but nothing is sure.” For example, it’s possible to take a taxi home fairly easily, but you MIGHT run out of gas on the way. Or you can take your phone on the bus, but it’s POSSIBLE that you’ll never see it again. Or you can have a casual conversation with your family around the dining table, but your host brother COULD make fun of you relentlessly for your weird accent (Yeah, I’m talking about you, Luis).

Granadilla: the weirdest looking and best tasting
fruit I've ever had.

It’s the beginning of my fourth week here and things are in full swing. Classes are happening, relationships are forming, and I have even once or twice recognized random people while walking around downtown. This is real life.

A few recent highlights:

Tramposo:

My 9 year old host brother Marcelo absolutely loves games. Monopoly, indoor soccer, uno, tennis, you name it. He’ll play it. He also recently discovered that I have chess on my computer (double whammy, technology AND a board game all wrapped into one!) and so he has been wanting to play it quite a bit. Wanna know how I learned the word “cheater” in Spanish? THIS KID.

My favorite little tramposo and his cousin. 

In monopoly he counts the wrong number of spaces so he won’t have to go to jail, in Uno he just straight makes up rules, in chess NOTWITHSTANDING the fact that it’s on a computer and fairly hard to cheat, he’ll press down on the mouse as my hand hovers over different moves so that I move to the wrong place. And yet, despite all of this, he’s my favorite little dude ever. When I walk in the door after school he’s so pumped to see me, when we watch TV he always makes sure to turn on the English subtitles (it’s the little things), and when I speak Spanish to him he’s never-endingly patient.

He’s a crazy little booger but I honestly couldn’t have asked for a better host family.

Brichero:

So for those of you who are blessedly unaware, in Peru there’s a certain type of person who is known as a brichero. Essentially, these are locals who prey on un-expecting foreigners and start relationships with them mostly so that they can gain access to any resources like money or whatnot that the foreigner has. If you’re interested in learning even more about bricheros than my stellar explanation can provide, check out this video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IRk6dvRLngA

My cute little Peruvian phone!

So anyway, on Thursday night (we didn’t have class on Friday, Mom) I was out at a hostel-bar with friends, minding my own business when this Peruvian woman came over and started talking to me. We were chatting it up, talking about our respective countries and sharing stories, having a good old friendly cross-cultural conversation. She was speaking in English, I was speaking in Spanish and feeling pretty proud of myself, it was great. And then I started to realize something...

She was NOT a she. “She” was in fact just a dude with excessively long hair and very womanly features. My powers of observation are clearly up to par.

I don’t know how your experiences in bars have been, but from my fairly limited experience I’ve noticed that guys don’t usually just casually chat with girls without having ulterior motives. Call me crazy, but that’s what I’ve observed.

So anyway, with my incredibly honed investigation skills, I began to realize that this Peruvian chick…. errr I mean chico was very possibly hitting on me. So with my equally honed skills of not being socially awkward, I excused myself to go to the bathroom and didn’t return. Well played, Hannah. Well played.

But the story does not end there! I try to avoid featuring my social awkwardness as the main point in my tales, as much as humanly possible at least.

Donaldo and his bag of coca leaves

Let’s flash forward about 48 hours. My friend Dalton and I are sitting on the fountain journaling and being cool and whatnot, when we happen to notice an oddly familiar looking Peruvian with unnaturally looking long hair. And with him, there appears to be a very much NOT Peruvian woman with whom he was getting pretty cozy with (PDA is everywhere here). Dalton and I have heard plenty of stories about the infamous bricheros, so we decided to get a closer looked. We noticed (conveniently) that there was an empty bench next to theirs and so we (inconspicuously, I might add) ran over to claim the territory. And it was him! The brichero had found his prey, and her name was not Hannah Eckert.

And there you have it folks! The story of how I successfully navigated my first encounter with a brichero.

Coca:

For those of you who are as naïve as I was, coca leaves are the source of cocaine. Alone they’re very harmless and act more like redbull than coke, but they’re illegal in most countries because of what you can make out of them. But not here! Nope! Because this is Peru and they do what they want.

A beautiful Cusquena sunset over the colonial
Spanish buildings.

So one of my professors is quite the coca head (haha, get it?) and invited us to a speaker on the benefits of coca leaves a couple of weeks ago. Being the dutiful students that we are, we all decided to attend. After drinking coca tea, eating coca bread, and consuming some kind of coca soda that was green, we were ready to go. A mere hour after the scheduled time for the chat, a very old hippie guy finally emerged and began speaking. For an hour and half. In Spanish. And I don’t know what I was expecting out of a speaker who is an expert on the coca leaf, but he talked at approximately a million miles an hour and I couldn’t understand anything except the occasional “oja de coca,” “redbull,” and… yeah that was just about it. So that was fun.

Then yesterday we were all sitting in our class on Indigenous Amazonian Peoples getting ready for it began when I accidentally let out a teensy little yawn. Very small. And immediately Donaldo was ready with some coca leaves for everyone! He’s a regular boy scout he’s so prepared. And to make matters more exciting we’re going to be travelling to the Amazon for three days later this month with him. It’ll be interesting to see how the saga of the coca leaf continues…

So that’s my life! Basically just full of drugs and Peruvian men. What more could a girl ask for?

Hasta luego!

Hannah