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Published: March 11th 2010
VICUNAS between Cusco and Arequipa
Vicunas are a much smaller, cuter but alas much rarer relative of Llamas and Alpacas. Clothing items made from Vicuna hair start in the $1000 range...we're sticking to alpaca! begins in Cusco after another week of heavy rains that have left 15 people dead and 90%!o(MISSING)f the residents of the town of Taray just south of here homeless. Tomorrow, we head out in a bus from our school with 20 others to distribute food and supplies to the affected; we'll also prepare a lunch for 300 of the unfortunate- hope they like peanut butter and banana sandwiches!(that's a "BROMA" ie. joke in Spanish!). More about this in a later blog.
SCHOOL DAYS
In what feels like a heartbeat, our 8 weeks of group Spanish classes have come to a finish, and in the classic "the-more-you-know, the-more-you-realize-you-don't-know" fashion, we are still ill-equipped to cope in the real world of Spanish speakers.
Just how many past tense forms, subjunctives, conditionals, future tenses, and exceptions-to-the-exceptions-to-the-irregular verbs can one language possibly have?! We can’t compare Spanish grammar to our school English grammar because that happened a lifetime ago. We have, in reality, learned a great deal, and will continue to take some private classes in the afternoons after our morning stints of volunteer work.
Our group classes have been major work, but also a lot of fun. Each
The Jello Lady
Not many people have a fridge to set jello but you can get jello out and about. Monday started out fresh with two new teachers, and groups of up to 6 students. The students in the class remain the same, week to week, and progress through the curriculum together, but each week, some students leave and new ones arrive and may get tucked in at our class level. We
hate people who
start at "advanced".
Each level of study is divided into three sections so "beginner-beginners" start at level 1 and each week move up one level until week 4 when they progress to Intermediate level 1 and then 3 weeks later to Advanced Level 1 and so forth. After our 8 week stint, we have now completed Advanced Level 1, which merely means that we have been taught the curriculum to that level ... the level of understanding and absorption on our part ... well ... is not exactly advanced, but it does sound good to be called advanced, and there are those OCCASIONAL days when the words just flow smoothly and the pronunciation is just so right. However, the polite smile with averted eyes is a dead giveaway that we are not on the mark, but so is rolling-in-the-aisles laughter. Efrain has been known
Salud!
Fruit and herb infusion ready to be strained. to call Larry over to interpret Maureen's Spanish.
The teachers, of which there are probably 15, are great with the odd exception. The first session of classes is 1 hour and 45 minutes beginning at 8:30 am with the first instructor. A coffee/snack break (la pausa) of a half hour is then followed by another hour and 45 minutes with the second teacher. We think we have discovered a pattern; one teacher is the talking teacher responsible for getting us to practice Spanish orally and the other is the grammar teacher responsible for giving us the tools to speak and write with. Each instructor will usually assign homework ("TAREA") to be completed for the following day- more often than not, at least an hour or two each afternoon or evening is spent in completing the homework.
For excitement on Friday afternoon, we check the new class lists posted for the following Monday. We get to see who our new instructors for the next week will be and whether it will be morning classes or the dreaded zero-energy afternoon classes. Everyone has their favourite instructors but we have found that even when we were dismayed by the assigned professor/a,
Larry y su amiga
Larry routinely buys chocolate, Sublime, from Lourdes and uses their friendship as an excuse to stop by and load up. we usually warmed to them by day 2 or 3.
As most of the students in classes tend to fall in the age range of 20-35 and are single, a fair amount of discussion in the classroom around which we build conversational skills involves talk of boyfriends/girlfriends/lovers
(novios/novias/enamorados). As the old guys we are sometimes put in the awkward spot of giving the younger set advice ... in Spanish! Lots of laughter comes from these talks ... and another good source of laughter comes when we listen to Spanish songs for words and then sing them together as a group. For people who have problems with malapropisms in English, this exercise is doubly amusing to others.
We have declared Fridays in our classes as "Chocolate Fridays", the one day that we bring SUBLIME chocolate bars (Cusco's best chocolate) to class to share and keep our spirits (and blood sugars!) high.
Food on the Street
Many Cusqueneans have a meal or two on the street, literally out on the sidewalk! The most basic item is breast milk and we are happy to report that by far the majority of babies fed in public are breastfed. A Mom may
Eggs on the run
Quail eggs cooked on the spot and peeled for your convenience. Pretty, but pity the little quails in the cage below. be standing nonchalantly against an Incan wall with a baby nursing, or at the back of a stall watching TV with the baby nursing, or exiting a cab with a baby latched on and balanced in one hand, the money for the cabbie in the other hand and various parcels magically attached! We've only seen two babies bottlefed in eight weeks. Maternity leave is wishful thinking and one employee at our school has her younger sister look after her three month old baby, bringing her by the jobsite to nurse. There was an "article" ("ad in disguise") in the Lima paper about Abbott Pharmaceutical's wonderful new product for babies; an piece that conveniently doesn’t mention that breast milk is still superior. Baby foods in the supermarkets all have sugar and starch added ... is this the '80s in Canada? There is a special vitamin and mineral fortified milk for children 1-5 years that has partially skimmed milk as the first ingredient, sugar as the second and honey as the third! Yikes!
We digress, back to the street. All manner of interesting food can be had on the street. The jello lady was one of the first examples we saw.
Tuna not atuna
Tuna ladies sell the fruit from cactus. Canadian tuna fish is "atuna" here. She had a large bucket of "jello" cups that look like vanilla pudding on the bottom and red jello on top, served at room temperature. Then there is a mate (infusion) made from very exact herbs and fruits layered in a bucket that we mistook as compost at the entrance to San Pedro's Mercado... almost added our own banana skins and apple cores before we got the notion that things weren't quite right for compost. Ladies carry their buckets of mate from shop to shop and stand on street corners, offering a swig from a glass that has been rinsed out in another bucket of water.
Don’t forget the "tuna" ladies with wheelbarrows of carefully displayed tunas (no, not fish!), the succulent fruit from cacti. They peel it for you right on the spot and it is quite mild but tasty and just sort of melts in your mouth. There are stands selling slices of watermelon that appear from time to time - one lady had a loud speaker to announce to the neighbourhood that she was coming. Some foods, like one of the many types of corn in Peru, are cooked on tiny propane heaters with open flames,
Street smart
Another of Larry's favourite pastimes that comes with portion control. Maureen loves the reasonable portions of ice cream. set inside a
cardboard box to block the wind! There are grills with skewers of meat and potatoes.
Larry, of course, can find ice cream on any street. One morning we saw a nicely dressed gentleman with a platter of apple pie slices for sale. Down our street there is a small stand where the lady sits all day and offers breakfast or lunch in little plastic bowls and cutlery that are recycled with a quick wipe of a cloth. She carefully opens her bag at her feet and takes out potatoes or an egg to peel. If eggs are your thing, there are mobile stands with tiny quails in the bottom and tiny quail eggs being boiled above and peeled for your convenience.
People feed their children wherever it is handy - maybe a curb in the park or against a store along the sidewalk, or in front of St Pedro's market - a concrete picnic. While basic street foods look to be potatoes and eggs or something in a Tupperware container, North American type packaged junk food is also available and we see many young people with candy bars, potato chips, ice cream bars etc. This
Picnic on the grass
Moms generally have their babies and toddlers with them when they work and this was a nice spot to eat. particularly impacts our street because ladies park outside the private school gates above us to capitalize on the more affluent students and the sea of green uniforms that leaves at school’s end drop their wrappers in the street, day after day. Speaking of North American treats, Larry’s very favourite food on the street is a Canadian-type doughnut with a chocolate frosting and a cream filling - Larry can track the young lady down if she is within 2 sniffing blocks - thank goodness he has only spotted her three times and her schedule eludes us.
Our volunteer work at Madre Teresa de Calcutta begins this week in a daycare for 2-5 year olds. It has been fifteen years since we had a five year old around and we got to make the rules in our house - this should be interesting in a different culture where we will
follow the rules.
‘Til next time, the Cusco Kids😊
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Cherie Miltimore
non-member comment
Worth waiting for
I was thinking it was a long time to wait for a new blog. It was well worth waiting for....so interesting. I will be disappointed when you come home. Language takes a long time to learn but think how far you have come!!! Cherie in a clean house.