Saturday, February 18, 2012

What I've Learned So Far...

Peru is a pretty awesome country that is drastically different from the US, go figure, so I figured I'll talk about some of the things I've learned/noticed while living in Peru these past two months or so.

One thing I have noticed is the differences that there are in speaking here. I guess I just assumed everyone speaks the same here, but being the untraveled foreigner I am I was totally wrong. There are three distinct regions in Peru, the Coast, the Sierra, and the Selva, and you better bet they speak very distinctively! They all have their own words that aren’t used in the other regions and to top it all off a lot of the people from the Sierra have thick accents that my host family even has trouble understanding, this is a lot for a gringo to handle! There is an interesting, well at least to me, reason for the thick accents these learned an indigenous language, called Quechua, first and Spanish second. There are a lot of people from the Sierra with these accents, and when I say a lot of people I’m not kidding, which leads me to me second point…

Since the late 70’s early 80’s Lima has experienced a HUGE influx of migrants from the rest of Peru due to the intense violence in the Sierra, mainly in Ayucucho. The violence has since greatly diminished. In the 60’s the population of Lima was around 2 million but has grown to 9 million as of today due to all of the people that sought refuge from the fighting and better job opportunities. One of my teachers even said that only about 10% of the people living in Lima were born here. A lot of these people are indigenous or practice some of the traditions or simply come from indigenous descent. It is hard to tell who is indigenous and who’s not though because some of them no longer where the clothing which is a big indicator. It reminds me of the book I’m reading for class, I, Rigoberta Menchu, when she mentions that she is sad she can’t identify every indigenous person because they don’t wear the traditional clothing like her. Makes me wonder the same thing and how many of them speak no Spanish at all like Rigoberta, which is crazy to me because I had no idea about these indigenous languages before coming here.  I’m glad I’m learning about the history and Peru itself along with Spanish.

I think I’ll mention one more not as important, but equally as interesting, observation I’ve encountered before this post becomes a novel, they eat Halls cough drops as if they were candies here! The other week a girl in the English class I help out in offered me one and I was so caught off guard when she gave it to me so I didn’t say anything and quickly threw it away before she could notice. My throat felt fine! But the next day at Pizza Hut, very Peruvian I know, they gave us Halls too after our meal and it all made sense. I don’t remember seeing those in Willy Wonka.

P.S. Sorry for the lack of photos, just imagine an indigenous person holding a pack of Halls, that should sum up the post

Tuesday, February 7, 2012

Pancakes and Cuy

Two Saturdays ago, it's been awhile since I've blogged sorry, I took a class trip, my first field trips in ages by the way, to another district in Lima called Miraflores. It was quite the adventure getting there. About 12 of us piled onto a combi, one of the mini buses, and headed off to Miraflores. We took up the whole combi, a combi full of gringos must have been quite the site, we were getting looks left and right. We were even asked to take a picture with some Columbian tourists once we arrived in Miraflores; I wonder how they could tell we were foreigners? We toured all throughout Miraflores and learned all about the history of Lima, it was actually quite interesting. We ended our tour at Huaca Pucllana, which are ancient ruins. We had a tour throughout the ruins and learned all about the history. There were tourists from all over in our group at this tour, including some from France. I decided to try to talk to one in French and I actually ended up having a legit conversation with him. I had finally shaken the feeling of feeling dumb every time I spoke, but it came all came flooding back after I spoke French, my French is nowhere close to my Spanish. 
That following week I finally became a true Peruvian, I had Guinea Pig for dinner, and it was really good! The saying 'Tastes like chicken' could not have been any truer. Guinea Pig, or as it's known here cuy, tasted just like chicken with BBQ sauce. The only thing that concerned me about it was that there was no sauce on the Guinea Pig, well that and that the fact that I ate something dark grey and hard also, too late to worry now!
After trying some authentic Peruvian cuisine me and some other students from UNK decided to make French toast and scrambled eggs for some of the Peruvians we've met down here. We tried to come up with a new Spanish word for French toast but that was a fail, the best we came up with was pan suave, or smooth bread. We spent the whole dinner talking, in Spanish of course, and as one of my friends put it 'You know your Spanish is improving when you can add sass.' While my delivering jokes in Spanish needs some improvement I'd say the sass part is up to par with the natives here! The whole meal consisted of everyone giving everyone friendly sarcasm, well and pretty much this whole trip too. Now I just need to learn the word for sass...
The next morning we made pancakes and scrambled eggs again for someone's host family and it was another success despite the lack of utensils. I was forced to use a cheese grater instead of a spatula. By the time we got around to making the eggs one of the Peruvians walked in and asked us 'Sopa de huevos?' She thought we were making egg soup; she had a good laugh at that and at our lack of utensils. The host family liked the pancakes so much one of the girls nicknamed them 'Panqueques Nebraskeanos'.



                                      Miraflores, after taking a picture with random Columbians
Group French toast dinner.

                                                                         Where's the beef?