Small things and exams

I am inspired to write tonight after having read my husband’s blog, which I find to be ever insightful and amusing. (For any of you who don’t know, my husbands are Zach Braff and Jason Mraz—both have good blogs, but the lovely Mr. Az is much more entertaining.) I haven’t been writing as much as I think is needful, because, as I believe I wrote before, often times it seems that my life isn’t as exciting as maybe I perceive that it should be. OR is it that my life isn’t as exciting as I think others perceive it should be? Neither of those should really matter, since the beautiful part is, it’s my blog. I can write anything! I was reading (translating) The Alchemist, which has so many wonderful perspectives to offer. I’m still towards the beginning, if you can imagine, and the “muchacho” says that when a person thinks that that all of their days are the same, they have stopped perceiving the good things in their lives. I choose to take notice of the small things in my life and appreciate them. For example:

• I was shopping (yet again) with Dorita the other day and we drifted to the underwear section of the store. It’s funny because in this department store, they have this line of underwear that is a total knock-off of Victoria’s Secret, and I’d wager that the quality is on the same par, but it’s naturally much cheaper here. And I do love my foreign languages…and my underwear. When the two cross, I’m a sucker:
  

• When I first arrived and discovered Lima to be in a state of chilliness, I had to go sock shopping. Of course I searched for (and found) my precious argyle socks, but in the process, Vanessa noticed my love of the socks. She gave me this present the other day, and it makes me laugh because they’re so adorable, and because I am so easy to read:
  
  



• I am pretty much wearing the same thing, day after day after day. This uniform consists of layer up on layer of clothing, usually adding up to five layers on top. But during my first week here in Lima, my Peruvian father gave me one of his old sweaters to wear. It's this funny, purple sweater that could be years and years old, and I like to imagine that it's made from alpaca hair. Purple alpacas...better thing to imagine. Here's your favorite non-eskimo:

Spanish…I had my final exam yesterday and received a 90%, though I repute that score since 1) it was mostly writing and we had hardly any creative, written homework assignments (and our teacher never, ever read our homework), 2) they took off two points for a true or false question using vocabulary we’d never learned and 3) they marked me off four points from my “essay question” on the back, but didn’t mark any corrections. But since I also missed the first week of class, and this dramatically lowered my score for the overall class, I’m just not going to worry about it. I am instead appreciating my expanded vocabulary, the increase in my conversational ability, and new friends (a fantastic lady from Maine who is advocating for enhanced education for the deaf community and another girl my age from Germany who easily gives the best hugs I’ve received here in Peru and rates right up there with my top huggers). At times, I feel like my Spanish is incredibly poor, usually when I’m talking to my Mama Peruana. She has a hard time understanding me a lot of the time, and I find myself thinking, “Man, I have been here for over a month and I am still this unintelligible?” People speak so quickly and by the time I have one sentence translated out in my head, I’m two sentences behind their current place of speech. But then there are other times when I feel like I’m doing pretty well, like when I talk to strangers and they understand me (and I understand them, too!). The greatest thing is, I’m finding my knowledge of linguistics to be incredibly helpful, and one class I took in college in particular. The first day I walked into my “Languages of the World” class at UW, the teacher proceeded to tell us that the words “feather” and “helicopter” were related. I just shook my head and thought, “This is ridiculous.” Even after two, three weeks into the class I was still thinking that my teacher was full of it. (In fact, he was full of it—not a day of class went by when he didn’t talk about his theory on Shakespeare’s true identity or elaborating at length about how brilliant a linguist he was.) But as far as the relationship between these words (and so many others)—he was right. Ugh, I hate to be wrong, but at least I admit it, right? : ) Part of the reason I can understand so much right now is because I’m able to recognize most of the cognates and make those word connections, both when I’m listening to people speak and when I’m reading. It’s like figuring out another code, and I find it to be very satisfying. Other things I find satisfying? Finding new favorite words. My first favorite words:

• Sonrisa = Smile. Isn’t that such a beautiful word? It sounds like sunrise. It’s rather poetic, and it just plain makes me happy.
• Tramposa = Tricky. Vanessa called me “tramposa” one day. I sat there wondering why she would call me a tramp for paying for her bus fare. Um, you wanna take this outside? Bring it! Yeah, anyway, my favorite book the dictionary called and said it actually means tricky. Nice.

Last week in class was the “clothing” unit where we learned the names for all the clothes. A lot of the words were different than the ones I learned in high school, but now I just consider myself that much smarter—I actually know synonyms in Spanish! The thing that I find to be interesting is the influence that American culture has had on their clothing vocabulary. For instance, a t-shirt is called a “polo.” Their sizes? “small”, “medium” and “large” of course all pronounced with an accent: “esmall”, “mehdioom”, “larje”. More? A sweater vest is a “pulover". And my favorite is “bibidi” which is a men’s tank-top undershirt. Can you say BVD? They also took a Brit word for sweater, “jumper” and turned it Spanish-style into “chompa”. The world is getting smaller and smaller…

Dulces:

• Maracuya cheesecake. I finally found good cheesecake, and it’s more of a tartlet. Maracuya is some sort of fruit, though as is typical with me, I don’t even know what the fruit looks like, I just know that it gets mixed with other sugar resulting in a postre for me to devour. Thank you, my dear Polly, for introducing this to me. I tend to stick to the chocolate and non-fruit cheesecakes, but this one was thoroughly enjoyable.
• Pie de manzana. Apple pie. This afternoon I went out to “breakfast” with some American friends from the Flying Dog (my Lima hostel home base) and we had three different desserts, one of which was pie de manzana. This as one of the best apple pies I’ve had, because along with the apples, the filling was a thick, appley, custardy goodness. Not just empty rellena, it was good. We also had the crema de volteada and…
• Torta de chocolate…with a twist. It was sort of a chocolate bunt cake with a white, light cream that had little pieces of fruit in it, too. The cake was alright, but I was more impressed with the strawberry on top. Fresas, fresas, tan ricas…

Things I’ve seen/done/experienced:

• Alfajores exam—check! I passed my alfajor-making exam yesterday (courtesy of my vida de Lima teacher, Vanessa). I tried making alfajores last week by myself and they were a huge flop! Note to self, no more mantequilla con sal! (Butter with salt seems to not work here…butter without salt is fairly expensive, though I think I’ve found one that’s in my price range.) When I tried baking this particular batch of cookies, they basically melted. They’d hold their form until you grazed them with a fork at which point they’d crumble into dust. I was heart-broken! Why aren’t my cookies working here??? Then mama Peruana suggested we try margarine, because its consistency is harder. Second batch? Success! So we decided that I needed to have two exams this week, one for Spanish and one for alfajores. I got home yesterday and set to work, and it turns out, I can make alfajores by myself. Now I just need to figure out the whole manjar blanco part…but I got to have a lovely night of bringing happiness to my friends at Flying Dog (and naturally myself as well) in the form of cookies and I Heart Huckabees.
• Travelers’ sickness(es). I finally got some sort of gastro illness on Friday. My sickness really started a few weeks ago, when I started experiencing the opposite problem that most travelers have, namely that I was unable to go to the bathroom very frequently. Then Friday rolled around and my stomach decided to flip the switch, so I spent most of Saturday and Sunday lying in bed reading. It wasn’t terribly painful, just uncomfortable, so I just went along with it. Sunday I took some immodium, and that lasted until today, when I’m happy to say I won a victory and I’m starting to feel normal again! Still more overweight than I’d like to be, but better. I’ll probably be doing a lot of walking starting next week when I travel up north for a while, but I’m told that I need to go to Cajamarca which is beautiful and has some good sites…and cheese. And manjarblanco. The food here is just reeling me in! Oh yeah, and I’m also experiencing some Tina-type annoyances. I have a few fleabites that came from somewhere inside this house, and I also have some sort of weird rash on my side and the middle of my back. It may have something to do with the fact that I wore my yoga pants for about two weeks straight without washing them…it’s cold here! And I’m trying on the “dirty traveler” lifestyle. Yeah right, I’m so not a dirty traveler yet…I live in a house in the middle of the city where I have my own room and access to a shower every day. Though in my defense, the shower doesn’t always have warm water (I haven’t quite figured the system out yet) and the air here is really cold and it’s not exactly welcoming to a body drenched in water. I’m transitioning. J In every sense!

Things I have a new appreciation for:

• A functioning bowel system. Seriously, I had just a minor taste of what most other travelers go through, and I’m sure that there are other similar maladies just waiting for me in the future. What can I say, street food is tempting, and I’m slowly becoming more adventurous, so I’m going to try it.
• Having contact with other travelers who are living simply and NOT accumulating. Materialism is always just lurking around the corner, and it’s all I can do to not go shopping and buy all kinds of cute new clothes right now. But I’m holding out! Experiences, not things, experiences, not things.
• Friends who dress up (of their own accord...um, sort of). Vanessa dresses up in costume at least once a month for work (she works in a casino that is literally a stone's throw from the house). There are tons of costume shops here...they're give me ideas for additions to my tupperware. Anyway, Saturday she was dressed up as the Reina de Primavera (Queen of Spring):

I love my friends...

Okay, I've started writing a few other blogs, so I'll try working on those a little bit more so there are a few more posts. Maybe then every single one won't be like a mini-novel!