El Condor Pasa

I miss Cuzco. Our last day taking in the green central fountain with white swans and lacy patterns, the huge flags, the bright red brass and boom marching bands for Independence Day...

We huffed and puffed to a playground perched halfway between the "Cristo Blanco" and the intermittent blasts of celebratory rifle fire below. Found some giggling kids who joked with us and sold us ornamented necklaces and then ran off as if we might take back the one sole we had given them...

Went to a museum of Pre-Columbian art and learned that Georges Braque actually claimed to have "been inspired by" (ie courteously stolen)a "primitive Peruvian cubism." Indeed, one of the sculptures dated between the years 1-800 AD was of a potato portrayed from every different angle.

At the door read: "Greatness of a people is not ascertained by conquests or rides but by development of social systems and relation to the natural environment."

Our bus ride yesterday took twelve hours. The bus had toilet paper for one hour. I was not nauseated for the same period of time. To comfort me as I staggered back up to the double deck after having paid homage to the toilet downstairs, John began telling me about the stories he would make up for Craig as a kid, going through the alphabet animals with replacing the adjectives to things like "Mass murdering moose."

"And one time, the vomiting vulture..."

I glared and turned to the arrid yellow of the hills stretching before us, scattered with stone houses, cemetaries with flowered crosses sticking up out of the dirt, sheep following blindly. People washing clothes in snakelike streams, towns that looked like military barracks.

Through Puno, where Lake Titicaca stretched and reclined. Over the Altiplano, which made John remember Clint Eastwood.

We stopped, too, in a rather desolate town that apparently produces the most counterfeit currency. As we left, we could see everyone in town running toward a building that was in the throws of a giant fire, flames shooting everywhere, engulfing a bus parked behind it.

As the sun set over cold, waving grass and far off mountains, we rather jarringly realized that we had been stopped for thirty minutes on the side of the road. No explanation, we just started moving again, eventually, as the impending darkness and isolation tightened.

One more stop at the Puestro de Control Cuarentenario, part of the Minesterio de Agricultura, and we could only make out shapes for the last three hours, which was comforting considering the long drop on either side of the winding highway.

Finally, I have started feeling homesick, helped only by blips of Cajamarca, a music resembling Appalacchian bluegrass, on the 70-year-old Radio Peru. I know that it has only been one full week, but the transition to this very dry and very Spanish-looking city has been a little sticky.

I was so enraptured by Cusco´s culture, that now I find myself bubbling over with negativity toward our new home which has a McDonalds and Radioshack and a mall.

Still, the week has just begun. And our real work starts in a few days. I will be working from 730-930am, then 5-9pm. I will let you know how to reach me as soon as I get my phone off of the black market, as reccomended by our boss.

I miss you all.
Lex