These things keep passing…… I think they’re called months.

               Yikes it’s been a long time since I wrote anything. In my defense there have been long stretches of relatively uninteresting days in my life lately; turns out December is slow for business in the Peace Corps and then January is still slow for youth volunteers because it’s the beginning of summer break. However, there have also been some excellent days in between the boredom and I should be writing about them. Let's take a look back at December, shall we?

               Madre mia came for a visit. I realize that seems like a whole page or two of its own, but I’m not really sure how I would write it. We spent a lot of our time sitting around visiting (and a little bit of crying), which is exactly what I wanted it to be.  Six months is the longest I’ve ever gone without seeing her. We did do a lot of site seeing as well, I’m a good little host. We stayed in Huaraz mostly, but we also saw Caraz, the ruins at Chavin and my site. In Mancos Mom got to go with / I dragged her to my English classes in the primary school. All the kids had the chance to ask mom questions. At this point I would tell you all a story about her trying to describe a plane flight to my students (with me translating of course), but Mom says I tell it wrong. There was a lot of arm flapping involved though, that’s all I’m going to say.

                Christmas Eve was yet another cultural adventure for me.  Here is tradition to eat a whole other meal at midnight to ring in Christmas day. We went to mass before dinner to have the little baby Jesus blessed so we could add him to the nativity scene at midnight as well. There were also firecrackers and the exchanging of gifts. Four full meals in one day was a little rough, but it was a fun version of Christmas Eve.

                Christmas Day I woke up and opened Christmas presents on skype with my family. Mom brought presents when she came down and I actually waited until the 25^th to open them. Impressed? That morning I headed into Huaraz to meet up with everybody. We cooked dinner and watched Ernest Saves Christmas. I was great. Keren’s parents were in Huaraz as well. Her mom made Hanukah doughnuts and latkas as part of our dinner. They even brought dradles and chocolate coins for us the play with; so much holiday fun! I ended up staying the 26^th as well. Jeff, Brice and I hung around the hostel for the day. Jeff started teaching me the art of betting in Blackjack. I’ll take a run at Vegas when I get home…….

                Continuing with the massive amounts of celebrations in one week’s time; I celebrated my 25^th birthday a few days later. We had lunch at my house. Kait, John William, Kyle and Johanna came over to help me celebrate. My host sister Paola and I tried to cook a birthday cake as well. We aimed for a two layer cake, both layers stuck to the pan and crumbled when we tried to turn them out. Never fear……Paola and I just decided to smush the crumbles into one pan with some peanut butter and mold our own cake. Surprisingly it actually held together and formed a cake, unsurprisingly it was a little dense :-P Later that night was the graduation party for the seniors at my school. It was good fun for a while, but by 4:30 in the morning I was really ready to be in my bed. 

                Rounding at the week of festivities, and December as a whole was New Year’s Eve in Huaraz. We all donned our yellow for good luck and had a potluck at California Café. Complete with card games, dancing, fireworks and Elke spinning fire poi. We stuck around the restaurant until the midnight count down and then went dancing until all hours of the morning. It was great fun and a great way to ring in the new year. 

December 6: Oh dear, I’m sensing there might be a problem…….

              I don’t like Paneton….gasp! While those of you living in Peru take a moment to overcome your shock, I’ll explain myself to our friends in the States. Here in Peru there is one big holiday tradition, just one. It’s Paneton and hot chocolate. Paneton is this loaf like cake, with bits of dried fruit baked into it. They sell them everywhere and it is an inarguable staple of a Peruvian Christmas. Now that December has started all social groups and organizations are starting to have their own chocolatadas, which is a fancy word for a Paneton and hot chocolate party. I went to one with my knitting group and we each got a fourth of a cake to ourselves….a fourth! Now the hot chocolate is quite tasty; melting chocolate, evaporated milk and cinnamon mixed with boiling water. Great idea. The Paneton however is sort of like dry sponge cake with raisins and some type of neon green dried “fruit” that I feel certain can’t be found naturally on our earth. Getting through the next three weeks of December may have just gotten trickier.

                On a totally unrelated note, I finally have conclusive evidence that perceptions of body sizes down here are TOTALLY different. While we were all sitting around eating brick size chunks of Paneton, the knitting ladies started asking me how much weight I had gained since I got to Peru. I told them that I still don’t understand kilos, but it’s a good bit. They were surprised to hear that I am normally skinnier. Then I was surprised when one of them said “oh aren’t you so glad you’re here then, wouldn’t you hate to be all skinny again? You’re getting so pretty.”  Whaaaaa?!

November 27 – December 4: Early In Service Training

           Our E-IST was in Olmos, Lambayeque.  It’s the site of Spear, a Peru 15 youth volunteer, and it was mostly what you’d expect a PC training to be I think. A few of the highlights……

We each did a short presentation of our community diagnostics and turned them in (finally). Mine went great and the group I presented to commented that my Spanish had improved a lot since training. EXCELLENT!

We had the chance to participate in the World AIDS Day celebration that Speare had organized with his kids. It was great to see an event first hand and of course one of our assignments for the week was to come up with skits and participate. We wrote raps, original songs, staged games shows and even had a dancing condom.

The last day of the training we were divided into small groups to go visit other sites in Lambayeque. I went to Eten, right by the beach. We worked with a group of youth health promoters, visited a great town library, and had ceviche on the beach. It would be no stretch of the imagination to say that I have a little bit of site envy over Eten. It was a great town.

The day that training ended we hung around for a night in Chiclayo, the capital of the department. It’s one of the old colonial towns in Peru and feels enormous to me in comparison with Huaraz. There are so many things there that haven’t made it to Huaraz yet. We had Mediterranean food for dinner, hung out at the PC hostel and went salsa dancing that night. We had most of the next day to wait for our bus so we went to the mall! I had pizza hut and wandered around the Plaza Vea just looking at stuff. I also tracked down a King Kong cake for my host family. Before you even ask, I have no clue about the name. It’s a layer cake with various fruit fillings and apparently Lambayeque is known for them. I don’t actually think they taste very good, but my host mom asked for it by name so I made sure to bring one back with me. 

November 23 – 26: Trujillo and Huanchaco…..it’s time for Thanksgiving!

               Wednesday was the first day of my first vacation as a PCV. I absolutely love my site, but oh man was I ready for a trip to the beach :-). Wednesday Ali, Keren and I spent the afternoon working in a café in Huaraz. The plan was to finish up some writing before we caught the bus to Trujillo, but truth be told, we were all so excited to get on the road that we got very little done. Oh well. Wednesday night we took the overnight bus to Trujillo- 10 hours; 8 of which are spent just crossing the mountains. It’s really only two hours from Chimbote, the coastal city of Ancash, to Trujillo. However, the Andes Mountains are in between Huaraz and Chimbote and it turns out they are kind of tall…..who knew?

                We spent Thursday in Trujillo. Almost all of Peru 17-YD came for the holidays, as well as a bunch of Peru 15 & 16 who were on the way to their own Thanksgiving events. We went to the mall, ate a ton of pizza, window shopped around the city and generally enjoyed hanging out with our training group again. That night we all went out to a salsa bar and danced the night away. Friday morning the 17ers started cabbing it over to Huanchaco, the beach town about 25 minutes out of Trujillo. Ali and I decided to go to an artisan market in Trujillo before we left so we didn’t get to the beach until that afternoon. The PC hostel in Huanchaco is amazing; there is a huge patio and the beach is exactly across the street. After getting ceviche with Ali, I immediately changed into my swimsuit and began two days of lying on the beach and wandering around looking at all the little beach shops.

 Saturday was our Thanksgiving celebration and it was an impressive feat if I do say so myself. We got permission to use the hostel restaurant kitchen, but we could only use it from 3-5; which is their break between lunch and dinner.  So we prepped a thanksgiving dinner for thirty-five on patio tables; used a camp stove to boil potatoes; then we cooked everything AND cleaned the kitchen in two hours. We had pollo a la brasa instead of turkey, three types of mashed potatoes, stuffing, sweet potato gratin green bean casserole, baked mac and cheese, sautéed veggies, fruits salads, veggie salad, baked apple crisp and no bake cookies. It was D-elicious. 

I was one of the kitchen crew and have now earned a totally undeserved reputation as a great cook. I just got lucky :-P My plan was to cook Mom’s baked Mac and Cheese (it’s the best in the world), but it’s not always easy to find the same ingredients down here.  Basically sharp cheddar cheese is more expensive than meat here, so Kat (la captain of our Thanksgiving adventure) just bought tons of different cheeses and told me to make something up. The final result was a cheddar, mozzarella, edam, cream cheese, queso fresco mixed with garlic, parmesan cheese  madness…..and that madness tasted good :-). I also made the no bake cookies. You just melt everything together, stir in the oatmeal and form the cookies. It is SO easy and all of us have the same recipe because it came out of a PC cook book, but I made them for the host family party at the end of training and now everyone thinks I’m the only one who can. They actually bought the ingredients without telling me, because someone else in the group had asked for the cookies :-P So there we are 30 minutes before we’re supposed to be out of the kitchen and I’m just throwing things in the pot. Luckily the recipe is pretty hard to mess up. We didn’t have time to form all the cookies so we just poured it onto sheet pans and had cookie cake/pudding because it didn’t have time to set either. Would you believe the pans were still basically licked cleaned? Guess it just goes to show that rarely will mixing peanut butter and chocolate go wrong.

                All the food was amazing and there was more than enough for everyone. In the end we started inviting the other guests at the hostel to eat with us. I know we all missed our families in the States, but the truth is that this Thanksgiving was spent with family, a new one. 

November 22: Being part of a host family means being there for the “sad” as well

                Tuesday was a sad day for my host family. Fabiola’s uncle passed away, so my host mom and I went to Huaraz to accompany her to the funeral. It turns out I don’t really know the right Spanish words to express condolences yet, but hugs mean the same thing no matter what language you speak.

                As a cultural experience the funeral was actually very interesting. They have different customs here in Peru than in the States. Most notably we walked through the streets of Huaraz throwing flowers on the coffin and the pallbearers took the coffin by the uncle’s house to say good bye. It seems like a nice tradition. 

November 19: Fortunately they like the Gypsy Kings; it’s the only Spanish music I have.

              Saturday morning I woke up and continued working on my diagnostic, I write way slower in Spanish so this paper has been more of a process that I am used to. After about an hour though Paula (the older one) knocked on the door and asked if I wanted to cook with her. So I brought my laptop into the kitchen to play music while Paula and I cooked lunch. Or more accurately, Paula and I tried to cook lunch and Fabiola kept a close eye to make sure we didn’t screw up :-) We made aji de pollo and it turned out great. I also really enjoyed spending time like that with the girls in my host family. Poco a poco I’m starting to feel like I’m building more of a relationship with my host family and its great!

                After lunch I went up to Caraz for a few hours to hang out with Jeff and Keren. We were all going cross eyed from staring at our diagnostics so a break was in order.  There’s nothing like ice cream and people watching from our balcony in Caraz to brighten up a week. 

November 18: a green take on the blues

              So I have officially met rainy season. The locals were in a fit because it came so late this year; being that I have no crops of my own, I was lesson concerned, although I understood.

                I still have no crops, but I’m starting to understand a little more now. It’s like those whale sharks in the Atlanta Aquarium ….once you’ve seen them, you’d know if they were missing. Rainy season here is not a slight spritz around the 3 o’clock hour nor is it a sudden deluge either, it’s an event.  Each afternoon the clouds roll in across the mountains, the wind picks up, then drizzle starts and slowly increases. It could last a few hours or it could last all night. And the locals certainly expect it to happen every day.

                From a practical standpoint I see the usefulness; the agrarian culture here depends on it. From a nature standpoint I can even see the beauty; I had a great time thinking of a way to describe it to you, even though I came up with nothing. However, from a personal standpoint I’m slightly worried. I’ve been thinking a lot about morning glories this week. Yep, I mean the flower. A morning glory is a flower that closes up each night and reopens with the sun each day. I’ve never lived somewhere with a rainy season before and I’ve only been in this one for about a week, so I don’t have a lot to go on; but I’m starting to worry that I’m a morning glory. Or maybe an afternoon not-so-glory. This week, each day when the rain started I just wanted to stop. I’m hoping it was simply a blah week that happened to coincide with the arrival of rainy season; but if not, what do I do? The sun may be out in the mornings, but there are a lot of afternoons between now and March.