week 6? i think?

So the past week has been really great. I still find myself loving Lima. I'm so content and amused here and each day still has something fresh to offer. Whether it's taking random walks with my host mom around Barranco to go visit some retired mimes, eating beef hearts on a stick, sitting at the beachfront admiring the ocean, listening to musicians trying to earn money off the street, drinking a a liter of the most awesomest pineapple juice, having my shoulder be used as a pillow by a sleepy old lady on the micro, getting to walk through my host dad's studio everyday on the way to my room and seeing how his paintings progress, finding myself picking up on the slang better, making pretzels with abby while her host parents stare in awe, or busting my lip while sand boarding...oh so refreshing.

But of course there is the tough stuff. Feeling invisible and inadequate because I can't communicate well with the people here, feeling disconnected with people at home, the cat calls which have become annoying, gaining weight because my host family doesn't understand that my body can only handle so much food, getting lost on the micros, not being able to watch any of the Office episodes that I've missed because Hulu doesn't work here. Tragic.

So more specifically, here are some things that have happened in the past week or so:

ICA! For semana santa, or easter week, I took a trip to Ica Peru with Laura, Abby, Audrey, Aprill, and Chris. I had a great time with them! We went sand buggying and sand boarding in Huacachina, which is a desert with a cute little oasis. The sand dunes were beautiful! I felt like I was in Aladdin. Another day we went to Nasca and saw some of the mysterious Nazca lines and Inca lines. My favorite part of that day ended up being when we went to a ceramic place in Nazca that taught us how the Nascans used to make their pottery. It was awesome! They used paint brushes made out of childrens hair! The ceramic place makes replicas of the pottery in the exact same way that the nascans did, and with the same designs. Did you know...that Pablo Picasso's art was influenced by the art of the Nazcans? Well know you do.
Another one of my favorite parts of the trip was when we went to a museum that had mummies!! They were soooooooo cool! They had this room full of mummies behind glass cases. I could see there dried up skin, fingernails, eyeballs, tongues, teeth, hair, everything! it was amazing! They had old trophy heads that had been decapitaded and kept as prizes, they had a mummy of an 8 year old boy, they had skulls of people who's heads had been purposely deformed from birth via headboards..for beauty purposes? They had one skull that had dread locks about 4 feet long. haha. I was quite amused.
On the final day we went to some islands called Islas Ballestas on a boat tour. I decided that i really like boats! But anywho, on these islands there live birds, penguins and sea lions! hundreds of sea lions! with babies! so cute. but it smelled like guano. like big time.


This morning I got to talk to Paula, the empleada, or maid. She basically told me her life story. So awesome! She grew up in cajamarca which is located in the sierra of peru, and she came to Lima when she was 15 because she was basically looking for a better life and opportunities to go to school and live a glorious life. She didn't want to stay in cajamarca because it's typical for the people in the sierra to marry early and have kinds by the time they are 16. And she had other plans. She said that before she came, she pictured Lima as this beautiful place where one's dreams could come true, and where everyone earned a bunch of money. But when she came it wasn't like that. She immediately started working, went to school a couple of years later during the night, fell in love with a man, had a daughter, got seperated from him, raised her kid, and now works in our house(like she has for the past 20 something years) so that she can pay for her daughter's college. It was hard hearing it, because her dreams never came true. She mentioned how she never really got to find 'herself' because she fell in love and had a kid and had to commit her life to her child. She said her life has never really been fun, but eh. It was really neat to here.

I've found myself getting frustrated over things that didn't bug me the first couple of weeks. It's mostly a matter of not being able to control where I am going, where I want to go, how i get there, what my schedule looks like. I really do just have to go with the flow. For instance tonight I really wanted to check out this youth group at a church in Miraflores, about 12 minute micro ride. It started at 830 and i left my house at 8:15(bad first step) knowing i would get there a little bit late. But I ended up waiting at the micro stop for 25 minutes unable to find a micro that would get me to where I needed to go,while about 27.000 people decided to throw out cat calls, whistles and kissy faces. Pretty frustrating. So i just resigned and ate croissants filled with manjar blanco and peruvian cheesecake with Audrey instead. Btw, cheesecake here is pretty nasty. And people here eat manjar blanco, which is kinda like dulce de leche, the way we eat peanut butter. It's in everything! Oh lima.
So basically, it can be hard when you have very little control over where you want to go, how you get there, how well you can blend in, whether you get a seat, what time you arrive...me and my friend Abby like to call it the Peruvian time warp. you never know what the time warp is gonna suck you into one day. oh well 'asi es la vida', jaja as Abby's host dad apparently likes to say.

I feel like i really do have to live life one day at a time here. Anything more than that is too much. I can't think about the future, I can't look back, I can only live step by step. If I don't there is so much to miss out on, so many new and exciting and sometimes frustrating things(which are some of the best learning experiences), I can't make a schedule because it's just going to get lost in the peruvian time warp anyway...not matter how hard I try. So just live moment by moment, Amelia. It's funny because life should be like that all the time, not just in new, or 'special' occasions. So yeah, for now on, let's just wake up in the morning and live out one moment at a time.


Some pics from ica: