So I guess it’s time for another update! Considering it has been two weeks since I last wrote, I won’t bore all of you, my many faithful readers, with my day-by-day itinerary. In short, I have gone to a lot of classes and seen a lot of Incan ruins. I have also eaten alpaca (although not yet guinea pig), gone to a birthday party, and sang a bit of karaoke.

I will go into detail about a few things that I hope will be interesting. So here goes:

My daily schedule: During the week, I have two sessions of classes every day. In the mornings, I have Spanish class from 9 until 12. I usually get up around 730, and eat breakfast with my host family. Around 8 I leave for class walking with Hannah and Alex, two other SIT students who live in my neighborhood. The walk from our neighborhood, Magisterio, to the center where we have class is about 40 minutes. Considering I STILL haven’t really gotten used to the altitude here, I usually arrive huffing and puffing to class a few minutes before we begin. The fifteen students in the program have been split up into two different levels of Spanish classes, and I am in the upper level, but I have found the class to be very easy for me. I definitely have the most Spanish experience out of the group, and while it is useful to review grammar and conversational skills, I still find myself very bored and frustrated that I am not in a higher level. It is a moot point now, though, because we finish with Spanish on Tuesday (and then more onto Quechua!). After class ends at noon I return home for lunch, sometimes walking or sometimes in combi, which is the name for public buses here. The buses are usually big vans and are ALWAYS too crowded – the people are shoved in like sardines and it is pretty uncomfortable. I really like public transportation, so I don’t mind too much, but I do find myself getting pretty frustrated with being herded around like cattle. So walking is preferable. I usually eat with at least my host mom if not the rest of the family, and I am very very lucky to have been placed in a family that cooks well! My host mom, Maria Elena, is obsessed with food (as am I) so we have been eating very well. I have eaten a huge variety of things – from pesto pasta and sweet potatoes to tamales and stuffed meats. Lunch is a HUGE meal, so I am often stuffed to the brim when it comes time to return to school for our afternoon session.

Every afternoon we have a lecture from a different invited guest about some theme relating to Peru and its indigenous communities. It has been very interesting to hear people speak about their areas of expertise, and I have started to comprehend a little better the diversity of Peru’s indigenous communities and many of the different factors affecting them. Before coming to Peru, I had always thought of the country in terms of the Andean, quechua-speaking indigenous people, so it has been a big reality check to learn that over half of the country is part of the Amazon and that there are many different groups indigenous people residing there. One of the most interesting things that we have learned about so far has been Peru’s efforts at bilingual educations, which have been futile thus far. Considering I am interested in immigration and ESL in the United States, learning about a different country’s attempts to implement bilingual education has been an interesting comparison. I hope to investigate this further during my month-long ISP (Independent Study Project) which I will complete at the end of the semester. We have also learned about traditional medicine in Peru, Incan archaeology, and the history of indigenous rights in the country. It has been great to learn all of this, but it is also making everyone quite antsy to actually get out there and experience the indigenous culture! Luckily, we don’t have long to wait as we leave in three days for Manu, a park in the Amazon, where we will spend a few days each in two different indigenous communities there. I am really excited to get out of Cusco and go somewhere different (and WARM!)

One very interesting experience I had last week was actually something completely unrelated to being in Peru. Last Wednesday, as many of you Jewish folk know, was the beginning of Rosh Hashanah. There are three other Jewish kids on the program, so we decided to seek out any sort of service to see what it was like. The only thing that we were able to find was Chabad, which to my understanding is the closest thing to missionaries that the Jews have. I think that Chabad exists in many cities, and is run by orthodox Jews. Its goal is to find not very devout Jews (read: me) and make them more religious. So I went, accompanied by three friends, to the Chabad house in Cusco. We arrived for the service and were immediately barraged by many people speaking Hebrew – it seemed that everyone there was Israeli. The Chabad was located in a huge old house with courtyard in the middle. After some confusing, multilingual conversations, we found our way upstairs to the service. To my surprise, there was a curtain hanging in the middle of the room, dividing it half. I was confused at first until I realized that the front portion of the room was only for men and the back part, behind the curtain, was for women. I have never been to a religious service that prevented women from seeing the action, and I was quite taken aback and even a bit angry. But I stuck out the service (very short and completely in Hebrew) with my friends so that we could attend the dinner afterwards. For the dinner, there were probably over 200 people, all speaking Hebrew and appearing to know each other, and us. We felt very uncomfortable and a bit unwelcome, but stayed anyway for the food and the experience. We found some space at a table and ended up meeting Zevi, the only other American there. Zevi is an Orthodox Rabbi from Crown Heights, Brooklyn, who had just arrived in Cusco the night before. He was an interesting fellow because he was very young and personable, and seemed very normal, but he was also in his full-on Jewish regalia – suit and top hat and everything – and will not touch women. Honestly, I experienced more culture shock on Rosh Hashanah than I have the rest of my time in Peru!

I have also spent a considerable amount of time visiting different Incan ruins during the past few weeks. Last Saturday we went as a group to visit a bunch of different ruins that are right outside of the city, and yesterday I went with a smaller group to Pisaq, a town that lies about 33 km outside of Cusco. The town has a cute market, and about an hour hike up a mountain are some more beautiful ruins. I am honestly a bit tired of hearing about the function of each ruin and about the incredible architectural feat that allow the rocks to stay so well together, etc., so I might take a break for a while. I did, however, enjoy going to Pisaq because we got to hike up a mountain, which was VERY difficult because of the incline and the altitude, but also very worth it because, hey, I am in the ANDES! Every view in breathtaking and sometimes I need to remind myself to stop taking pictures because they never come out quite as incredible as is the view.

Well this entry has been pretty longwinded and unorganized, but I am exhausted so I will call it a night. I will update again next week after my trip to the Amazon!

Cusco

I am currently writing from my bedroom in my host family's house in Cusco! We arrived here as a group on Thursday evening and were met by all of our new host families. My host family consists of parents, Maria Elena Carrazco and Ariel Barrionuevo, and a 20 year old host brother named Diego. I also have a 23-year-old sister named Paola, but she lives in the city of Arequipa, which is 8 hours away, so I will probably never meet her. We live in la Urbanizacion (neighborhood) Magisterio, which is about a 30-minute walk or a 10-minute drive from the Plaza de Armas, the central plaza of Cusco. 2 other students from my program live in the same neighborhood as me, which is really and convenient. The family is very nice and welcoming - they have had many exchange students live with them before so they are very familiar with the process. This is very comforting but also makes me feel like one in a long line of foreign students in their lives. But they have been very warm, open, and inclusive, so all is good!

Friday morning my host dad helped me get to the place where we will be taking classes because we had to take a Spanish exam. We take classes in the Centro Bartolome de las Casas, which is a center dedicated to researched about marginalized groups of people. In this case, that research is mainly dedicated to studying indigenous groups here in the Andean region of Peru. It is one of the major research centers in Southern Peru and people come from many different places to study there. SIT has an office, a few classrooms, and its own tiny library in the center. The building is very beautiful and located only about 3 blocks from the Plaza de Armas, which is fantastic. The exam that we took will be used to break the group up into different levels for the Spanish classes that we are going to start tomorrow (Monday). I am definitely one of the better Spanish speakers in the group so I am not too worried.

I have so far spent a lot of time with my host family – yesterday we all went to see my host dad play in a soccer game. He is a dentist (as is my host mom) and every Saturday he plays with other dentists in a league against teams from other professions. This week they played the engineers, and the game resulted in a 1-1 empate (tie). The type of soccer that is popular in Cusco is very urban – teams of 6 play on basketball courts. Every park that I have passed has always been full of people playing soccer. I am waiting to find some people playing basketball so I can join in! Yesterday I also went with my host mom and brother to the Baratillo – a huge, open-air market that winds up and down different avenues. The thing about this market is that almost everything there is stolen, used, or fake. There were fake ray-bans mixed in with 60-year-old typewriters and old books in English about mineralogy. Anything that is brand-name has been stolen – generally from stores and tourists – and anything that looks new is a knock-off. My host brother jokingly told me that when his friends’ phones get stolen on a Friday night out, they will go the Baratillo the next morning to buy it back.

Some of the most interesting things I saw at the Baratillo were fake North Face jackets and other items. I think that this makes a big statement about the type of tourism in Cusco. The tourism industry here is dominated by adventure tourism. In the center of town there are tons of shops advertising rafting trips or hiking tours to Machu Picchu, and most of the tourists that are seen choking the center of the city are generally sporting expensive, brand-name outdoor-performance clothing. For this reason, there is a market for fake North Face and Patagonia products in a city that keeps warm via alpaca sweaters. It is very obvious that Cusco is a city of multiple identities. It is at the same time a haven for dreadlocked hippies and adventure seeking travelers, a central market for the indigenous people living in the small mountainous communities outside the city, and also one of Peru’s biggest cities, filled with a mainstream working-class and professional culture just like any other. I don’t really understand yet how these different identities and functions blend together and build off each other, but I am hoping that by the end of my semester here I will have gained a little more insight.

Right now I am relaxing after a long weekend. Last night I explored Cusco’s nightlife with my SIT friends, which included having a drink in the highest Irish pub in the world, at over 11,000 feet! Today I went to one of Cusco’s big produce markets, where we spent over an hour haggling over prices and choosing between the 20 varieties of potatoes. I then drove with my host family to visit a town about 30 minutes outside of the city where there is a beautiful church and a lot of old Spanish architecture. On the way back we stopped by some old Incan ruins that casually sit on the side of the highway. We concluded the trip with a big lunch (at 4:30 pm!) and I am currently resting and waiting for the inevitable food coma. Tonight I have to do some reading because classes start tomorrow – I had almost forgotten the reason for which I am here in Cusco!

Peru!

So I have arrived in Peru! I left on a noon flight from Boston, and arrive in Lima around 10 pm (their time, which is an hour behind the east coast, so really 11:00). I had traveled with a girl on my program, Priscilla, because she was also from Boston. Our flight to Cusco didn't leave Lima until 5:45 am, so we waited in the airport all night until it was time to leave. We waited at a Starbucks and ended up meeting a few other people from our program who were also there waiting for flights, so it was nice (but also a little ridiculous because we were so tired) to meet each other in advance. We got to Cusco around 7:00 am and got picked up by the staff here (we have 3 main staff who coordinate everything and are in charge of academics). Rather than staying in Cusco right away, we have been staying at a hotel in a nearby city called Urubamba for our orientation. The reasoning behind this is that Cusco is at 11,000 feet and many people get sick from the altitude when they first get there. Urubamba is only around 7,000 feet so it has been easier to get used to the altitude.

We haven't been doing too much in orientation, just getting to know each other (there are 14 other students in the program) and becoming familiar with Peru and the culture and understanding the academic expectations for the trip. We have gone a few little trips to neighboring communities but otherwise mostly stayed in our (beautiful) hotel here in Urubamba and talked. Yesterday, though, we went to Machu Picchu, which was beautiful! Well, it owuld have been more beautiful had it not been raining the entire time. But it was still incredible to see, and even better than I had expected. The trip took a LONG time each way, so we all bonded a lot on the journey, which was fun.

Today we are going to meet our homestay families in Cusco! We are leaving on a bus in an hour to go to a little reception they are having for us. Tomorrow we have a Spanish placement test and then we start class on Monday. I should go now but I will update more later once I figure everything out in Cusco.

Hasta Luego!

Rachel