From SATA-Peru-2007
The day began on a sad note; my Spanish class was cancelled because the teacher, Mariella, has been bedridden for the past few days. I truly hope she has a speedy recovery and would like to take this time to say that she has been a wonderfully helpful teacher thus far, and has vastly improved our Spanish in less than 2 weeks time. Our class decided that the only way to be fair to Mariella would be to speak Spanish during the normal class period time. Therefore, the majority of the class (Hans, Erich, Rick and Adonnica) went out to a delicious café where we had American style breakfasts and coffee/tea as we spoke Spanish. On Fridays, after Spanish class we have one of our ethnology of Peruvian people’s class with Manuel for about 3 hours. We spent the first half in the classroom where we discussed the first portion of the book, The Conquest of the Incas by John Hemming. We specifically discussed many of the Incans crucial developments as well as a few of the fundamental things that Hemming said were missing from their society. These, we decided, are very controversial and it is very difficult to say for sure that the Incas would have been more advanced for having these. We then briefly discussed Coricancha and its role in the conquest before heading over to that museum for the second half of class to see it for ourselves.
Coricancha is a magnificent building with amazing architecture and a very beautiful garden. I was surprised to learn that it is a convent now and also shocked at the amount of Christian paintings inside, many of which hailing from the Cusco school of art.
We ate lunch after we returned from Coricancha and then we had free time until Quechua class at 5. Hans and I went on a very unsatisfying hike because we had hoped to make it to the large mountain range in back of Sacsayhuaman, but were held up because we look like tourists and were not allowed to take the easy route up to Sacsayhuaman unless we bought tickets for 40 soles (which is crap, and not something we were about to buy into). We were stupid enough, however, to create our own path up to the same area and despite the fact that I was attacked by a dog, all turned out okay. We did lose a lot of time, however. We hiked on the road to Pisac for a while, but eventually turned around when we realized that Pisac is very far away and walking on the road wasn’t much fun. We found a little more danger with dogs and a very steep slippery path that lies right next to a cliff, but in the end we managed to stumble our way into Quechua class a few minutes after 5 p.m. In class, we practiced the present progressive among other things and after Gina (the teacher) had a special treat for us. She took us to a theater on Avenida del Sol, where we watched and heard traditional Quechua dancing and music.
I enjoyed the dancing, but especially enjoyed the announcer who was the tallest Peruvian women I have ever seen. She was pretty hot. The rest of the night was relatively eventless, aside from the fact that my roommate was so sick from a stint with dysentery that I was worried for his life.
September 13, 2007 September 15, 2007
