I'd like to tell you a little about my host family. They are a family of five. My host father Julio and my host mother Bacilisa. They have three children. The youngest, Jairo, lives at home and goes to school in the village. The middle child, Junior, studies electrical engineering in Cusco. He comes home sometimes when his parents need his help in the shop. The oldest lives in Lima and works there, so I don't really expect to see him around. They are the sweetest people, they are just so hospitable and really care about making me feel at home. Classic case of mi casa es su casa. My host father calls me 'hija', which means 'daughter' in Spanish. They also keep telling me to eat, and offering me more food after I've already finished a ginormous plate of food. I like the food here, but it's a lot of carbs. There's rice with everything, even if there are already potatoes in the dish. I might come back looking like a balloon. I went with my hostmum to go shopping yesterday. We walked around the town a bit and at the square there was a little bookstall set up. It sold everything from children's books to peruvian cookbooks to english guide books to Peru. When we passed a shop my hostmum decided she wanted eggs (and I mean like a proper stack of about 100 eggs), so her and the shoplady started checking all the eggs and swopping out the broken ones. So after a few minutes of shuffling around with the eggs, she had a couple of cartons of whole eggs. This was then tied together with strips of garbage bag and carried out with us. Yesterday I got brought over here by Hugo, our volunteer manager, who grew up in Cusco and really loves the area. He talked about the history and everything all the way here. They showed me around the town a little and then dropped me off at my house. Flying into Cusco was amazing. I had the best seat in the house: by the emergency exit, on the left side of the plane, by the window. The left side of the plane was important because it had the best view of the Andes. I saw the sun come up over a sky full of mountain tops and fluffy marshmallow clouds. The clouds dissipated after a while, and I had the most spectacular view of the Andes. There were little rivers and spiky mountain peaks. The sun made everything look orange and warm. It was so beautiful I couldn't stop looking at it.
In the afternoon there was a social organised by Projects Abroad. We went to a house just outside of Urubamba, where a man told us all about traditional Inca and pre-Inca musical instruments. There were a lot of flutes and whistles that produced all kinds of different sounds. There were drums and a small guitar (no not a ukulele). The guitar was made so small so it could easily be hidden, because anyone caught by the Spanish with a guitar would be killed. The Spanish wanted the guitar to only be used in good Christian ways, and not to worship the ancient gods. We all got to try out the instruments. I could get a sound out of most of the whistles. The flutes were more difficult. The pan flutes made something resembling a sound sometimes, but the traditional flutes stayed stubbornly silent. At least drums are always fun to hit.
There are strikes going on all around the Cusco area, so the roads are closed and nobody is working. They are demonstrating the privatisation of the archeological sites around the area. That also means that there is no school until Friday. We just spent the morning at the office. The others had classes to prepare, but I haven't met my teacher or my class yet so I had no idea where to start. Luckily my supervisor explained the school competition that will take place next week. We spent some time preparing that. In the afternoon we went for a short walk. I'm still not entirely used to the thin air around here. Even just walking uphill (nothing too steep), made me feel out of breath. Tonight I'm going dancing.
As a side note: I apologise for the lack of photos with my blog posts, but the WiFi that I have managed to find is not particularly fast, and uploading pictures is not really in it's range of capabilities. I am taking pictures though so I will spam you with them as soon as I get better WiFi.