In case anyone is actually checking this... here are just a few pics from my weekend. I literally can't believe that the month is almost over- I leave tomorrow night. Time has just flown by. Anyway, for my last weekend here in Peru, I splurged and went on a whirlwind tour of Cusco, the Sacred Valley, and Machu Picchu. It was incredible. Above, I am sitting on the very summit of Wayna Picchu, the ruins at the top of the mountain that towers above Machu Picchu, looking down on the ancient city.

There are llamas all over Machu Picchu... I would guess that it might be the only one of the new seven wonders of the world where domesticated livestock mingle with the tourists.

The postcard view- the tall mountain in the background is Wayna Picchu.

I will be sure to post more pictures and write more about my weekend later!

Unfortunately, I have basically nothing new to report this week, because I have pretty much been in bed sick since Tuesday night. Big bummer. I'm not sure what it was, probably some sort of flu or GI thing, and it was pretty miserable there for a few days, but I think I am on the rebound now. Just in time for the weekend. :) I took my regular Spanish classes all week, though, which I really enjoy. I am finally starting to feel like I am picking up a lot of useful vocab... I can't believe I only have one week left after this!

Anyway, I still can't get my pictures to upload very well, so I am having to do them one at a time... in any case, here are a few of where I have been spending the majority of my time.

This is where I live. Lucy and Alberto's home facing the street:

This is the view of El Misti (snow-capped!) from the stairs on the front of the house:
This is a view of the backyard and the garden:

Toto, the pet monkey (random, Lucy found him in an ad in the newspaper):

And the tortise that roams the backyard and tries to come into the house whenever she can:

Chilis from the garden:

Next door is a school, and so at various times throughout the day, you can tell when the students are out for recess. Also, I occasionally hear them all singing together in chorus at the tops of their lungs (music class? choir practice? English class? not sure)... this afternoon it was Help by the Beatles, and last week they were singing She Drives Me Crazy, by Fine Young Cannibals.

I will keep working on uploading more pictures from my trip to the canyon last weekend; stay tuned!

A little bird told me that there was something on the news there about an earthquake in Peru? I haven't heard any of the reports, nor do I know where the earthquake reportedly took place, but there was one here on Wednesday night! I apparently lived through some pretty big ones in Mexico, but the truth is that I don't really remember them. So I count Wednesday's as my first earthquake! It wasn't very big, I don't think, although people were definitely talking about it the next day. I was sitting on my bed, reading, around 9 0r 9:30 at night and all of a sudden I realized that the bed was shaking very faintly. The shaking grew at little stronger and a little stronger, and I looked up and realized that other things in the room were trembling, too. At this point it dawned on me that we were having an earthquake (I know, right? Wow... smart.) Lucy called for me from down the hall to put on my shoes and go outside in the garden, but by the time we all made it out there, it was over. Exciting! My teacher told me the next day that Arequipeños believe that earthquakes are the earth "unloading", and that they were are growing nervous because they hadn't had an earthquake in so long, and were afraid the next one might be big.

Alright, without further ado, more pictures from last weekend! The bus ride to the canyon from Arequipa was about three hours long, with lots of stops to take pictures (of clouds, in our case) and buy souvenirs and use the restroom. The slow ascent is purposeful: to prevent altitude sickness.

Here are my favorite little fuzzy alpacas. I'm not sure why I think they are so funny, but I do.

This is the so-called "Lookout of the Andes". Altitude here is 4,910 meters (or 16,109 feet, for those of you who, like me, can't do the conversion.) It supposedly has amazing panoramic vistas of five surrounding volcanoes and their mountain ranges... none of which we could see. Plenty of tour busses, though, and local women hawking traditional textiles as well as more touristy alpaca hats with "Peru" written on them.

A "traditional" mountain hut? I'm actually not totally positive; I'm pretty sure it is just there for tourist consumption. The many little cairns covering the mountainside supposedly bring good luck in love and life to their builders (a wishing-well of sorts.)

On Saturday night, we slept in the small town of Chivay, which is located very near the opening of the canyon. We were taken to a natural hot springs pool for a couple of hours, from which you could enjoy a nice view as well as a cold beer (and I did both.) Then, for dinner that night, we were all taken to the same restaurant to eat typical dishes and take in a traditional music and dance show. I loved the music and ended up buying a CD at the end of the evening. The dance was less interesting, although the costumes were elaborate and gorgeous.

Literally about five seconds after I took the picture above, the dancers all let go of their partners and turned to the crowd to pull in participants. One of them came to my table and grabbed my hand. So I tried to follow along in the dance that honestly seemed like it would never end (also, the air is REALLY thin up there!) One of the major disadvantages to traveling alone is that there was no one to take a picture of me looking utterly ridiculous.

The next morning, we were up bright and early for our trip down the canyon about an hour, to try to spot some condors hunting in the morning! This picture I took from inside the bus, but it still gives you an idea of how beautiful the canyon was. You can see the ancient terraced farming system that is still used.

Flight of the condors! These guys can be HUGE: up to 3m wingspan and 1m high, weighing about 30-35 pounds. They don't actually hunt, they scavenge. So twice a day, they glide and swoop around the sky, looking for dead quarry.

In this picture you can see four condors in the distance. For about ten really amazing minutes, we had six or seven fully-grown condors soaring right above our heads at the same time, putting on a show. It was really hard to capture with a camera.

This is an adult male; you can tell by the white ring at the neck.

Self-portrait when the condors had all moved on.

Along the way back up the canyon, we stopped at a tiny little town for more pictures, trinkets and crafts shopping. This is a woman peeling a tuna for me, or prickly pear fruit.

Local llama dressed up for the tourists gets a snack of orange rind.

The two young boys from the family in my tour group pose with a little local girl and her baby goat.

I am going to write a much longer post about the trip I took this past weekend at some point later on this week, but for now my pictures are not uploading for some reason, and so I only have four for you here. I went to the Colca Canyon on a little tourist bus trip on Saturday and Sunday. The trip basically involved a lot of time in our 15 passenger bus, a lot of stops at viewpoints (all of which were under clouds on Saturday, big bummer) and a lot of eating traditional regional dishes in restaurants. It was pretty fun, and I am glad I went. Here is a preview:

These are wild vicunyas, whose wool is softer and more valuable than cashmere, apparently. They are protected in this national park that we drove through, and we saw a ton of them.

Vendors at one of our rest stops, selling alpaca sweaters, hats, gloves, scarves, bags. They are dressed in traditional clothing and expect payment in return for pictures taken of them.

I couldn't resist. I figured this picture was worth about 35 cents.

Alpacas! They are pretty funny-looking, like cartoon characters or something. They are also delicious, as I discovered a few times over the course of the weekend. :)

Traffic.

I may have mentioned this before, but the traffic here is crazy. By far the scariest experience I have had so far has been trying to cross the street; really, any street, at any time. The drivers in Arequipa rank right up there with the ones I saw in Nigeria, and from what I gather, this is true anywhere in Peru. Left-hand turn from the right lane? No problem! Right-hand turn from the left lane? Sure! Pass another car by crossing the double yellow line, while going around a blind corner? Seriously. It is wild. Nothing about it makes sense to me. What looks to me like a tiny side street often seems to actually be a major thoroughfare, and although I usually think that I have a decent sense of direction, I will often be in a vehicle that appears to turn off of a big street into a random neighborhood, make about a dozen turns, and come out on another major road that seems like it should have been a simple right turn from the previous big street. And pedestrian right-of-way would never even occur to drivers here. As Lucy said to me, "Here the only traffic lights are for the cars. Pedestrians have only intuition."

Human stoplight: here is one of the policeman that occasionally direct traffic at a very major intersection near my house. I can't describe in words the chaos that happens when they are not there. Once I asked my Spanish teacher why they don't install a light there, and she gave me a blank stare, and then said that she had no idea.

Many people here get around by taxi. Arequipa is completely overrun with them. Probably at least a good 80% of the cars on the road are taxis, and many of them are not legit, so you have to be careful about the ones you take. Taxis here are way worse than New York City cabs. At least in New York, the cabs will probably ultimately try to avoid killing you. However, they are relatively cheap to take and wherever you are in the city, you only have to wait a matter of seconds before one comes by.

Count em (the taxis are the ones with the signs on top, not just the yellow ones.)

Another way to get around is public transportation, or combis (essentially large minivans or small busses.) They run on fixed routes but will pick you up and drop you off anywhere along the way. The signs on the windshield let you know which neighborhoods they go to, and every one of them also has, in addition to the driver, an employee who hangs out the open door, shouting out the combi´s destinations. This guy is also the one who collects the fare from passengers once they are aboard.

To take one, you wave at the one you want, which will then swerve over to the side of the road to get to where you are (sometimes crossing several lanes of traffic to do so). The guy hanging out the door will stop shouting the combi´s destinations in order to tell you to hurry up and get into the combi. He sounds like an auctioneer, sometimes muttering almost under his breath, sometimes nearly shouting, "climb up, climb up, climb up, hurry, hurry, hurry." If you are the only passenger embarking (or the last one on), the second your foot is off solid ground, the guy yells at the driver to hit it (who does.) I have learned to take off my sunglasses when I flag down my combi, so that I can see more clearly the darker interior of the bus and quickly find something solid to grab onto immediately, to prevent my being thrown down the aisle as soon as I hop on. Getting off is not quite as tricky, but involves some of the same maneuvers. You yell "Baja!" where you want the combi to drop you off, and the same guy will open the door for you (if it hasn´t already been hanging open) and tell you to hurry up and get off, "get off, get off, get off, hurry, hurry, hurry," as you push your way towards the door and leap to the ground. This is how I get to and from the clinics every day--the round-trip costs me about 50 cents. Here, an Arequipeno demostrates the dismount.

One super annoying aspect of the traffic here is the incessant honking. People here honk at everything. Turning left from the right-hand lane? Check. Traffic speeding up or slowing down? Check. Someone on the side of the road? Check. Car in front of you? Pull up to a red light? Been about 30 seconds since the last time you used your horn? Check, check, check. Car horns come in a wide variety of sounds, too--anything from your traditional honk or beep to whistle sounds, car alarm sounds, and siren sounds. I always think it is amazing (kind of hilarious, kind of really irritating) when I am walking along the street, and there are three taxis coming from EACH direction, and they ALL honk at me. As if I were secretly really wanting to take a taxi, but just hadn´t seen any I liked yet out of the 17 to pass me already. It is possible that some amount of that honking is because I am a gringa, but to be perfectly honest, I really don´t get much more honking than the average pedestrian/car/traffic light/crack in the asphalt.

Somewhat related: one of my first mornings here, I heard something driving around the neighborhood, playing "Under the Sea", from The Little Mermaid. The sound was just like an ice cream truck, only it was 7 in the morning. So I asked Marcela what it was, and she told me--it's the trash pickup.

This morning it rained a little bit (very rare for April), and when the clouds allowed a peak at the mountains surrounding the city, they were snow-covered!

I have been in Arequipa for just over a week now.

It is a very beautiful and very typical Latin American city. By that I mean that some parts are very attractive and others, not so much. The traffic is terrible, the drivers are certifiably insane, the people are very friendly, the food is DELICOUS, the pollution is bad, the population is proud of its home region, and there is always a lot going on.

This is a picture of El Misti, the huge volcano that literally looms right over the city. Locals are quick to point out that in the past, it was always snow-capped, but in recent years, with the "cambio climatico", that has now changed. Occasionally it will get some snow, although it is infrequent (and the snow never reaches the city.) You can see from the picture that the scenery is beautiful, although the smog is always present, to varying degrees.

I am living with Lucy and her husband, Alberto. They are a very nice couple and have one son, Luis Alberto, who is in college in Lima. Lucy runs a language institute here in Arequipa (actually located on the second floor just above her home) and Alberto is an economist, who is involved in various development and microfinance projects, and also teaches graduate courses at one of the universities in the city. They have a live-in cook/maid named Marcela, who has been with them for about 12 years and makes amazing food.

My daily schedule has been something like this: I get up and have breakfast, then go to a clinic where I am "volunteering" (mostly just observing, and feeling confused.) This has been a mixed experience so far, but I have definitely seen some interesting things. I get to and from the clinic by public transportation, which is an adventure all its own (I will write more about this later.) I come home for lunch between 1 and 1:30. This is the big meal of the day here, and it is always at least two courses and really good. Then I have time for a quick nap or some emailing or some homework before my Spanish classes in the afternoon. I have one-on-one classes that have been somewhat focused on health and medical issues, although we are still working our way through a much-needed grammar review for me. After this, I usually read until dinner, which is normally a very low-key event, and the nightly telenovela that we all watch while we munch on bread rolls with cheese and tea or something similar. I have picked up the plotline and finally know who (most of) the characters are and the convoluted way they are all related to each other, and I am starting to get really into it.

Speaking of Spanish language television, if you have ever noticed that it is rather cheesy and the acting is rather bad, particularly so in commercials, and wondered why, I can tell you. It is because they will take anyone off the street. Literally.

My second or third night here, a casting agency called, having found Lucy in the yellow pages by looking up Spanish schools in Arequipa. They were looking for foreigners to act as a group of tourists in a commercial for a Chilean pharmacy, InkaFarma, and they wondered if she had any students currently? Lucy and Sandra, my teacher, were very excited about this possibility and so they invited the woman in charge of casting right over to the house (they made me change my t-shirt and put on a little makeup first.) Anyway, they ended up casting me in this commercial, and I spent most of Saturday filming. I think the point of the commercial was to depict a tourist group seeing the sites of Arequipa with a guide, and the guide ends up taking a couple of them to InkaFarma to cure their ills.

This is the church in the plaza of Yanahuara, a nice area of Arequipa with many picturesque nooks and a great (smoggy) overlook of the city. We started early, so there weren´t too many people out yet.

This was the film crew. The director is on the right, in the grey shirt and hat. He spoke a little English, so that when he tried to repeat his Spanish directions in English for the one person who needed it, it always came out sounding a little funny, but he got the point across. In any case, he did not seem too concerned with the quality of our "acting."

This was our "guide" for our scenic tour of Arequipa.

The "tourist" group. Of the eight of us, two were American, one British (the one that didn´t speak a word of Spanish), one was from Barcelona but has lived in Arequipa for 30 years, one was Chilean and the other three were Arequipeños. I guess we all looked white enough to be foreigners, or something.

InkaFarma. The few Arequipeños whose opinions I have on the matter agree that they would never shop there because it is a Chilean company, but that they have the lowest prices around.

The commercial is due out in two or three months, and my homestay family has assured me that they will either record it and send it to me, or just post it on YouTube.