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!