Instead of trying to sum up my whole trip, and the meaning of everything, and how it all changed me (which would take more than a lifetime to do), I want to leave you all with an experience I had on my last day in Cuzco, which was all at once odd, disturbing, commonplace, and in some strange way an appropriate ending to this series of other-worldly events.
I spent the last couple days living in the house where I began when I first came to Cuzco, spending time with Rosita and reliving old memories in my head. Things had changed; the family was practically uprooting the entire house, redoing all three bathrooms. Mijael no longer works in the fish store underneath the house; his brother-in-law, who owned the store, decided to sell it. Rosita now sits at the table to eat with the rest of the family, instead of at a seperate table in the same room. She is almost finished her thesis and will soon be moving out of the house, but only once my host parents manage to find another maid (they really can't live without one).
At the same time, not much had changed. Erika, the maid in the house of my host mom's daughter, had off for awhile, the result being that Rosita kept being asked to come over and take care of the kids there. My host parents were away for the weekend in their house in the country while Rosita had to stay in the house and wait for all the different repairmen to come. Seeing as she was supposed to be taking care of the kids in the other house at the same time, I ended up having to stay in the house waiting for the repairmen to come.
Finally at mid-day on Monday Socorro and Ramiro returned from their weekend house. I left the house for a few minutes to buy something at the general store, and when I came back my host parents were gone, and at the kitchen table, like a ghost, was seated an elderly indigenous woman I had never seen in my life. It startled me, partly because she was obviously indigenous, in the characteristic sweater, hat and skirts, and for that reason I knew she couldn't have been any blood relation of my host family. It crossed my mind that maybe she had broken and entered, but I knew that was utterly ridiculous. Not knowing what to do, I entered the kitchen and just kind of stood there, looking at her, struggling to make some sort of connection but feeling as if there had never been two people on earth who understood each other less. Finally I said hello and asked her name. She said it was Juliana, and I introduced myself, explaining that I lived there. She just looked at me apprehensively and a little fearfully, and said she was waiting for la Señora Socorro. Mystified, I went up to my room.
Later it was explained to me what relation Juliana had to the family. When Socorro was growing up, Juliana had been the maid who took care of her. Yet it was impossible for me to imagine that this modest old woman had once had the authority to discipline Socorro. During lunch, which was kind of a going away party for me and in which I opened a bottle of wine from Argentina that I'd been saving, Juliana sat at the same table where Rosita used to sit. She was served a child-sized portion of wine and spoken to like a child. After lunch, Juliana sat at the table and waited there while Socorro went upstairs, watched some TV with the kids and took a short nap. I was waiting for Rosita to finish taking her shower so she could go out with me, so I came downstairs and sat at the same table as Juliana, neither of us saying a word to each other for several minutes. Finally Juliana asked me, "Is la Señora Socorro coming down, or has she fallen asleep?"
"She's not asleep right now," I said. "Should I tell her to come down?"
"No, she'll come down."
She sat and waited for another half hour or so, until Socorro finally came down, and started talking to her as if it were official business, about God knows what. During the part of the conversation I witnessed Socorro was giving Juliana a pair of earrings and saying they made her look so pretty--still speaking to her like a child. And to think, there was a time when Juliana spoke to her the same way.
Friday, August 3, 2007
Is anything sacred?
A conversation between me and Carlos and a woman who sells vegetarian food in the market in Cochabamba, Bolivia, as we were sitting down to eat lunch. A little mean perhaps, but hilarious. It started with the woman saying something about me being Carlos's wife.
Carlos: We're not married, and we're never going to get married either.
Señora: [gasps] Why?!
Carlos: Because...because we're not. Why did you think we were married?
Señora: Well, because I saw you two together and I figured people from other countries couldn't be so different from us. We're all human.
Carlos: Well, we're never getting married. Naomi, tell her why we're not getting married.
Me: We're not getting married because we don't believe in love.
Señora: [gasps] Really?
Me: Really. My mother used to always tell me that love doesn't exist. Carlos, didn't your mother ever tell you that?
Carlos: My mother never told me anything. That's why I don't believe in love.
Me: See that?
Señora: They say that if you know God's love, you know the love of the universe...
Me: Shit! Carlos, we don't believe in God do we? That must be why we don't believe in love!
Carlos: Dammit, you're right!
Señora: And the president of the United States...he's a believer isn't he?
Carlos: In Satan. Yes. He worships Satan.
Señora: Good lord, he must, otherwise he wouldn't have started so many wars and killed so many people.
Me: Yeah, but that's normal in the Unites States. Lots of people worship Satan.
Señora: How horrible!
Carlos: We're not married, and we're never going to get married either.
Señora: [gasps] Why?!
Carlos: Because...because we're not. Why did you think we were married?
Señora: Well, because I saw you two together and I figured people from other countries couldn't be so different from us. We're all human.
Carlos: Well, we're never getting married. Naomi, tell her why we're not getting married.
Me: We're not getting married because we don't believe in love.
Señora: [gasps] Really?
Me: Really. My mother used to always tell me that love doesn't exist. Carlos, didn't your mother ever tell you that?
Carlos: My mother never told me anything. That's why I don't believe in love.
Me: See that?
Señora: They say that if you know God's love, you know the love of the universe...
Me: Shit! Carlos, we don't believe in God do we? That must be why we don't believe in love!
Carlos: Dammit, you're right!
Señora: And the president of the United States...he's a believer isn't he?
Carlos: In Satan. Yes. He worships Satan.
Señora: Good lord, he must, otherwise he wouldn't have started so many wars and killed so many people.
Me: Yeah, but that's normal in the Unites States. Lots of people worship Satan.
Señora: How horrible!
Wednesday, August 1, 2007
7/29/07 -- Roadblocks, assaults, etc.
So, just when you think Bolivia can't get any crazier, it does. What a country, I tell you--it makes Peru look like a very stable place. That said, now that I'm back in Cuzco my friends have been telling me that the strike of professors between Cuzco and Puno only got worse after I left--apparently the Peruvian president has proposed to give funding so that future teachers can take extra preparatory courses, but the teachers are protesting because they'd rather just be paid more. Meanwhile in Bolivia, there was a big controversy about the price of bread, which went up from 4 ´pancitos´ (little breads) for a peso to 3 pancitos for a peso, causing complete and utter chaos. OK, well maybe that's a bit of an exaggeration, but then add to that huge student demonstrations which resulted in universities in some areas being suspended for two weeks, a giant demonstration of 2 million people in La Paz protesting the proposition of moving the political capital back to Sucre (the country's historical capital), and an enormous mining strike that happened to be centered right where I was, in Potosi. Every single road out of Potosi was closed due to roadblocks, and I ended up being stuck there for five days, originally having planned to be there for two. Not that there's anything so bad about being stuck in Potosi, but there's something incredibly unnerving about not being able to leave a place and having no idea when the situation will change. I was staying in a small, very personal hostel and when I came down for breakfast the third morning the receptionist said to me, 'You seem to be suffering from a bit of anxiety.' I just nodded in consent.
So, I did go on my tour of a cooperative mine, but the day I went was the first day of the strike and not one miner was actually working. It was still an unforgettable experience though; the good thing was that I had my own personal Spanish-speaking guide, since the rest of the people on the tour were Belgian and had there own French guide. My guide was the same age as me, 21, and worked in the mines from the time he was 18 to 20, for lack of a better option. We ended up becoming friends and hanging out for the rest of the time I was stuck in Potosi. Anyway, a couple interesting things about the mines: first, I couldn't believe it when my guide told me that during the colonial period the miners were basically enslaved and would be forced to stay in the mines for up to 6 months at a time without seeing the light of day. When they came out, the sunlight was so shocking to their eyes that many went blind. The production of the coca leaf was supported in this time period because it decreases hunger and made it possible for the workers to go longer periods without rest. Another interesting thing is that in each mine, to this day, there is a little sculpture of a devil to which the miners offer coca leaves every Friday, which is said to watch over those who work underneath the earth. There is also a sculpture of the Pachamama, the female counterpart who watches over the earth (but not the underworld).
After Potosi I went on to Sucre, which is where Bolivia's independence was declared, and which was the capital city until La Paz took its place by sheer power of numbers, I guess. It's also said to be Bolivia's most beautiful city, and has a much different feel than the rest of the country, full of beautiful colonial buildings. The week when I was there there was also a fair of miniatures, which I was really excited about because several people in Peru had told me about this Bolivian phenomenon. It's basically a big market in which all of the vendors sell miniatures of pretty much everything you can imagine--foods, toiletries, clothing, money, alcohol, Bolivian passports, marriage certificates, etc. Other than that, I went to an archaeological site in which some dinosaur footprints have been found (which sounded more interesting than it actually was) and La Casa de La Libertad, the very place where independence was declared which is now a museum. Pretty cool.
After that I went to Cochabamba, one of the biggest cities in Bolivia. I can't really understand why it attracts so many tourists, but I mostly went there to meet up with a friend I met in Cuzco, Carlos, who is kind of a nomadic jewelry maker and happened to be travelling in Bolivia at the same time as me. I was in Cochabamba for three and a half days, during which time I did basically nothing. The first day I was exhausted from having taken an overnight bus, and the second day, well, Carlos and I had the idea of walking up to a lookout point in the city, which involves going up a few hundred stairs. About halfway up, around 3:00 in the afternoon, we stopped and sat down to take a rest, and kind of ended up getting robbed, and the assaulters kind of had knives. Neither of us were hurt and it was mostly just a scare (my assaulter was dumb enough not to notice I had a digital camera, and Carlos somehow convinced his to leave him his passport) but there was the slight problem that we were left with a total of 5 pesos between us. So Carlos, conveniently being an artesan, went to sell some of the jewelry he makes in the street, and we managed to scrape up just enough to get buy until the next day when my parents wired me enough money for both of us to get by in Bolivia for probably about a month (thanks ma and pa).
Anyway, that pretty much ended our desire to do touristic things in Cochabamba. A couple days later we were off to La Paz, and spent the good part of a day there walking around looking for a movie theater playing something decent and not finding one. Luckily Carlos is quite entertaining and somehow we managed to keep each other amused. I spent the next day in a bus back to Cuzco, and here I am, just saying my goodbyes to everyone, trying to explain why I was in Bolivia for two weeks longer than I originally said I would be (this is difficult with Peruvians, who like to ask you the exact date and time you will be returning to see them, despite the fact that they themselves are never on time), and preparing to return to the US on Tuesday.
So, I did go on my tour of a cooperative mine, but the day I went was the first day of the strike and not one miner was actually working. It was still an unforgettable experience though; the good thing was that I had my own personal Spanish-speaking guide, since the rest of the people on the tour were Belgian and had there own French guide. My guide was the same age as me, 21, and worked in the mines from the time he was 18 to 20, for lack of a better option. We ended up becoming friends and hanging out for the rest of the time I was stuck in Potosi. Anyway, a couple interesting things about the mines: first, I couldn't believe it when my guide told me that during the colonial period the miners were basically enslaved and would be forced to stay in the mines for up to 6 months at a time without seeing the light of day. When they came out, the sunlight was so shocking to their eyes that many went blind. The production of the coca leaf was supported in this time period because it decreases hunger and made it possible for the workers to go longer periods without rest. Another interesting thing is that in each mine, to this day, there is a little sculpture of a devil to which the miners offer coca leaves every Friday, which is said to watch over those who work underneath the earth. There is also a sculpture of the Pachamama, the female counterpart who watches over the earth (but not the underworld).
After Potosi I went on to Sucre, which is where Bolivia's independence was declared, and which was the capital city until La Paz took its place by sheer power of numbers, I guess. It's also said to be Bolivia's most beautiful city, and has a much different feel than the rest of the country, full of beautiful colonial buildings. The week when I was there there was also a fair of miniatures, which I was really excited about because several people in Peru had told me about this Bolivian phenomenon. It's basically a big market in which all of the vendors sell miniatures of pretty much everything you can imagine--foods, toiletries, clothing, money, alcohol, Bolivian passports, marriage certificates, etc. Other than that, I went to an archaeological site in which some dinosaur footprints have been found (which sounded more interesting than it actually was) and La Casa de La Libertad, the very place where independence was declared which is now a museum. Pretty cool.
After that I went to Cochabamba, one of the biggest cities in Bolivia. I can't really understand why it attracts so many tourists, but I mostly went there to meet up with a friend I met in Cuzco, Carlos, who is kind of a nomadic jewelry maker and happened to be travelling in Bolivia at the same time as me. I was in Cochabamba for three and a half days, during which time I did basically nothing. The first day I was exhausted from having taken an overnight bus, and the second day, well, Carlos and I had the idea of walking up to a lookout point in the city, which involves going up a few hundred stairs. About halfway up, around 3:00 in the afternoon, we stopped and sat down to take a rest, and kind of ended up getting robbed, and the assaulters kind of had knives. Neither of us were hurt and it was mostly just a scare (my assaulter was dumb enough not to notice I had a digital camera, and Carlos somehow convinced his to leave him his passport) but there was the slight problem that we were left with a total of 5 pesos between us. So Carlos, conveniently being an artesan, went to sell some of the jewelry he makes in the street, and we managed to scrape up just enough to get buy until the next day when my parents wired me enough money for both of us to get by in Bolivia for probably about a month (thanks ma and pa).
Anyway, that pretty much ended our desire to do touristic things in Cochabamba. A couple days later we were off to La Paz, and spent the good part of a day there walking around looking for a movie theater playing something decent and not finding one. Luckily Carlos is quite entertaining and somehow we managed to keep each other amused. I spent the next day in a bus back to Cuzco, and here I am, just saying my goodbyes to everyone, trying to explain why I was in Bolivia for two weeks longer than I originally said I would be (this is difficult with Peruvians, who like to ask you the exact date and time you will be returning to see them, despite the fact that they themselves are never on time), and preparing to return to the US on Tuesday.
7/16/07 -- Adios to my plans
Alright, that last email I wrote makes me laugh because just like usual on this trip, nothing that I mentioned has gone according to plan. It turned out I couldn't go to Quillabamba because there was a landslide blocking the only road that goes there from Cuzco. At that point I was a bit anxious to get out of Cuzco, so I told Braddy I was going to begin my travels in the Bolivia direction a bit early and that I would meet him in La Paz. On Monday I bought my ticket to Puno for Wednesday morning, only to arrive at the terminal and find that there had been a roadblock strike going on since Monday and that no buses were leaving during the day. I changed my ticket to that night and left at 10 pm. On a trip that was supposed to take six hours, the bus stopped at 5:30 am and informed all its passengers that it could not go any further and we were going to have to get off and walk. So at 5:30 am in the freezing cold with my little rolling suitcase, I walked about a half hour over a bridge, from where I had to take two mini-buses to get to Puno, finally arriving at 8:30 am. I was happy to finally be there.
Well, then my friend Braddy was busy for awhile with an art show and by the time he got done with that he informed me that he was sorry but he no longer had the time, money, or energy to come to Bolivia. Such is life.
But I will start from the beginning of my travelling adventures. As I've mentioned, my first destination was Puno, a small tourist city on the shore of Lake Titicaca, which is the highest freshwater lake in the world and was sacred to the Incas. The Lake is split between Peru and Bolivia, and a Bolivian friend I recently met on a bus told me Bolivians like to say that the 'Titi' belongs to Bolivia and the 'caca' to Peru ('caca' in Spanish means 'shit'). In reality though, the whole of the lake is quite gorgeous. Anyway, after a day spent wandering around Puno (in a day you can do pretty much everything there is to do in Puno) I took a boat to two different islands in Lake Titicaca, Amantani and Taquile. Taquile was particularly interesting to me because at Middlebury I wrote a paper dealing with the weaving tradition and tourism there. The paradox of the island is that it's both a fabricated tourist attraction and an isolated place where people really do still live somewhat 'traditionally,' if you ignore the island's many rstaurants and bars. Amantani is less touristy and people there live more 'rustically', but they do have one little tourist-attracting niche, which is staging little 'discotecas' for tourists at night in which they dress you up in the traditional clothing that they themselves don't wear anymore and everyone dances to a band playing traditional music. It's quite a show. While on the Peru side of the lake I also visited a couple of the Floating Islands, which are man-made islands built completely of reeds, no more than 20 meters in diameter. These communities were initially built as a way for people to escape from widespread tribal warfare, and people still live quiet lives there in tiny communities although they now get things like education and medical services in Puno. They're something you really have to see to believe.
After visiting those islands, I continued across the Bolivian border to Copacabana. On the bus ride there I met a fellow traveller from Morocco and another French guy that the Moroccan guy had met on the bus from Cuzco to Puno. The three of us decided to spend the night on the Isla del Sol (Island of the Sun), which is the mythical birthplace of the Incan civilization. Ironically, the first night there we got caught in a hail storm and ended up just sitting in our hostel drinking cheap, gross Bolivian wine and chewing coca leaves. The next day was a little clearer and Romain (the Frenchie) and I hiked to some really cool labyrinth-like ruins on one side of the island before taking the boat back to Copacabana.
After that I continued on to La Paz and spent two days there hanging out with Tarik (the Moroccan), visiting markets and museums, and the usual stuff you do in cities. While Lake Titicaca is the highest freshwater lake in the world, La Paz boasts being the highest capital, at something like 3800 meters above sea level. The main part of the city is situated in a bit of a valley, but like Lima, the outer boundaries of the city just keep growing due to people migrating there from the country, and from several lookout towers in the city you can see just how packed all the buildings are on the side of the mountains. It's pretty impressive.
It just so happened that Tarik was also planning on doing a tour of the salt flats and desert near Uyuni, so I decided to go with him. It was a very uncomfortable 12-hour overnight bus ride down to Uyuni, which is a freezing cold, isolated and desolate town which earns its livelihood almost completely from tourism. There are dozens of tour agencies that do three-day tours of the desert, and we ended up going with a different tour agency than we had made the reservation with, which apparently happens a lot. The tour group consisted of me, Tarik, two youngish Polish couples, and a local tour guide and cook, all packed snugly into a jeep. The tour was memorable both for the spectacular scenery (only my photos can describe that, which I unfortunately might not be able to posr online until I get home) and for the fact that the tour itself was comically bad. The guide and cook seemed intent on speaking to us as little as possible. The jeep arrived at the tour agency an hour late the first day, then stopped at several places around town to pick up a few personal items and some food items that our guides had neglected to pick up beforehand. Every time we arrived at one of the sites the guide would tell us we had 15 minutes to walk around, then after ten minutes would yell, 'Let's go, let's go, we're late!' On top of that, the cook made a hot dog casserole for the two vegetarians on the trip, then on the last morning when we asked for the scrambled eggs we had been promised, said that there were eggs in the bread. She finally brought us a bowl of scrambled eggs but without forks and plates to eat it with. Following breakfast we revolted and spent an hour and a half in the hot springs mostly just to piss of the guide. Because of this we arrived lateat the town in which we were apparently supposed to stop and get gas (the guide had told us nothing about this, of course) and the gas station was closed. But instead of telling us that he was going to try to find the owner of the gas station, the guide pretended we were at another stop in the trip and asked if we wanted to get out and see the local market or church. This resulted in all of us being quite confused when we ended up waiting 45 minutes for him to come back. We arrived back in the frigid Uyuni at 8:30, 2 and a half hours late. The good thing was that we all got along really well and were able to laugh at all the silly mishaps. Unfortunately we arrived back too late to stage a protest in front of the travel agency.
At the point of reaching the Chilean border on the last day we parted with Tarik, who was continuing on to Valparaiso. Coincidentally, me and the two Polish couples all had the same plan, which was to move on to the religious and mining center of Potosi, where I am now. On the bus here I was sitting next to and chatting with a Bolivian guy who is studying in Sucre, which just happens to be my next destination. The city of Potosi supposedly has a fascinating history, of which I know little because I unfortunately do not have the Lonely Planet Guide to Bolivia (this appears to be an essential). My Bolivian friend told me that at some point in history it was the biggest city in the world. Anyway, despite my ignorance, I am highly looking forward to taking a tour of one of the cooperative mines tomorrow. More on this to come.
Well, then my friend Braddy was busy for awhile with an art show and by the time he got done with that he informed me that he was sorry but he no longer had the time, money, or energy to come to Bolivia. Such is life.
But I will start from the beginning of my travelling adventures. As I've mentioned, my first destination was Puno, a small tourist city on the shore of Lake Titicaca, which is the highest freshwater lake in the world and was sacred to the Incas. The Lake is split between Peru and Bolivia, and a Bolivian friend I recently met on a bus told me Bolivians like to say that the 'Titi' belongs to Bolivia and the 'caca' to Peru ('caca' in Spanish means 'shit'). In reality though, the whole of the lake is quite gorgeous. Anyway, after a day spent wandering around Puno (in a day you can do pretty much everything there is to do in Puno) I took a boat to two different islands in Lake Titicaca, Amantani and Taquile. Taquile was particularly interesting to me because at Middlebury I wrote a paper dealing with the weaving tradition and tourism there. The paradox of the island is that it's both a fabricated tourist attraction and an isolated place where people really do still live somewhat 'traditionally,' if you ignore the island's many rstaurants and bars. Amantani is less touristy and people there live more 'rustically', but they do have one little tourist-attracting niche, which is staging little 'discotecas' for tourists at night in which they dress you up in the traditional clothing that they themselves don't wear anymore and everyone dances to a band playing traditional music. It's quite a show. While on the Peru side of the lake I also visited a couple of the Floating Islands, which are man-made islands built completely of reeds, no more than 20 meters in diameter. These communities were initially built as a way for people to escape from widespread tribal warfare, and people still live quiet lives there in tiny communities although they now get things like education and medical services in Puno. They're something you really have to see to believe.
After visiting those islands, I continued across the Bolivian border to Copacabana. On the bus ride there I met a fellow traveller from Morocco and another French guy that the Moroccan guy had met on the bus from Cuzco to Puno. The three of us decided to spend the night on the Isla del Sol (Island of the Sun), which is the mythical birthplace of the Incan civilization. Ironically, the first night there we got caught in a hail storm and ended up just sitting in our hostel drinking cheap, gross Bolivian wine and chewing coca leaves. The next day was a little clearer and Romain (the Frenchie) and I hiked to some really cool labyrinth-like ruins on one side of the island before taking the boat back to Copacabana.
After that I continued on to La Paz and spent two days there hanging out with Tarik (the Moroccan), visiting markets and museums, and the usual stuff you do in cities. While Lake Titicaca is the highest freshwater lake in the world, La Paz boasts being the highest capital, at something like 3800 meters above sea level. The main part of the city is situated in a bit of a valley, but like Lima, the outer boundaries of the city just keep growing due to people migrating there from the country, and from several lookout towers in the city you can see just how packed all the buildings are on the side of the mountains. It's pretty impressive.
It just so happened that Tarik was also planning on doing a tour of the salt flats and desert near Uyuni, so I decided to go with him. It was a very uncomfortable 12-hour overnight bus ride down to Uyuni, which is a freezing cold, isolated and desolate town which earns its livelihood almost completely from tourism. There are dozens of tour agencies that do three-day tours of the desert, and we ended up going with a different tour agency than we had made the reservation with, which apparently happens a lot. The tour group consisted of me, Tarik, two youngish Polish couples, and a local tour guide and cook, all packed snugly into a jeep. The tour was memorable both for the spectacular scenery (only my photos can describe that, which I unfortunately might not be able to posr online until I get home) and for the fact that the tour itself was comically bad. The guide and cook seemed intent on speaking to us as little as possible. The jeep arrived at the tour agency an hour late the first day, then stopped at several places around town to pick up a few personal items and some food items that our guides had neglected to pick up beforehand. Every time we arrived at one of the sites the guide would tell us we had 15 minutes to walk around, then after ten minutes would yell, 'Let's go, let's go, we're late!' On top of that, the cook made a hot dog casserole for the two vegetarians on the trip, then on the last morning when we asked for the scrambled eggs we had been promised, said that there were eggs in the bread. She finally brought us a bowl of scrambled eggs but without forks and plates to eat it with. Following breakfast we revolted and spent an hour and a half in the hot springs mostly just to piss of the guide. Because of this we arrived lateat the town in which we were apparently supposed to stop and get gas (the guide had told us nothing about this, of course) and the gas station was closed. But instead of telling us that he was going to try to find the owner of the gas station, the guide pretended we were at another stop in the trip and asked if we wanted to get out and see the local market or church. This resulted in all of us being quite confused when we ended up waiting 45 minutes for him to come back. We arrived back in the frigid Uyuni at 8:30, 2 and a half hours late. The good thing was that we all got along really well and were able to laugh at all the silly mishaps. Unfortunately we arrived back too late to stage a protest in front of the travel agency.
At the point of reaching the Chilean border on the last day we parted with Tarik, who was continuing on to Valparaiso. Coincidentally, me and the two Polish couples all had the same plan, which was to move on to the religious and mining center of Potosi, where I am now. On the bus here I was sitting next to and chatting with a Bolivian guy who is studying in Sucre, which just happens to be my next destination. The city of Potosi supposedly has a fascinating history, of which I know little because I unfortunately do not have the Lonely Planet Guide to Bolivia (this appears to be an essential). My Bolivian friend told me that at some point in history it was the biggest city in the world. Anyway, despite my ignorance, I am highly looking forward to taking a tour of one of the cooperative mines tomorrow. More on this to come.
Tuesday, July 3, 2007
Two ridiculous mishaps
Ridiculous Mishap #1: The case of the stolen cell phone.
After spending a lot of time bragging about how I haven't gotten mugged or robbed the entire time I've been in Latin America, the latter finally happened. Of course, it happened on the day of Inti Raymi, the biggest festival in Cuzco, when all of the robbers come out. I was on a bus going back from Sacsaywaman and forgot that I had my cell phone in my pocket. The bus was prety crowded and as I was getting off I felt someone behind me slip my cell phone out of my pocket. I yelled, 'Hey! Someone just stole my cell phone!' but no one did anything. It occurred to me that there was absolutely nothing I could do given that I didn't know who had taken it and everyone was getting off the bus. Well, if something had to get stolen from me, I figured, better my $25 cell phone than something more valuable.
The next day I went to one of the offices of the cell phone company I was using, Telefonica, to have them block my number. Seeing as Telefonica is the biggest and most well-established phone companies in Peru, you’d think they’d have their act together at least for issues as common as stolen cell phones, but no. I waited in line for 20 minutes just for the woman there to tell me to dial 123 on one of their phones in the office, and then to find that that number didn’t go through, and that the woman had no interest in listening to me anymore. Finally after waiting another ten minutes with her ignoring me and throwing a minor fit, she told me that the system was not currently in operation, that I’d have to wait an hour. In response to this I stormed out of the office and came back the next day only to find that the number still didn’t work.
In the meantime, I rented another cell phone from a friend and decided to call my old number just to see what happened. To my surprise, a woman answered. The conversation went something like this:
Woman: Hallo?
Me: Hi, who is this?
Woman: Hallo?
Me: This is the owner of the phone you’re using.
Woman: What?
Me: That phone was stolen from me a few days ago. The phone you have is a stolen phone.
Woman: Oh. Well someone sold it to me.
Me: Well, in any case I’m going to have to block the account because you’re using a phone that’s still in my name.
Woman: Name a time and place to meet and I’ll return it to you.
Me: OK, do you know where the Parque España is in Santa Monica? How about we meet there at 5:30.
Woman: OK.
I went with Rosita to meet the woman in the place we had arranged. We even told the local police about what had happened and asked them to hang around for awhile in case the woman tried to ask me for money for my stolen cell phone. By 6:00 she still hadn’t showed up, and when I called my cell phone again she said she would be right there. At 6:15 I tried to call again, and my cell phone was turned off. The next day I went to a different office of Telefonica and they blocked my number for me with no problem. I really don’t understand bureaucracy.
Ridiculous Mishap #2: Bad Water
Last night I went out dancing with Braddy and some of his friends, and decided that staying at his house was a better idea than coming back really late to my house and waking up my entire family. I was sleeping in the same room where he does his painting, and in the middle of the night I woke up really thirsty, saw a brand-name bottle of water on the floor next to his painting materials, and started to drink it. I drank about half the bottle. Well, the next morning when I woke up I looked at the water and realized it didn’t look so clean. It was slightly yellowish in color and there were some particles floating on the bottom. ‘Braddy, one little question,’ I said. ‘Where is this water from?’
Braddy: Oh, shit. Did you drink that?
Me: Yeah, I was thirsty in the middle of the night and didn’t realize how gross it was.
Braddy (laughing): That water is from the ocean in Chile. When my friends travel I always ask them to bring water back for me because I like to paint with water from all different places. It’s part of my mystique.
Me: Oh, well if it’s from the ocean in Chile that’s not so bad. I was afraid it was tap water from here.
Braddy: No, it shouldn’t be that bad, just a little salty.
Me: Strange, it didn’t taste salty.
Braddy (10 minutes later): Oh shit. You know what, I just realized, that other bottle is the water from Chile, the one you were drinking is water from Pisac. (Pisac is a rural town about an hour outside of Cuzco)
Me: Oh. Well, that’s not good.
Braddy: No, that’s kind of bad. You better start taking antibiotics. That water is loaded with little creatures.
Me: OK, I have some antibiotics here actually. What water should I use to swallow the pill?
Braddy: Use the Chilean water, it’s cleaner. No, just kidding, I’ll boil some.
And so I am temporarily back on antibiotics. I can only hope that my body doesn’t become a giant safe haven for antibiotic resistant bacteria by the time I get back to the states.
After spending a lot of time bragging about how I haven't gotten mugged or robbed the entire time I've been in Latin America, the latter finally happened. Of course, it happened on the day of Inti Raymi, the biggest festival in Cuzco, when all of the robbers come out. I was on a bus going back from Sacsaywaman and forgot that I had my cell phone in my pocket. The bus was prety crowded and as I was getting off I felt someone behind me slip my cell phone out of my pocket. I yelled, 'Hey! Someone just stole my cell phone!' but no one did anything. It occurred to me that there was absolutely nothing I could do given that I didn't know who had taken it and everyone was getting off the bus. Well, if something had to get stolen from me, I figured, better my $25 cell phone than something more valuable.
The next day I went to one of the offices of the cell phone company I was using, Telefonica, to have them block my number. Seeing as Telefonica is the biggest and most well-established phone companies in Peru, you’d think they’d have their act together at least for issues as common as stolen cell phones, but no. I waited in line for 20 minutes just for the woman there to tell me to dial 123 on one of their phones in the office, and then to find that that number didn’t go through, and that the woman had no interest in listening to me anymore. Finally after waiting another ten minutes with her ignoring me and throwing a minor fit, she told me that the system was not currently in operation, that I’d have to wait an hour. In response to this I stormed out of the office and came back the next day only to find that the number still didn’t work.
In the meantime, I rented another cell phone from a friend and decided to call my old number just to see what happened. To my surprise, a woman answered. The conversation went something like this:
Woman: Hallo?
Me: Hi, who is this?
Woman: Hallo?
Me: This is the owner of the phone you’re using.
Woman: What?
Me: That phone was stolen from me a few days ago. The phone you have is a stolen phone.
Woman: Oh. Well someone sold it to me.
Me: Well, in any case I’m going to have to block the account because you’re using a phone that’s still in my name.
Woman: Name a time and place to meet and I’ll return it to you.
Me: OK, do you know where the Parque España is in Santa Monica? How about we meet there at 5:30.
Woman: OK.
I went with Rosita to meet the woman in the place we had arranged. We even told the local police about what had happened and asked them to hang around for awhile in case the woman tried to ask me for money for my stolen cell phone. By 6:00 she still hadn’t showed up, and when I called my cell phone again she said she would be right there. At 6:15 I tried to call again, and my cell phone was turned off. The next day I went to a different office of Telefonica and they blocked my number for me with no problem. I really don’t understand bureaucracy.
Ridiculous Mishap #2: Bad Water
Last night I went out dancing with Braddy and some of his friends, and decided that staying at his house was a better idea than coming back really late to my house and waking up my entire family. I was sleeping in the same room where he does his painting, and in the middle of the night I woke up really thirsty, saw a brand-name bottle of water on the floor next to his painting materials, and started to drink it. I drank about half the bottle. Well, the next morning when I woke up I looked at the water and realized it didn’t look so clean. It was slightly yellowish in color and there were some particles floating on the bottom. ‘Braddy, one little question,’ I said. ‘Where is this water from?’
Braddy: Oh, shit. Did you drink that?
Me: Yeah, I was thirsty in the middle of the night and didn’t realize how gross it was.
Braddy (laughing): That water is from the ocean in Chile. When my friends travel I always ask them to bring water back for me because I like to paint with water from all different places. It’s part of my mystique.
Me: Oh, well if it’s from the ocean in Chile that’s not so bad. I was afraid it was tap water from here.
Braddy: No, it shouldn’t be that bad, just a little salty.
Me: Strange, it didn’t taste salty.
Braddy (10 minutes later): Oh shit. You know what, I just realized, that other bottle is the water from Chile, the one you were drinking is water from Pisac. (Pisac is a rural town about an hour outside of Cuzco)
Me: Oh. Well, that’s not good.
Braddy: No, that’s kind of bad. You better start taking antibiotics. That water is loaded with little creatures.
Me: OK, I have some antibiotics here actually. What water should I use to swallow the pill?
Braddy: Use the Chilean water, it’s cleaner. No, just kidding, I’ll boil some.
And so I am temporarily back on antibiotics. I can only hope that my body doesn’t become a giant safe haven for antibiotic resistant bacteria by the time I get back to the states.
Wednesday, June 27, 2007
Fiesta fiesta fiesta
It’s about time I write about the various festivals I’ve witnessed so far in both Cuzco and Ollantaytambo. Yesterday was the grand finale of all the festivals, but I’m still a little incredulous that the partying is really all over. We’ll see.
The first big exciting festival was Señor de Choquekilka (I can’t believe I actually remembered that name) which was an ongoing festival from May 26th-29th. I went with Jenny and my French friend Yacine to catch the last day of it. This festival is held in honor of an appearance of an image of Jesus in a lake to a campesino, which allegedly saved the man from falling off a cliff. The festival started with a bunch of dancing groups dancing down to the “pampa,” a large open space where the majority of the festival would be held. This was followed by an interesting spectacle in which a couple of live chickens were hung by their feet from a rope, then lowered onto a large cross float. Then a cob of choclo (corn) was hung from the same rope, and a bunch of men on horses had to ride under it and try to grab the corn. Every time someone grabbed one another corn cob would be hung on the rope. It was explained to us that for each corn cob a chicken was awarded, but the catch is that the person who ends up with the most chickens also has to be mayordomo for the next year—which means organizing the entire 4-day festival.
After that spectacle there followed much merriment, music and dancing, and a few of the dances we saw were really incredible. My personal favorite (and I think Jenny and Yacine would back me up), which I have also seen at other festivals but far inferior in quality, was a dance involving what Rosita calls “narizones”, or men with masks with long noses which in this case were meant to represent dishonest judges and politicians (I’ve also seen a similar dance done with the narizones representing drunkards, but now that I think about it, maybe the two dances are one and the same). The dance we saw in Ollantaytambo was particularly entertaining—there was a brass band playing rowdy music, and the narizones were dressed ostentatiously, many carrying books with the title “law.” The dance they did was very blatantly raunchy in a comic way, with the narizones stopping every few seconds to do some pelvic thrusts. Adding to the comedy was one boy dancer whose pants kept falling down, to the point where they were literally around his ankles, but who admirably just kept on with the dance in his tighty-whities as if nothing had happened. Another dance of the narizones featured more slapstick humor involving a cartoonishly ugly woman as well as a bull and several bullfighters.
Another interesting dance was a dance of ukukus, a type of traditional character that I think I have mentioned before. Ukukus wear knit masks that cover their entire face and animal-like robes with long fringes. They also carry whips. And use them. I keep asking people about the symbolic meaning of ukukus but all I’ve been able to find is what wikipedia tells me, which is that they are meant to be kind of an intermediary between the human and animal world. Ukuku dances are many and varied but most of them involve two or more ukukus snapping whips at each other. This whipping can be semi-comic at times (for instance, if the person getting whipped is a drunkard character) but in any case usually gets gasps from the crowd. Sometimes there will be one or two ukukus present in another kind of dance, and in this case they seem to be there to—symbolically or more literally—keep the other dancers in line.
Another one of my favorite costumes is a really creepy-looking mask which is made of kind of a screen-like material, so that it is semi-transparent but you still can’t see the person’s actual face. These masks are the most human-like but pretty scary, perhaps for that reason. I’m not sure what these masks are supposed to represent, but a lot of times dancers with these masks also wear a headdress of large feathers, which would signify a character from the jungle. Other times they wear a black scarf covering the rest of their head (scary) and an ornate, regal-looking suit.
There were several more kinds of dances, but those were the highlights for me. After the dancing was over the mayordomo made a really, really long speech on a loudspeaker, and then finally a procession to the plaza began, led by a handful of men carrying the cross. By this time it was already dark. The procession took at least an hour, but I was having an interesting time because two of the dancers had grabbed my hands, obliging me to dance with them all the way up. Things also got interesting when I had the marching band right behind me, and kept colliding with the drum player. I looked over at Yacine and saw the long end of a trombone barely miss grazing his ear. When we finally got the the plaza there were too many people to move. There was some more dancing and speeches, until finally the cross was retired onto a wooden platform that had been built for it.
Then commenced the real partying: the night was kicked off with the most incredible fireworks I have ever seen in my life, which I don’t even know how to describe. Earlier in the day a big wire structure had been set up in the plaza for the fireworks. Other than regular fireworks, there were fireworks that interacted with this structure in some way I cannot explain scientifically, so that, for instance, at one point there were colored sparks flying off wire spirals and later there was a golden wall of fireworks which were being shot down from a bar of same structure (sorry for that really bad description). Then, on a huge stage that had been set up that morning, with a giant advertisement for Corona in the background, there were two different musical acts that played all through the night. They were both chicha bands, the first being a bit Bakstreet Boys-esque with matching yellow suits and goofy dance moves. The second was even more timeless: a woman named Larita Pacheco was the lead singer, and came out dressed in a huge ostentatious red dress and playing an electric harp. We bought food from vendors (at these festivals there are always women selling beef shishkabob-type things with a potato stuck on the end for good measure) and danced until two in the morning, when we finally crashed in our hostel.
The festivals I’ve seen in Cuzco have been larger in terms of the sheer number of people attending them, but nothing has really rivaled my experience in Ollantaytambo. Even so, there are a couple important festivals worth mentioning. The first one, and the most important religiously, was Corpus Christi on June 7th. On this day, all of the saints of different parts of the city are taken out of their churches and paraded around the city before all converging in the Plaza de Armas. Hoards of people gather around the plaza to hear an outdoor Catholic service followed by a very slow procession of all the saints around the Plaza and eventually into the Cathedral. I actually changed my flight to Buenos Aires to a day later so that I could witness this festival, and every Peruvian I asked told me it was well worth the penalty fees. When all is said and done, however, most of my marveling was at the amazing capacity that Peruvians have to sit for hours on end listening to the same repetitive music and watching a few saints be moved a couple inches a minute around the plaza. I was with my friends Erika, Rosita and Vanessa and after about 3 hours had to start tugging on their shirts to make them leave.
Despite the religious significance of the festival though, I think the thing people get most excited about is food. On Corpus Christi the Plaza San Francisco is full of vendors all selling the same traditional dish, called “chiriuchu.” In Quechua that means “cold aji”, aji being a special type of hot pepper they have here. The dish consists of slices of a variety of cold meats including sausage, chicken, and guinea pig, served with toasted corn kernels, cheese, and a corn cake they call “tortilla”, and garnished with seaweed, a string of fish eggs, and an aji pepper. It’s really delicious if you ask me, but takes a good long time to pick apart the meat, and my inexperience was evident. For dessert, my friends treated me to coconut milk (which I drank out of a cocunut with a straw) and for the other hand, a piece of sugar cane to chew on (delicious). Yes, ok, when it comes to food, Peruvians know how to celebrate.
The third big festival, which took place right after I got back from Buenos Aires, was Inti Raymi, which is a semi-contrived reenactment of an Incan sun ceremony meant to offset the Catholicism of Corpus Christi and encourage pride in Cuzco’s Incan heritage. Unfortunately I missed a few of the festivities leading up to the main day of the festival, which included a night of a bunch of Peruvian bands that sounded a little like a Battle of the Bands type thing. The first night I got back there were a couple of salsa bands playing in the plaza and some fireworks, but the plaza was so crowded that I ended up just being driven insane by the quantity of people and going home in a grumpy mood. On Saturday, which was the day before the main Inti Raymi festival, was a huge procession of dance groups through the plaza that started at 1:00 in the afternoon and supposedly lasted until 2 or 3 am. It was actually quite entertaining, and I stood there watching for a good two and a half hours, which I thought was sufficient although everyone I talked to seemed to be surprised that I hadn’t staid for the entire thing. There were dance groups coming from all over Peru, the ones from the jungle being by far the most interesting costumes: one group even had people dressed as condors and lions, and some gnome-looking creatures with big masks made out of paper-mache. My favorite dance that I saw (unfortunately not in person, but I was lucky enough to catch it on TV) was one which seemed to be a comic representation of domestic violence among rural people. In one part of this dance the women literally wrestled their husbands to the ground and started beating them. Then the men retaliated by picking up their wives, slinging them over their shoulders, and carrying them off kicking and screaming. The parade also included groups of immigrants from various countries, which usually didn’t do dances but were there more symbolically, representing that aspect of Cuzqueñan culture. To top it all off there was a gigantic float in the plaza that everyone called the “Inca”, which represented an indigenous man blowing on a kintu, or three coca leaves. And when I say he was blowing on the leaves I mean his arms actually moved and he actually blew smoke out of his mouth. It was quite a spectacle. This night was also the biggest night for partying, and though I wasn’t in the mood to get completely smashed, I came home at midnight to find that even my host mom was still out partying.
Sunday was the main day of the festival. I didn’t see the first part of it, but the day begins around 8:00 am when there is a symbolic salutation of the sun in Qoricancha, a park near the center of the city. From there, all the dance groups come dancing up to Sacsaywaman (ruins of a big temple right on the outskirts of Cuzco) from four different directions, representing the four “suyos”, or districts of the Incan Empire. Then hoards of people gather in Sacsaywaman to watch the main part of the show. It’s a long, complex theatrical production in which the four suyos come out dancing, all gather around the Inca (the political leader) and his religious counterpart (I forget what the name of this leader was), and the two leaders address the four suyos. Then a llama is sacrificed and everyone rejoices. The problem with this spectacle is that it’s pretty hard to really see or hear anything unless you buy preferential seating for somewhere around 70 American dollars. If you’re me and not Cameron Diaz (yes, Cameron Diaz was there, it was front page news in Peru), it isn’t really possible to get seats where you can both see and hear at the same time. Even so, on the ridiculously crowded bus on the way there I met a guy who actually lives in Sacsaywaman, only a few yards away from the archaeological site, and he took me to a good spot that his friends had saved for him, where I could at least see the whole thing from afar if not hear a word of it. It was worth it to be there just to have it all explained to me by this guy, Elias, and to drink chicha and chew coca with he and his hippie friends. I also got into a couple arguments with him about how to say certain things in Quechua—his mother is a Quechua speaker but I’m pretty sure he doesn’t actually speak the language even though he seems to think he does. There’s nothing funnier than getting into arguments about people about their supposed native language and winning. I guess that’s also a little sad though.
The first big exciting festival was Señor de Choquekilka (I can’t believe I actually remembered that name) which was an ongoing festival from May 26th-29th. I went with Jenny and my French friend Yacine to catch the last day of it. This festival is held in honor of an appearance of an image of Jesus in a lake to a campesino, which allegedly saved the man from falling off a cliff. The festival started with a bunch of dancing groups dancing down to the “pampa,” a large open space where the majority of the festival would be held. This was followed by an interesting spectacle in which a couple of live chickens were hung by their feet from a rope, then lowered onto a large cross float. Then a cob of choclo (corn) was hung from the same rope, and a bunch of men on horses had to ride under it and try to grab the corn. Every time someone grabbed one another corn cob would be hung on the rope. It was explained to us that for each corn cob a chicken was awarded, but the catch is that the person who ends up with the most chickens also has to be mayordomo for the next year—which means organizing the entire 4-day festival.
After that spectacle there followed much merriment, music and dancing, and a few of the dances we saw were really incredible. My personal favorite (and I think Jenny and Yacine would back me up), which I have also seen at other festivals but far inferior in quality, was a dance involving what Rosita calls “narizones”, or men with masks with long noses which in this case were meant to represent dishonest judges and politicians (I’ve also seen a similar dance done with the narizones representing drunkards, but now that I think about it, maybe the two dances are one and the same). The dance we saw in Ollantaytambo was particularly entertaining—there was a brass band playing rowdy music, and the narizones were dressed ostentatiously, many carrying books with the title “law.” The dance they did was very blatantly raunchy in a comic way, with the narizones stopping every few seconds to do some pelvic thrusts. Adding to the comedy was one boy dancer whose pants kept falling down, to the point where they were literally around his ankles, but who admirably just kept on with the dance in his tighty-whities as if nothing had happened. Another dance of the narizones featured more slapstick humor involving a cartoonishly ugly woman as well as a bull and several bullfighters.
Another interesting dance was a dance of ukukus, a type of traditional character that I think I have mentioned before. Ukukus wear knit masks that cover their entire face and animal-like robes with long fringes. They also carry whips. And use them. I keep asking people about the symbolic meaning of ukukus but all I’ve been able to find is what wikipedia tells me, which is that they are meant to be kind of an intermediary between the human and animal world. Ukuku dances are many and varied but most of them involve two or more ukukus snapping whips at each other. This whipping can be semi-comic at times (for instance, if the person getting whipped is a drunkard character) but in any case usually gets gasps from the crowd. Sometimes there will be one or two ukukus present in another kind of dance, and in this case they seem to be there to—symbolically or more literally—keep the other dancers in line.
Another one of my favorite costumes is a really creepy-looking mask which is made of kind of a screen-like material, so that it is semi-transparent but you still can’t see the person’s actual face. These masks are the most human-like but pretty scary, perhaps for that reason. I’m not sure what these masks are supposed to represent, but a lot of times dancers with these masks also wear a headdress of large feathers, which would signify a character from the jungle. Other times they wear a black scarf covering the rest of their head (scary) and an ornate, regal-looking suit.
There were several more kinds of dances, but those were the highlights for me. After the dancing was over the mayordomo made a really, really long speech on a loudspeaker, and then finally a procession to the plaza began, led by a handful of men carrying the cross. By this time it was already dark. The procession took at least an hour, but I was having an interesting time because two of the dancers had grabbed my hands, obliging me to dance with them all the way up. Things also got interesting when I had the marching band right behind me, and kept colliding with the drum player. I looked over at Yacine and saw the long end of a trombone barely miss grazing his ear. When we finally got the the plaza there were too many people to move. There was some more dancing and speeches, until finally the cross was retired onto a wooden platform that had been built for it.
Then commenced the real partying: the night was kicked off with the most incredible fireworks I have ever seen in my life, which I don’t even know how to describe. Earlier in the day a big wire structure had been set up in the plaza for the fireworks. Other than regular fireworks, there were fireworks that interacted with this structure in some way I cannot explain scientifically, so that, for instance, at one point there were colored sparks flying off wire spirals and later there was a golden wall of fireworks which were being shot down from a bar of same structure (sorry for that really bad description). Then, on a huge stage that had been set up that morning, with a giant advertisement for Corona in the background, there were two different musical acts that played all through the night. They were both chicha bands, the first being a bit Bakstreet Boys-esque with matching yellow suits and goofy dance moves. The second was even more timeless: a woman named Larita Pacheco was the lead singer, and came out dressed in a huge ostentatious red dress and playing an electric harp. We bought food from vendors (at these festivals there are always women selling beef shishkabob-type things with a potato stuck on the end for good measure) and danced until two in the morning, when we finally crashed in our hostel.
The festivals I’ve seen in Cuzco have been larger in terms of the sheer number of people attending them, but nothing has really rivaled my experience in Ollantaytambo. Even so, there are a couple important festivals worth mentioning. The first one, and the most important religiously, was Corpus Christi on June 7th. On this day, all of the saints of different parts of the city are taken out of their churches and paraded around the city before all converging in the Plaza de Armas. Hoards of people gather around the plaza to hear an outdoor Catholic service followed by a very slow procession of all the saints around the Plaza and eventually into the Cathedral. I actually changed my flight to Buenos Aires to a day later so that I could witness this festival, and every Peruvian I asked told me it was well worth the penalty fees. When all is said and done, however, most of my marveling was at the amazing capacity that Peruvians have to sit for hours on end listening to the same repetitive music and watching a few saints be moved a couple inches a minute around the plaza. I was with my friends Erika, Rosita and Vanessa and after about 3 hours had to start tugging on their shirts to make them leave.
Despite the religious significance of the festival though, I think the thing people get most excited about is food. On Corpus Christi the Plaza San Francisco is full of vendors all selling the same traditional dish, called “chiriuchu.” In Quechua that means “cold aji”, aji being a special type of hot pepper they have here. The dish consists of slices of a variety of cold meats including sausage, chicken, and guinea pig, served with toasted corn kernels, cheese, and a corn cake they call “tortilla”, and garnished with seaweed, a string of fish eggs, and an aji pepper. It’s really delicious if you ask me, but takes a good long time to pick apart the meat, and my inexperience was evident. For dessert, my friends treated me to coconut milk (which I drank out of a cocunut with a straw) and for the other hand, a piece of sugar cane to chew on (delicious). Yes, ok, when it comes to food, Peruvians know how to celebrate.
The third big festival, which took place right after I got back from Buenos Aires, was Inti Raymi, which is a semi-contrived reenactment of an Incan sun ceremony meant to offset the Catholicism of Corpus Christi and encourage pride in Cuzco’s Incan heritage. Unfortunately I missed a few of the festivities leading up to the main day of the festival, which included a night of a bunch of Peruvian bands that sounded a little like a Battle of the Bands type thing. The first night I got back there were a couple of salsa bands playing in the plaza and some fireworks, but the plaza was so crowded that I ended up just being driven insane by the quantity of people and going home in a grumpy mood. On Saturday, which was the day before the main Inti Raymi festival, was a huge procession of dance groups through the plaza that started at 1:00 in the afternoon and supposedly lasted until 2 or 3 am. It was actually quite entertaining, and I stood there watching for a good two and a half hours, which I thought was sufficient although everyone I talked to seemed to be surprised that I hadn’t staid for the entire thing. There were dance groups coming from all over Peru, the ones from the jungle being by far the most interesting costumes: one group even had people dressed as condors and lions, and some gnome-looking creatures with big masks made out of paper-mache. My favorite dance that I saw (unfortunately not in person, but I was lucky enough to catch it on TV) was one which seemed to be a comic representation of domestic violence among rural people. In one part of this dance the women literally wrestled their husbands to the ground and started beating them. Then the men retaliated by picking up their wives, slinging them over their shoulders, and carrying them off kicking and screaming. The parade also included groups of immigrants from various countries, which usually didn’t do dances but were there more symbolically, representing that aspect of Cuzqueñan culture. To top it all off there was a gigantic float in the plaza that everyone called the “Inca”, which represented an indigenous man blowing on a kintu, or three coca leaves. And when I say he was blowing on the leaves I mean his arms actually moved and he actually blew smoke out of his mouth. It was quite a spectacle. This night was also the biggest night for partying, and though I wasn’t in the mood to get completely smashed, I came home at midnight to find that even my host mom was still out partying.
Sunday was the main day of the festival. I didn’t see the first part of it, but the day begins around 8:00 am when there is a symbolic salutation of the sun in Qoricancha, a park near the center of the city. From there, all the dance groups come dancing up to Sacsaywaman (ruins of a big temple right on the outskirts of Cuzco) from four different directions, representing the four “suyos”, or districts of the Incan Empire. Then hoards of people gather in Sacsaywaman to watch the main part of the show. It’s a long, complex theatrical production in which the four suyos come out dancing, all gather around the Inca (the political leader) and his religious counterpart (I forget what the name of this leader was), and the two leaders address the four suyos. Then a llama is sacrificed and everyone rejoices. The problem with this spectacle is that it’s pretty hard to really see or hear anything unless you buy preferential seating for somewhere around 70 American dollars. If you’re me and not Cameron Diaz (yes, Cameron Diaz was there, it was front page news in Peru), it isn’t really possible to get seats where you can both see and hear at the same time. Even so, on the ridiculously crowded bus on the way there I met a guy who actually lives in Sacsaywaman, only a few yards away from the archaeological site, and he took me to a good spot that his friends had saved for him, where I could at least see the whole thing from afar if not hear a word of it. It was worth it to be there just to have it all explained to me by this guy, Elias, and to drink chicha and chew coca with he and his hippie friends. I also got into a couple arguments with him about how to say certain things in Quechua—his mother is a Quechua speaker but I’m pretty sure he doesn’t actually speak the language even though he seems to think he does. There’s nothing funnier than getting into arguments about people about their supposed native language and winning. I guess that’s also a little sad though.
Monday, June 25, 2007
Baratillo 6/23/07
The easiest way to see Peru in a nutshell, I think, is by going to any outdoor market in Cuzco. There is a giant food market right near where I live in Santiago, which on the weekends extends into a kind of flea market called a “baratillo.” In this market you can find anything you would ever possibly need, granted it might take you hours to find it since the vendors and their things are not organized by any logic. I went to the market this morning just to walk around, but in order to make myself feel like I was doing something else there other than people watching I decided to make it my mission to buy a pen. The first one I found, after 10 minutes, was an American flag pen, and I bought it despite the embarrassing irony. With my American flag pen I wrote this list of some things I saw in the market, in no particular order:
-used school books
-remote controls
-curtains
-blenders
-jewelry
-cell phone covers
-used computer parts
-used clothes
-plastic baby doll heads (I swear, I saw several people with these, the bodies nowhere to be found)
-rusty old tools
-undergarments
-toothpaste and other toiletries
-cigarrettes
-shoe soles
-colored pencil stubs
-doormats
-various crafts
-“chicha” music video DVDs (these are just as funny as chicha music, but I would have to sit down and watch a bunch to be able to describe them well)
-DVD players
-framed pictures of Jesus
-used jars and beer bottles
-used corks and bottle caps
-funnels
-clothes hangers
-chess pieces
-old magazines
-ceramic sinks
-shoelaces
-wooden furniture
-single batteries, unpackaged
-toilet paper
-pirated CDs
-various foods including potatoes, chicha, custard, and ceviche.
-hundreds of people pushing past each other, all seeming to be in a rush to find something or get somewhere.
There is also no rule about specialization. There are some more professional-looking vendors who only sell, for instance, one type of craft (that they probably bought from other artisans), but there are others who might have a variety of things arranged in no particular order: maybe some chess pieces, some used books, some rusty metal tools, some baby doll heads, toilet paper, and a basket of potatoes, for instance. This would not be at all strange. It’s just Peru.
-used school books
-remote controls
-curtains
-blenders
-jewelry
-cell phone covers
-used computer parts
-used clothes
-plastic baby doll heads (I swear, I saw several people with these, the bodies nowhere to be found)
-rusty old tools
-undergarments
-toothpaste and other toiletries
-cigarrettes
-shoe soles
-colored pencil stubs
-doormats
-various crafts
-“chicha” music video DVDs (these are just as funny as chicha music, but I would have to sit down and watch a bunch to be able to describe them well)
-DVD players
-framed pictures of Jesus
-used jars and beer bottles
-used corks and bottle caps
-funnels
-clothes hangers
-chess pieces
-old magazines
-ceramic sinks
-shoelaces
-wooden furniture
-single batteries, unpackaged
-toilet paper
-pirated CDs
-various foods including potatoes, chicha, custard, and ceviche.
-hundreds of people pushing past each other, all seeming to be in a rush to find something or get somewhere.
There is also no rule about specialization. There are some more professional-looking vendors who only sell, for instance, one type of craft (that they probably bought from other artisans), but there are others who might have a variety of things arranged in no particular order: maybe some chess pieces, some used books, some rusty metal tools, some baby doll heads, toilet paper, and a basket of potatoes, for instance. This would not be at all strange. It’s just Peru.
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