Diana lives on a floating island in Lake Titicaca

diana, originally uploaded by sammarin.

...and is totally enchanted by bubble gum.

This afternoon we visited her home of Uros, a bunch of about 35 human-made floating islands which are made by people who have lived on Lake Titicaca since way before the 1400s. The islands themselves and everything on them - houses, beds, boats - are almost entirely made of a reed called totora. The president of the island showed us how the islands are constructed and secured. Awesome.

good fortune

fortunas, originally uploaded by sammarin.

One of the very coolest things about today was that a monkey told my fortune at the fiesta in Ichu. In the market, there were all kinds of stands, including ones that featured fortune-telling monkeys and parrots. The guy in the white hat touches the monkey to your head so it can ¨leer la mente¨(read your mind), and then the monkey picks out with its tiny hand a little folded up piece of paper from the drawer below and hands it to you. Of course all the fortunes are good - but I was (of course) still delighted.

¡puro fiesta!

guitarra, originally uploaded by sammarin.

OK, I am so retrasada (behind) in the chronology of my postings... so I am going to simply skip the glorious Machu Picchu and Cusco and other details about the Sacred Valley for now, and tell you all about those places next week. Today I just have to tell you about what happened today.

We went to a small pueblo called Ichu, where they were celebrating an annual festival to honor San Pedro y San Pablo. People who were born and raised in Ichu but have moved away to the big city return from all over Perú for this fiesta. It is the town´s biggest party of the year.

In addition to a market where people sold and traded stuff for dried fish and many varieties of papas (potatoes), there was a giant parade with costumes and dancing and bands playing music. Rivers of people flowing into the town. All kinds of special foods - like chicharrones and chuños, which i ate - and plenty of cusqueña (cerveza).

mi nuevo abrigo

mi nuevo abrigo, originally uploaded by sammarin.

Here in Puno it is soooo frííííííííío that I had to buy a new alpaca coat. (And gloves and scarf.) The gloves are actually of baby alpaca and very soft.

I told Mom about this purchase last night on the phone and she wanted a photo. So here you go, Mom! xoxo

at the highest point

We took a bus for 7 hours from Cusco to Puno today, and this is the town we will stay in for the next two nights - we visit Lake Titicaca tomorrow. Then on Saturday, we head for Arequipa, the town we will stay in for 4 weeks while we take our classes for the Travel Study-Spanish MA program through Sac State.

The landscape has totally changed between Aguas Calientes, the town at the base of Machu Picchu, and the area leading down to Puno. It is much drier here. I will post photos of both places soon on flickr... maybe after we have settled down in Arequipa. We are at the highest altitude we have experienced on the trip. Some of the symptoms of soroche (altitude sickness) are fatigue, headache and nausea. Thanks to Pacha Mama and drinking mate de coca, I have not had any big problems yet - except for being super tired. I definitely feel like 10pm is the latest I can muster these days.

Up early tomorrow to see Titicaca and the floating islands.

i have just one word for you tonight...

horno, originally uploaded by sammarin.

EMPANADAS.

memorias

ollantaytambo, originally uploaded by sammarin.

I wish I had more time on this computer to write about how things are going. I´ll just say that it feels amazing to me to see places that were constructed by the Andean people so long ago, to climb the same steps and look at the same sky. I feel connected to the past in a way that I´m not sure I ever have felt before.

And also connected to other places, as well as times... people visit this sacred valley from China, Brasil, Germany... everywhere - and they are discovering for the first time, as I am, something amazing. I´m awed by the sense of newness - the sense that we tourists have never seen such a thing as this before - mixed with the oldness of these places. Old and new are mixed again when you see folks on the street calling ¨memorias... memorias¨ - in order to sell the memory cards for cameras that they´ve got, alongside the hand-stitched tapestries...

There´s so much more I want to share once I get to Arequipa about this initial time in the Sacred Valley. Cusco, Ollantaytambo, Aguas Calientes, Machu Picchu - I feel truly fortunate to be here and walk these paths and breathe this high high mountain air!

desde el ombligo

mira el cielo, originally uploaded by sammarin.

here´s a photo from sacsayhuaman, near cusco in peru. more stories to come! i am currently inhabited by the inca spirit.

eroticismo

Yesterday we went on a tour of the centro històrico de Lima, and we saw the cathedral, plaza de armas, Palacio del Gobierno, and the church of San Francisco with its catacombs FULL OF HUMAN BONES arranged all crazy in order to save space for more of the dead! (I am going to post my own photos to flickr and blog them here asap.)

In Lima yesterday we also visited the Museo Larco with its enormous collection of Mochica ceramics and other pre-Incan objects. The museum features a Sala Eròtica, which was pretty amazing. Animals humping, humans humping in almost every way you could think of, including with dead people. Ahh... those horny pre-Incans!

Spent the afternoon at Larco Mar, a cool beachside eating and shopping center. We had 5 types of cebiche. Nam nam! Miraflores rocks; Everybody was out on the streets, even though it´s cold. A group of about 40 people were sitting around an amphitheater, waiting for a possible performance... Apparently every Friday, Saturday and Sunday there`s normally some kind of impromptu performance art that occurs in the central park.

This morning we were up way early for a flight to Cusco. When we arrived at the hotel we rested and drank coca tea which seems to be helping with the altitude.

Additionally - this group is amazing. Most of the people have done the program in previous summers and were embracing each other this morning with excitement. Already a bunch of people have remembered my name and welcomed me. They invited me out for ONE DRINK last night but I was ... too... tire ... d ....... Today I feel better, and we are off now for a city tour.

a quick first post from peru

Arrived at around 6am and I was amazed at the Lima airport - so bright and spacious and clean, like Scandinavia almost! With ladies dressed in bright orange outfits working at the duty free shop. My cab driver was amazingly kind, speaking really slow Spanish for me and clarifying vocabulary words, such as the difference between garua and niebla, and pointing out old viviendas that la gente de plata (rich people) live in.

We go on a city tour at 9am, and I'm heading upstairs now to take a shower. I fear taking a nap would do more harm than good at this point... I did sleep quite a bit on the plane, where I sat next to 2 limeños, a mom and 14-yr-old son... he was so cute, listening to rock music on his headphones and then curling up and snuggling with mom during the night. They were very curious about me and asked even about the over-21 wristband I was wearing from going to the wine tasting at the Washington, DC barbeque festival. (¿Para què es eso?)

If you have asked me to send you a postcard from Perù (or even if you haven´t and would like me to send you a postcard), could you (¿por favor!) email your mailing address to me at marjorieschreiber@yahoo.com? In my scurries I have left all snail mail addresses at home. ¡¡Gracias!!

If you would like to write me a letter in Perù (I would love it!) here´s my address for the next 5 weeks. It apparently takes a week to ten days for letters to get here from the USA.

Rosa ZANABRIA
Para: Marjorie SCHREIBER
Urb. Campiña paisajista B-7 San Lázaro Cercado
Arequipa
PERU

¡Hasta pronto!

funky keyboards, for starters

I'm writing from one of those internet airport kiosks (in Atlanta). Can you tell the space bar sticks? Oh, now I realize that is I tap it on the far right end, it works fine. Oh, maybe not after all. (Editorial comment: after looking at the published post, you can't see the extra spaces from the sticky keyboard, but trust me, they are *maddening*.)

I was told that I shouldn't bring my laptop to Peru (because of the risk of it being stolen, and because there's not much wifi, and definitely not where I'll be living), so I'm going to have to get accustomed to funny keyboards of all sorts, I'm sure.

So I left DC this afternoon, where I'd attended a tiny bit of the annual convention (basically just the RSS Services to Spanish Speakers committee meeting - I'm going to serve starting the end of this conference). That group of folks and the things they've been working on seem very cool. See the guidelines that were published at Midwinter for info. The new projects will be to compile reference resources in Spanish on this blog Adam created, and to plan a program on collection development en espanol for 2009.

I really wish I had the patience to create links for things in this post, but this funky keyboard has no control key or options for cutting and pasting. And I'd rather eat a taco than type in URLs. So, more later on the exciting world of Library Services for Spanish Speakers.

For those of you not-so-interested in my professional affiliations, here's some life info:

B & I ate soul food in Adams Morgan last night, a cool strip we would have explored more in a world of endless leisure time. We rode the bus through parts of DC we hadn't intended to explore. Confusing! Even the bus drivers were confused! I've spent my post-conference time on the plane, reading about colectivo buses in Lima and how they crash into each other in a mad rush for customers, and rush off before you're completely inside the bus. And eating unsatisfying airplane snacks. Now i'm in the airport for the next three ish hours. I leave Atlanta at 11:30 tonight, arrive in Lima at around 5am, hang out in Miraflores for the day and night, and then leave for Cusco in the morning. I'll post again soon!

offline

pool, originally uploaded by sammarin.

So, this is the reason I've not been posting to the blog!

More photos of Bermuda to come on flickr. It might take awhile to get them all up ... it's lazy and lo-tech days lately.