Rainy Tangerine Footbaths, A Midsummer Night’s Halloween, Puddles, Puddles, Tarantulas, Puddles, and Paper Trees.

The mangos are in season and I am rocking out!  There is a city of mangos called Quillabamba and it’s a little further down the mountain.  Here in this town, they hang off the trees and weigh the branches down, and they are everywhere.  They fall down to where the sleeping dogs lie and scare them running away.  However, they are transported here by truck and the result is that there are hairy little mango pits all over the streets. 

People don’t eat mangos here, they make love to them.  And it is a shameless, delicious, juicy kind of love.  I watched a man on the micro as he gently rubbed his hands all over the skin of the fruit, massaging the mango as if it had just gotten home from work and it was very stressed because it already had three projects going with deadlines coming and it was given another completely new project to work on.  He was so intent on massaging every worry that mango ever had right out and away, paying close attention to the curves.  Then he put his lips to the fruit and gave the skin a little bite.  A little juice came through the skin and after tasting it, he made out with that mango furiously with tongue and teeth like a nervous teenager.  And he was not ashamed.  He ate that mango for the entire duration of my ride, which was about 30 minutes.  This was not because it was an exceptionally large mango or because he was taking his time, because he definitely was not taking his time.  But rather, it was that he scraped with his teeth every little piece of flesh that that mango had to offer.  When we eat mangos around the table, we do the same and then have to go to the bathroom to compose ourselves. 

I went to Puno more than two months ago with Simone.  My host parents drove us to the city but then they went their way and we went ours, which was awesome.  When you are traveling and seeing amazing and incredible things for the first time, there is a completely different experience to be shared if the person you are with is just where you are, seeing everything for the first time.  We got there and the lady at the tour agency told us we had 15 minutes to find something to eat before a bus would pick us up from our hotel room.  So we ran up four flights of surprisingly nice and fashionable stairs for the $50 tour package that we bought, dropped our bags, and bought some chocolates from a lady on the street. 

A gigantic bus drove by and we hopped on as it took us around the narrow streets of the city, searching for its other passengers.  It took us to Syllustani, which was a graveyard used by the Inca and some pre-Incan cultures.  They buried their dead in huge inverted cones.  And as we were walking through these burial towers, a dark storm began to creep over the mountains.   It got cold and dark and eerie.  It began to rain lightly but we were grateful for this because it could not have been more dark and beautifully sinister.  As our bilingual guide was explaining to us the reason for the conical tomb shape, a woman walked up to him within four inches of his face and started snapping pictures of him and his handful of notes that he had to keep his lecture on track.  It was for this reason that Simone and I started laughing uncontrollably.  And this with the combination of a fictional alter-ego that we’d created named Sir Poopfree, our laughter could not be stopped.  I am pretty sure the guide thought we were laughing at him and his accent but this was just not true.  He hated us for the rest of the trip. 

We stepped into an energy center in the middle of a ring of stones and Simone’s headache that had been bothering her went away. Lightning flickered  violently over the mountain ridges surrounding the graveyard and the crazy woman raised her arms to the heavens.  We started laughing again. 

It felt like this was a place of ghosts, but not movie-like ghosts that haunt and scare and make mysterious things happen, but rather ghosts that are just drifting energies of people that have lived before and souls that are waiting to be born into people and dogs and flowers and ants and all sorts of things. 

The bus took us from the graveyard to a small stone house in the middle of wide, expansive fields in which you could really see the breadth of the storm.  A woman there served us a tea made of some kind of root and small puff pastries with clay.  The clay was gray like normal clay but tasted great because the land there was rich in salt.  After taking in the delicious warmth of the tea, I jumped at a chicken and bought a hat.  And the bus took us home.   

 

 

 

 

 

The rain came down in heavy splooshing globs and we scampered through the puddles because when you run, less raindrops are able to land on you.  We jumped into a restaurant and had some coffee, chocolate, and (no joke) a “sandwich de hot dog,” which was a hot dog sliced lengthwise on a hamburger bun.  Our feet were wet and cold and the thing that we wanted most in the world at that moment was a hot footbath.  Actually, a full-body bath would have been nice but we only had the shower with a small lip to catch the water.  However, we did not have anything to plug the drain so we improvised.  Simone, some weeks before, had taken a tangerine to work but had forgotten to eat it.  It had gotten older and less tasty and she didn’t want to throw it away for fear that her family would judge her.  So we plugged our footbath with an old tangerine, and everything in the world was good.    [Picture taken by Simi]The hotel room came with room service and we ordered coca tea while adjusting the rabbit-ear antenna on the television in order to watch a cooking show. 

The next morning, we had a very good bread for breakfast and then jumped onto the bus.  Something very interesting and beautiful about Peru is that every little town has its own customs and its own type of special foods.  They also each have their own type of bread.  The bus took us down to the shores of Lake Titicaca.  The locals say “Titicaca” like it’s written but our tour guide pronounced it “Titihaha” with a back-of-the-throat-loogie-making sound, probably to deter tourists from thinking of boobs and poop. Coincidentally, if you put a mirror underneath the word “boob” it would spell “poop.” 

 

That’s enough of that.

The lake was the end of the world.  Maybe because of its incredible altitude or because of something more myterious, there are no waves on Lake Titicaca.  And certainly because of the altitude, there are no trees. Instead there is a strange and complete silence—a lack of wind through the leaves, and waves on sand, and seagulls caw-cawing.  It is lined with mountaintops in some places, but in others you can see until infinity as if the world were really flat and the only thing ahead was a great waterfall and the depth of forever.  

The boat took us to the floating islands.  They were amazing, and that they could exist and that people could live there all of their lives floating around was also amazing.  However, the tour was a bit like that of a zoo, and as these were actual people, I did not like that very much.  They had some women line up and sing for us in Spanish and Aymara and English.  Then the tour guide explained the physical differences between us.  He said things like “the males think it is sexy when the females have long braids, so they tie these poms to their hair.” After the guide was done with his speech, we had a few extra minutes to go around and buy souvenirs.  I bought a little mobile made out of reeds that reminds me of a poem.  Once, on Third Street while Brianna lay in bed, Neil read to us a poem of the moon and the water until she drifted off to sleep.  And everything in the world was beautiful and we were at home in the lamplight. It reminds me of that moon song. 

I had  a little extra time after buying this, so I went over to talk with one of the people living there.  She was  an actual human, and she told me a little about how she maintains her house and then about her son.  He is studying in the secondary on the mainland.  Every morning and every night, he rows his boat to shore and back, and as it had rained the night before, his jacket was dripping with last nights raindrops on a hook in the sun.  How beautiful it would be to row yourself across Lake Titicaca at sunrise, just to go to class. 

The boat continued on to the real island of Taquile, and we sat on the top of the boat talking about art and what is and what is not.  And then we made some art with a plastic tea cup that was only art because nobody else had done it. 

We were the only ones on top of the boat and I don’t know why.  We laid ourselves down on the deck and took naps under the sun.  I was covering my face with my arms so that I would not get burned but I did not realize that because my arms were up, my shirt went up a little and left a small stripe of skin exposed.  I got burned pretty bad in that one little stripe.   The sound of the water and the warmth was very comforting though, and we arrived after a couple hours and three cups of coca tea. 

The silence of the lake on this island was incredible.  There was no sound of the boat motor, nor were there dogs or birds.  Most haunting was that the shrouded women who lived there whispered when they talked.  And as if it were contagious, we found ourselves whispering too without even thinking about it.  The island is known for making beautiful textiles, some of the best in Peru, and there was a shop filled with these intricate weavings that were as finely knit as t-shirts.  It was a very strange and beautiful old world with terrace fields and little gates made of recycled shoes. For fun, girls got into wheelbarrows and had boys carry them around.

I walked along the stone pathways, people whispering “buenas tardes” to me, and I wanted to live there weaving little bracelets to sell to tourists.  I was actually trying to think of how I could make this possible.  I would spend the day looking at the water and enjoying the sunshine, sipping tea made from spicy roots and things and I would not have a thing in the world to worry about.  Maybe there, I would learn to play the guitar. 

They loaded us onto the boat again and then came the wind and the rain.  It swept dark over the water and I thought of the boy who lived on the floating island who would row his way home in the rain.  When we arrived on the mainland, we skipped under awnings and eaves to get to a little cafe to have some coffee and hot chocolate.  I had a plate of pasta with ham and cantaloupe.  I am not normally in the habit of writing exactly what I had to eat, but this plate of pasta was amazing. 

In the morning, we walked down to the beach and took pictures of the garbage and the market.  My host parents met up with us in Juliaca and we went home.  We stopped the car in a windy carved canyon that I do not remember the name of, but whatever it was, it had no meaning because it was just as beautiful without a name.  There was a herd of sheep drinking from the river below and the ground looked like some nymph had run through the valley throwing flowers from a basket.  They grew right out of the ground without stem or leaf.

 

 

I came home then to the blurry madness of the week before Halloween.  I went to work in the mornings, making bats and spiders and masks with my students, and then in the evenings I went to class and read stories in Spanish.  On Halloween, there was to be a huge party in the restaurant, The Fallen Angel and I was thinking up a costume for the occasion.  I went there to eat and the owner, Andres Zuniga, sat down to talk with me.  He said “would you like to be a model in a fashion show on Halloween?” and I said “Well, hell yes!”  He is a well known designer in Peru but I thought that it would be something small in the little courtyard thing of the restaurant.  But as the week progressed, it began to look more of a big deal than I had imagined. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Other events of this week long festival of fashion were popping up on the news.  And there were posters all around Cusco.  I would go after my class to try on the clothes but every time I went, people were running around shouting into telephones and there was no time.  I met a bunch of models who were also waiting to try on clothes.  It turns out that these models, like the people of the floating islands, thought they are long-legged and beautiful, are just normal people.  Thursday I went to a small fashion show in the Fallen Angel and then danced a little at the after party.  A lot of the people there were “too cool” to dance, so Simone and I skipped out and went to our favorite disco, Roots.  The next night, after class, I went to my friend’s house with Simone and Steffi to make our costumes for the party. They theme was Greek Gods and I was Aeolus, the god of wind.  I had bought some colored powders in the market and some sheets of cotton.  I took it outside and dyed it but the stuff was some really intense color and it stained a very large part of the cement courtyard.  And then there was the trail of dripping color leading to where I left them to dry.  We spent a good hour guiltily trying to scrub the color out of the sidewalk and in the end it didn’t look terrible.  With purple hands, Simone, Efrain, and I went out to an exclusive party at a very fancy place called Izakaya.   [Photos by Simi]

Efrain kept asking me to get an autograph of the girl on the ticket but I never did.  Sorry Efrain.  We danced and danced and then ran through the streets to the other clubs to dance to different songs.  We were running back and forth, losing track of the hours, and then we walked out of a club to find the sun rising in wicked colors over the Plaza de Armas.  I wish you could have seen it.  [photo also by Simi].

I returned home tired in the bus with fingerless gloves and waited on the curb for the bread man, wrapped in my colored linens. 

It was 6:34 or thereabouts when I laid down in bed, And I had class with Yakeline at 8:00.  I woke up late and burned my throat on a hot cup of tea before sprinting to the center of the city to meet her.  It was one of those awesome field trip classes, luckily.  We went to see an archaeologist living in one of the little villages around Cusco.  He has a theory that the Incas and Mayas and Aztecs, and really all of the ancient civilizations sprang from the same mother culture, Atlantis.  His house is actually a museum of similarly carved rocks from many different cultures.  There was an actual shrunken head on the wall. He also had a small pile of what he said was an extraterrestrial rock.  These rocks were supposed to have strange healing powers when placed over a part of the body that needs healing.  I bought one and sent it to Eden.  It’s the little black one with a white stripe.

I climbed a gigantic tree and looked at an old painted church, and then we left.  As soon as I got home, I slammed a burning cup of tea and then ran off to the Hotel Monasterio to try on the clothes that I would be modeling later that day.  The Hotel Monasterio, like its name suggests, used to be a huge monastery, but is now the most expensive and lavish hotel in Cusco.  While I and the rest of the models were waiting to get our clothes, we were served champagne by monks.  Some of the guys were actually models, but others like me were really just guys pulled off of the street.  The shoes were awesome and I really wanted to keep the sweater that some other guy got to wear.  But there were some strange outfits.   Actually, there was just one: a kind of little baby suit that buttons in the crotch to make diaper changing easy.  The real model named Shay from England was selected to wear this down the catwalk because of his muscled legs, but oh he was pissed and did not speak Spanish.   He got over it though.  They slathered makeup on our faces and stretched our hair back into pony tails.  And then it was time to go on. If you’d

 

 

like to see a video of this, you should visit this link and click on “Backstage VNRO.”  You should also look at the other videos because they are interesting.  The music went on blaring and we ate chocolates, waiting to go on down the runway.  I had two outfits to model and everything was fast and awesomely fun.  I was hopping around backstage and smiling, trying to calm some of the other guys down who may have been freaking out a little. “Don’t worry, you’ll do fine,” I said, “Oh hey, did you hear this was going to be printed in Vogue Italia?”  The show was filled with a bunch of important people snapping photos and watching our clothes. [Neither of these two photos are mine]

 

 

 

 

 

 

When it had ended, we all gathered around and cheered.  Simi came back and we hopped around taking photos and eating the little chocolates that they had setting out.

I had not eaten anything for lunch, and breakfast was a burning cup of tea so we went over to one of our favorite restaurants, The Muse, to have some yummy Thai food. We talked to Ivan for a while and then, as it was getting late, we snuck into the back room and put on our costumes.  We painted ourselves in the bathroom and stuck things in our hair and it came out amazing.  Aeolus and Gaia (mother earth).   

We walked out and got a cab and the people in the street were hooing and hawing at us.  We stepped out of the cab, one leg first like famous people and walked into madness.  Dancy music was blasting off of the walls and lights were swirling and dancing around the disco balls.  This was a party for the people of this strange fashion scene and so, every costume was incredible.  There were people mostly nude and people with horns and wings and two-foot high heels (I’m not joking about that). It was completely strange and beautiful and fantastical, as if those

stories of nymphs and satyrs and demons were really true, but they hid themselves from the world of daylight and this was their one night to rock out and dance until they evaporated back into the dawn.  Those are actual bull horns; he had blood dripping down his face when he first put them on.

 

 

The music was awesome and we were alive and we were really here and it was really real.  Some questionable people tried to “borrow us for the night” but we just kept on dancing in the colored light.  And then the song came that sings “I’ve got a feeling that tonight’s gonna be a good night, good good night,” and we screamed it out.  People came up to us with their own costumes and asked to take pictures with us. 

With our little sandals that we’d made from things we’d found in the market, we danced until the sandals were almost nothing.  The night grew deeper and people started either filing out or getting a little more blatant with their wanting to “borrow us” for the night, so we left and walked down the cobbled street for the most part naked.  People whistled and cat-called and gave us high fives.  We stopped off in some other discos looking for good music and the streets were cold, and we were some of the least-dressed people in Cusco that night (apart from the people who were some string and glitter away from being completely nude).

The sun started peeking over the cathedrals and so we hopped in a taxi and went home while birds started chirping and the city was waking up.