“Are Nuns Considered ‘Single Ladies’ or Are They Married to God?” and Other Fantastical Holiday Stories.

I just got a Christmas package filled with all kinds of sweets and cookies and spices and Clif Bars and candles and awesome things.  There was also a picture and two cards that made me cry.  Thank you.

Recently, there have been a lot of things happening at incredible speed and it is almost way too much to take in and then put back down on paper or keyboard. 

One day a while ago while I was picking Steffi up from her house to go out to dinner or something, her family asked me to be part of a huge dance festival in a town three hours outside of Cusco called Acomayo.  Like I always do when someone asks me to do something crazy like this or a fashion show or a side job as a waiter, I said “well sure.”  So we’d been practicing this dance two nights a week and laughing and stomping our feet into the night. When came the day of departure, we waited in the dark street with our bags and the band and their drums.   The bus took us two hours into the night and we arrived in the tinkling rain of Acomayo in the huge old house where Steffi’s host-grandfather grew up.  We practiced a couple of times in the courtyard, which made me nervous because it still wasn’t complete and they were still saying things like “okay, when this happens, you have to do this.  But we’re not going to practice that now.”  In total, I think there were 14 dancers, the band, and a bunch of family members cooking and cleaning to feed the huge mass of people that were now staying in this house.  We sipped some sweet tea after dancing for a while and every now and then, the little grandmother that lived there would walk through the courtyard saying things in Quechua that I could not understand.  We slept on beds that looked as if they were taken from an orphanage from the early 1900s which made me want to jump up from my bed (carefully so as not to break it) and sing “Tomorrow, tomorrow!”

I just went to sleep though, and at five o’clock I was woken up because a thin plaster wall separated me from the street and a band just happened to be passing along, playing as loud as they could.  The springs on my bed were actually shaking.  Once I actually woke up, and everyone put on their costumes, we followed the virgin through town dancing all along the streets.  Every little town in Peru, in addition to having its own specialties and types of bread, has a patron saint and a matron virgin.  I forgot what this virgin’s name was (oops) but everyone was excited and the energy was incredible. 

There were many groups like ours with all manner of costumes with glitter and ribbons and color and masks.  Some demons dancing in the trees were sprinkling us with snow.  Steffi and I were the only gringos there and so everyone else who was not used to our presence would point and smile and yell “Mira los gringos” (Look at those gringos!).   

We danced in front of the little church to greet the Virgin and then relaxed for a good part of the day in the grass.  Something strange about most Peruvians is that they have a deathly fear of frogs and toads.  Maybe this is just ridiculous to me, as I spent most my childhood summers catching frogs in the pond and lifting up rocks to find salamanders and things.  There was a small toad resting in the grass near us, and when they found it, the whole company of dancers began jumping about screaming in terror.  I clamly picked it up and moved it to another spot while they looked at me as if I was a madman protecting them from a dragon, but since I was a madman, they may have needed protection from me later. 

We moved on to the amphitheatre that is sometimes used for bullfights and sometimes used for dances, and we did our jig to the cheers of the crowd.  The sun went down and the rain came in tinkly flecks and so we carried our cases of cervezas in a colorful snaking chain through the night, singing and dancing just because.  There were fireworks and flaming coffins in the plaza and we stomped our feet to the music blaring through the entire city, paying no mind to the rain.

The next day, we returned to the church and danced, and then again to the big amphitheatre.  Somehow, this time we had twice as much energy and our shouts were a little louder, all the words were right, and we jumped at each other like it was for real and we really were in love.  The guy on the loudspeaker yelled out “Look!  Even our foreign friends have come out to celebrate with us!  Bienvenidos a los gringitos!”  We stomped in formation through the street and went to a big house where some family friends were dancing.  They had a huge band with all kinds of instruments and every time someone gave us a case of beer as a gift (which was surprisingly often) the band would strike up a happy tune and we’d cheer and throw our hats.    

The big band began to play a song that we knew.  We didn’t know what it was but we knew that we knew it, maybe even from a past life, and so we danced with every drop of energy we had.  And then came the rain, hard and sunny and hail-filled.  The house had an open courtyard but we were dancing dryly under the awning and the rain came down with an incredible weight onto the tin roof, making a sparkling curtain of water that tinkled percussion to the music on the chairs and bottles.  We had been practicing and dancing only for that beautiful rain and in that moment we knew we were alive. 

I no longer teach art and English at General Ollanta.  This is because the seasons here are the opposite of the north and they are now on their summer break.  In the final days of my work, I developed a project to raise some money for the school because they do not have many materials, and in the extreme case of the second grade, they do not have pencils, paper, scissors, nor professor.  Really, their professor walked out one day and never came back until the goodbye ceremony to get some free cake.  Thus, they were a bunch of tiny little second graders alone in a classroom for a month and a half without learning anything. They would hit each other with rolls of paper and sometimes chairs and broomsticks.  They would throw broken glass at one another because that is what was readily available.  Anyway, I made this project with my students and with my prof. Viviana to make little Christmas cards to sell in the plaza.  The kids drew pictures on little pieces of cardboard, and then I cut out the cards and filling paper and spent three long days after returning from Acomayo, gluing them all together with the help of Simone, Efrain, and Benjamine.  I had just finished putting all of the cards together when I found myself on a chilly night bus to Bolivia with Simone.   We embarked on an epic, week-long, very loosely planned vacation. 

We’d been planning to go but it was still a little serendipitous when she called and said that we could get a bus that very night.  And I still had to teach art in another private school, run around the city, sell cards to Centro Tinku, make a shirt, buy shampoo and toothpaste, pack a rucksack, and have a quick coffee with Steffi in the cafe around the corner.  I also had to go to the immigration office and make everything right with my passport, whose days of legality had expired nearly a month before. 

Nevertheless, we were ready on time with our bags packed for a week and some banana snacks for the road.  The feeling of just taking off on some wild adventure is wonderful.  I had that feeling when coming to Peru and also when we would show up to school at 5:30 to go to Stratford, Canada with Mr. Pryce’s English class.  We were sure that we wouldn’t sleep from the excitement but as the bus curved through the nighttime mountains, we drifted off dreaming in our seats. 

We woke up with foggy eyes to this huge, expansive plain where the only things moving other than our bus were the sheep and the clouds.  And then the bus pulled over and the driver kicked us out.  We crammed ourselves into a tiny broken van with other travelers from England, Ireland, and Argentina.  Argentineans speak in a Spanish that has such a strong accent, it is almost unrecognizable.  Instead of “yo” they said “jo” and instead of “alla” they said “aja.”  But they were nice. 

Because of the bad relationships that the United States has with almost every country in the world, and because I am from these United States, I had  to pay $135 to get into Bolivia.  Everyone else was from some other country, and so I was that guy holding everyone up for fifteen minutes while the border control took their time looking over my paperwork.  I still love the U.S. but that was really expensive.  The van carried us on to Copacabana, Bolivia, the city of psycho hippies.  Simi and I bought some dried figs in the street and then found ourselves a hotel near the small center of the city. 

We arrived in the morning and the boat left for the Island of the Sun at 1:30 or something, so we had some time to kill.  We rested in the hotel for a bit but when the window flew open with a loud bang and the shower came on all by itself, we realized that we were in the presence of a dirty ghost who wanted some privacy.  So we left it to shower in peace and went out in search of adventure.  There was a small mountain overlooking the city and from the street we could see crosses growing out of the rock.  We climbed just to see what was up there.  We moved slowly over rocks and steep ledges and wondered, if those crosses were really a cemetery like the looked, how it was that the bodies and coffins were transported up such a steep and jagged mountain.  We found some piglets sleeping on a flat part and considered killing one of them 1) because then they would have been three little pigs and 2) because good bacon is very hard to find in Peru and were missing that crispy goodness hardcore.

We ended up leaving them to rest because such business would have been very messy, and we soon came to a little cave dented into the side of the mountain.  The view of the quiet city was marvelous and because of that we marveled at it wishing we could never leave that moment.  There was a little alcove that looked as if it were made specifically for presenting offerings to the Pachamama.  Water dripped out of a little crack and there was suddenly an explosion of green among this vastness of dry rock.  I didn’t have any rocks or coca leaves with me, which are the normal offering, so I folded a piece of paper into a crane and left that in thanks. 

We made our way up and the view was incredible.  However, once we reached high enough to be able to see the other side, we realized that that side of the little mountain had been used for years as a giant rocky trash can.  We also learned that there was a very nice stone path on the opposite corner.  Oops.  People would go up to the mountain and there they would buy little toy trucks or wads of fake money to put on their loved ones’ graves and then burn them.  While doing this, they would  drink a lot of Cusqueña beer and then throw the bottle off the mountain, crashing down into a huge pile on a ledge. 

 

  

 

We hurried back down because we wanted to eat something before our trip to the Isla del Sol.  And after collecting some strange pinecones and finding some nice graffiti on a wall, we went to a little hippie restaurant on the main road.  It was tiny and smelled like good food and incense, which is what home on Third Street smelled like.  They were playing a cd, that would later become the soundtrack to the trip, by the band Narcotango.  We ate our delicious food and looked around at all the strange lamps and dangly things and candle holders shaped like faces. 

Simone and I walked down to the docks at our 1:00 boarding time to find that there was nobody there.  We eventually found a guy and asked him where the boat was.  He told us that they had already left because it was now 2:00 as we had crossed a time zone when crossing the Bolivian border.  We walked back up the street in shame like those tourists that don’t know anything about the country they are in, because we were those tourists.  We poked around in some shops, looking through sweaters and hats and jewelry.  In one jewelry shop, we found a tiny white cat named Gandalf.  Look at how cute he is climbing that backpack!

We passed a building on the corner that had a sign taped to the window reading “Best coffee in town” and so we went in to test it. It was actually the best coffee in town.  The shop was run by a guy from Ireland or something and his wife from Venezuela or something.  They had cardamom coffee so I drank one of those with a hot bowl of porridge and it was delicious.  They also sold imported Nepalese paper products and Simone bought a journal made of paper in the exact colors that we associate with Peru, (yellow and blue).  Actually, we associate South America with various combinations of color.  One of them is yellow and light blue, another is orange and the same light blue, and yet another is purple and teal. 

As the sun went down, we walked back down to the docks and watched the sky.  It was a great burning colorful horizon and we watched it reflect in Lake Titicaca, shivering in the cold of coming night at 12,500 feet.  We met a Spanish traveler on the shore and talked with him for a while before returning to the warmth of the city.  Simi got a beaded braid put in her hair and we talked to a Bolivian guy for a while, but we were still tired from our journey the night before and from being kicked out of our room by that dirty ghost, so we went to bed. 

The next morning, we got an early start and went to the island at 9:00.  The water was beautiful crystal and we found ourselves a nice sandy beach, but no one was swimming.  Yes, the water was cold but no colder that the waters of Lake Superior.  We didn’t have time to swim anyway so we just spun around in the sand while some local kids looked at us like we were crazy.   Simi’s guide book said that on this island we could find the sacred rock where the great creator sent down Manco Capac and Mama Ocllo to find a place to start the Inca empire.  It said that this rock was probably the most spiritually important sites for the Inca people.  As we walked down a trail, a woman yelled to us, “roca sagrada! roca sagrada!”  Something funny about some people in the Andes is that when you ask them where something is, they respond with “alla no mas” which means “over there” or “that way.”  While trying to find our specific bus among nearly 20 similar looking giant busses, we asked the ticket taker where ours was and he pointed in the direction of all the busses and said “alla no mas.”  The same when we tried to ask our way through the maze of fields and little adobe houses to get to this sacred rock.  It turned out to be a rock in the middle of a field.  There were crops actually planted right next to it and I imagined some tired farmer leaning on it with his basket of potatoes after spending several hours hunched over, plucking them from the ground.  He may have even peed there hoping that the rock would hide him from the view of the ladies in the community. 

Another strange thing about Peru is that it is not only common, but absolutely normal to pee in the street.  And when I say pee in the street, I mean that they are facing the street filled with passing cars when they do it.  Once I saw a woman kneeling down holding her young son’s penis as he peed into the Avenida de la Cultura.  I wished that I’d had my camera to capture the smile on her face because she looked like an advertisement for public urination that you might find in a parenting magazine.  Another time, and I am not lying, I saw a man peeing on the street while rinsing his hands off in the stream. 

Anyway, we continued on the trail to some ruins.  I went down a small covered passageway and followed it through a kind of cave to a place that was not open to tourists.  I couldn’t hear anybody talking, nor could I see anyone and for a few moments, I was lost in ancient corridors covered in moss and lichens.  I eventually found my way out, and because we were naive, we decided to take a hike all the way across the island.   Just like Taquile, it was silent and still, and we could see out until forever.  However, it was at an incredible altitude and at times it was hard to breathe.  And we did not realize that this hike was one that normally took five hours.  The sun made us sweat and then the wind from the wide open water swept through our bones and took what little breath we had away.  Still, we climbed the rocky trail.  There were ruins speckled here and there and we stopped often to take a break and drink some water.  But we had to hurry because we only had four hours.  Near the end, we were running along the trail.  The boat was about to take off from the island and we were the last ones, still at the top of the island.  I jumped the stairs three at a time yelling “ESPERA! ESPERA!”  We made it, but just barely, and very much out of breath.  Once we landed on the main shore, we had to run up to the plaza to catch our bus to La Paz.

The bus rode along in the night and just as everyone had drifted off to sleep despite the loud and horrible Sylvester Stallone movie that was playing, the driver pulled over and said, “Everyone off!  We’re getting on a boat.”  So we confusedly got off and the bus drove onto a rickety wooden raft and took off down a dark river, carrying with it all of our belongings.  We had to buy a ticket to get on a little dingy that would take us to the other side.  The bus on the raft was drifting away and it made me very nervous but the stars that night were brilliant fiery ancient lamps that reflected in the ripples. 

The barge with the bus and the baggage eventually made it to the other side and we got back on and rode it all the way through the dark to La Paz, Bolivia.  Those silly Argentineans were with us and we followed them to a trusted hostel that they knew.  We got a room and then found a late-nite diner that served us some sort of cat’s meat spaghetti.  By that I mean that the meat was cat, not that it was meat one would find in cat food.  Whatever it was, we ate it.  And then while walking home, a crazy fellow (who looked like a mix of Johnny Depp and the young version of Dracula from Francis Ford Coppola’s version of the legend) came up very close behind Simone and meowed.  It was such a legitimate meow that for a moment, before we saw him, we thought that it was some poor down-on-his-luck street cat.  Perhaps this cat had just lost his wife and kids to a maniac chef at an all-night diner.  But no, it was a crazy man.  He would back off a little, or move to the other side of the street, and then swoop back and meow anew. 

In the morning after breakfast we went out on the streets of La Paz under tangled-wire canopies in search of the Witches’ Market.  The streets are knitted together with innumerable and indecipherable tangles of electrical cords and telephone lines.  And that, with the beautiful old buildings, makes you feel like you’ve traveled back to a time when electricity was new and we were all way too occupied and amazed by its possibilities to think about how our fine cities looked.  However, that old-world vision ends when you see two people walking down the street in zebra costumes.  Yes, we saw two people walking down the street in zebra costumes. 

We found the strange street lined with little shops and stands selling all manner of magical spells, oddities, and disgustingly curious things.  Very common in these shops were mummified fetuses of alpacas or horses.  Apparently it was good luck when building a new house for yourself to build into the corner walls a mummified alpaca.  There were also parrot heads and severed claws of some large rodent.  I bought some charms, a couple little tinctures of love potion and, since they were all out of Powder of Dead Woman, a little bit of harmony powder.  Some of the boxes had things printed on them like “New and improved formula!” or “Now with more curse-protection power!” 

 

 

 

 

 

Afterward, we bumbled around the city looking at really awesome feminist graffiti and eating chocolate covered grapes from the fair.  La  Paz is a gigantic hole in the ground, and to get out or in, you have to corkscrew your way around the mountainous walls.  And this fair has down in the bottom of the pit where everyone dressed like superfly gangsters and clambered around the little tents to buy little animal figurines and living plants with which to decorate their nativity set. We found a cozy little German restaurant to have a piece of cake before going to bed. 

We had wanted to take the night bus all the way to Arequipa and have the whole day to spend there, but since the border closed at night, we had to wait until morning to take off.  We spent eleven hours that day driving down the curly roads in a rickety bus.  The window in our seat was broken out and so we had some very nice flapping plastic to replace it.  There was, however, a very nice and large window in the bathroom (whose door would not shut) and when you used it, you had a wonderful view, as did the people watching the bus pass from the street.  It worked though, and we got to Arequipa without any surprise boat trips or anything like that. And below our hostel was a tiny little Kebab shop that had excellent food and Turkish coffee.  I almost got chills because it tasted so good, and then I read my fortune in the grounds. 

Arequipa is one of the wealthiest cities in Peru.  All of the buildings are made of a white stone taken from the nearby volcano and everything is nice and clean.  Taxi drivers actually have little identification cards inside their very nice cars, as opposed to the random cars from the 70’s that people stick batman-shaped stickers to that say “Taxi” like here in Cusco.  We were very surprised at its niceness.

I am not sure how it started—maybe it was the ice cream, or maybe the cathedral—but in Arequipa we were completely mad.  I was eating an ice cream cone and someone asked me if I would like to have lunch in their restaurant.  And in response, I kind of waved my cone at the man and said “but we’re eating ice cream.” I guess it is not that funny if you weren’t there but at the time, we almost puked up our swirl cones.  It talked in our guide books of a huge convent that was like a walled city within the city, Santa Catalina.  Simone and I went around the city looking for that convent and getting distracted by antique shops with real suits of armor. 

We walked into several cathedrals looking for this city of nuns but none of them were the right cathedrals.  In one of them, there was a beam of shining light coming down from a hole in the little rotunda thing.  Simone took a picture of me in that beam of light and when it showed up on her little camera screen we realized that it was one of the most awesome photos ever.  We were already giddy from the ice cream and when we saw that picture, it was incredibly hard to hold back our laughter.  We decided it would be best to get the hell out of that church so as not to offend any praying Peruvians.   But on the way out, a woman was selling colored candles and we could not resist.  We bought two for 20 cents and then went back inside to light them.  Simone’s candle started shooting out little sparks and I lost it.  We were laughing so hard, trying to hold it back, that it really looked like we were crying.  We thought, well why not just go with it?  So we hugged each other and kept on crying with laughter while people looked at us and thought, “oh, those poor gringos.”

We eventually found the Santa Catalina complex and went on in, sore from laughter, which is the best kind of sore there is. The walls of the little city are painted with natural earth dyes of such brilliant colors that it is almost too much for the eye to take in.  It is for this reason that I have about 300 pictures of walls.  But what could be more beautiful? 

 

 

 

 

We walked through the rouge streets and blue rooms taking pictures and giggling at nothing and everything.  As we passed one of the few rooms still inhabited by the nuns, the sweet sounds of the song “Single Ladies” by Beyonce, came blaring through the closed window shade.  Oh, those nuns and their hip hop.  And so was posed the question: Are nuns really single ladies or are they married to God? You can mail your answers to Calle Kiskapata, Urb. San Blas, Cusco Peru. 

We spent most of the day walking around the streets and hallways and when we left, we were dead tired from laughing so much.  We went to bed early that night after a Turkish coffee and some kebab and we set our alarms for 1:00 am because we had purchased tickets to a Colca Canyon tour that would take us by bus at 2:00 in the morning.  As you can probably guess, we did not get up when the alarm went off.  But what could we do? We were deep into the mysterious processes of sleep.  But when we heard that Peruvian banging on our hotel door, we slammed all of our things into random bags and packed all of our stuff, fell down the stairs and then stumbled, still kind of dreaming, onto the bus.  We had left our heavy backpacks with the front desk of the hotel and only took a little bag of necessities.  However, because we were in such a hurry, throwing whathaveyou into wherehaveyou, we had a bag full of completely random and useless things.  A battery charger, a bag of wet clothing, a toothbrush, a map of La Paz, and some pomegranates.  The pomegranates were actually very useful. 

The bus ride was really bumpy and a polish girl puked in a bag while some Americans complained that, because of this bus ride, they were never coming back to South America.  Yes, it was bumpy, but not that bumpy.  And the view was amazing. The world spread out below in tiny little fields and fissures of the broken earth.  The Colca Canyon is actually directly on a fault line and there is a little pueblo in its midst that is sinking about two centimeters every year.  You can see actual cracks in the earth where the rumbling broke it like a china tea pot. 

The guide showed us some ancient tombs, wedged impossibly in the sheer rock wall, of kings and men of another world.  Then the bus took us to a lookout point where we were supposed to see the sacred condor flying through the canyon.  However, we knew better.  There are very few of these gigantic birds still in existence and we were in a place paved especially for busses of hopeful tourists.  Of course we were not going to get to see that condor.  So we dug from our bag the pomegranates that we had hastily stuffed in there.  Oh, that pomegranate was delicious and pink.  We had been making funny tired faces into the camera and digging out a few little worms from one of the pomegranates when the tour bus got ready to leave. And as soon as we got into that bus the driver, who was looking into his rear-view mirror, yelled “Condor! Condor!” and the massive raptor swooped right by our window. 

That night, we had front row seats on the upper level of a huge bus that took us swooping through the night to the desert city of Ica.  The window that we had was so huge and open that it really felt like we were flying through the black.  Ica was not actually our true destination, but Huacachina.  It is a tiny little mirage of a lagoon lined by palm trees,sleeping in the sunshine among towering sand dunes.  Everything there is coated in a thin and imperceptible layer of dusty sand.  It coats your skin and you don’t even notice until you scratch a mosquito bite and find grains of sand beneath your fingernails. 

Legend says that there was once a beautiful native princess bathing herself under the desert moon.  But when she found a young hunter spying upon her from the darkness, she fled dropping her mirror into the sand, which became the calm waters of the lagoon.  Her linen, swirling in the night as she ran away, became the sweeping dunes. 

We spent most of our two days there lying around the pool of our hostel, playing with the parrots, and writing in our journals.  There was a sweet little restaurant in someone’s backyard with kittens that looked like really cute Egyptian gods.  Simi and I walked around the waters in a dreamy haze and only reluctantly made an effort to do something productive (travelwise) and try sand boarding.  Once, we came upon a couple of lovers making out behind a palm tree and Simone’s reaction was to yell “OOPS!” and them and then run away.  As we were sitting in the sun near the water, we noticed a boy in the pool resting his head on the side and secretly staring between the legs of a sunbathing woman.  Yes, I have a pretty awesome picture.                   But what else is a teenage boy to do?

The bus came to get us on the second night to take us back to Cusco.  It was a couple hours late and the people in the bus station accidentally put our luggage on a bus headed for a very-far-away city.  Luckily, I noticed as the other bus was pulling out of the parking spot and the ticket taker ran after the bus waving his hands like a madman to retrieve our things.  In Peru, you can’t call the company and expect them to apologize for the mix-up and deliver your things to your house like an airport.  If your luggage gets on another bus, all you can do is hope that it has a good vacation without you. 

The bus ride was long and passed through entire worlds.  We fell asleep on the hot sandy desert roads and when I woke up, the sun was rising over a strange icy mountainous world where only the tough-hearted could survive the chill.  It was blue and far away and cold like I would imagine Pluto to be.  But as everyone was sleeping and I was staring out the window in wonder, the solitude felt beautiful and cold like I could never be alone because even here, even in this barren landscape, people lived every day of their lives. 

The bus passed through little mountain villages and then went down to the warm tropical depths of splendor, passing the turquoise river that would one month later fill with rain tear down bridges and houses, leaving whole cities homeless.  When we got back to Cusco, I didn’t recognize it.  In the week that we had been in other parts, the rain had turned the mountainsides from a burned grassy brown to deep deep green.  I even told a girl next to me that the bus would arrive very late because we were nowhere near our destination.  But there we were in rainy Cusco with its beautiful and unexplainable energy.  I don’t know how I will leave.

And now for the holiday.  The day of Christmas Eve, the Plaza de Armas is filled with hundreds of artisans and thousands of people looking to buy their art.  Instead of decorating Christmas trees here, since the tree is not native to this part of the world, the people celebrate the birth of Christ by setting up an extravagant nativity in their house that can sometimes take up a corner of a room, or that can sometimes occupy a room entirely.  All of these artists in the plaza were selling little animal figurines and three wise men, and people from the jungle made the journey to Cusco to sell clumps of strange living mosses and vines with which to decorate the little mountain upon which the baby Jesus figurine was placed.    I went with my host family and we fought our way through the crowds, picking out little cats and goats.  And then we all went home and decorated the nativity together.  I didn’t really know what to do or how it should look so I hung a bunch of butterflies from the ceiling. My family is one of the few that do have a Christmas tree just because they have foreign students that stay with them. 

That night, all of the family—aunts, uncles, cousins, and friends—gathered together in the house and we had a dinner of stuffed pork and champagne.  At midnight, kind of like New Year’s Eve, we all ran out into the street and lit fireworks, screaming and dancing.  There are not really gifts exchanged here.  The celebration is more a time of being together and hanging out.  However, although they very much included me in everything and honestly tried their hardest to make me feel at home, it was still very strange.  I missed everyone very much, and I especially missed shrimp and veggie dip.  I could not call anyone because all of the international phone cards were not working that night, probably because everyone who was in some foreign country was trying to call home.  And there were no places open where I could use the internet.  But it was fine.  I got through it. 

The week in between Christmas and New Year’s Eve I was extremely busy.  Andres, the owner of the Fallen Angel, asked me to work there as a waiter because hundreds of people were coming from Lima to celebrate the new year in Cusco and it would be extremely busy.  Fernando and I worked from 3pm until 2am  every night and I would go home and sleep until one in the afternoon when I had to leave again to go to work.  It was a lot and I am really glad that I am no longer working there but it was also very fun.  I met a lot of people from all over the world and got to practice my Spanish.  People would always say “Where are you from?  You speak perfect Spanish! Good for you!” 

The Fallen Angel had a New Year’s party of complete madness.  It was Chinese themed and everyone that came had to come dressed as a dragon.  They had painted people dancing on boxes and hanging from the ceiling.  And at midnight, they ran around the Plaza de Nazarenas in a giant Chinese paper dragon, everyone with golden wings and a bottle of champagne. 

I, however, had other plans.  Simone, Steffi, Teresa, and I met in Simone’s apartment up in the artist district of San Blas and we made chocolate fondue. Actually, they made the chocolate fondue and I worked at the party until 11:30, when I ran down streets and up stairs to make it in time.  Once I got there, I slammed a bunch of chocolate in my face, grabbed my grapes, champagne, and yellow underwear, and we all went down to the Plaza de Armas.  Here in Peru, the custom for the new year is to eat 12 grapes, one for each month of the coming year.  Also, you have to wear yellow underwear and run around the plaza.  I am not sure why this is, maybe something about good luck, but whatever it means, it is an awesome tradition.  We counted down the seconds in Spanish and as midnight struck, the plaza exploded in fireworks and music and screams of joy.  We ran around the plaza with thousands of people in a huge and dangerous river of stomping feet and champagne foam.  It was pure and beautiful madness. 

The next day as I was walking to work at 2:30 in the afternoon, I found a kid passed out on the sidewalk of a busy streets with his pants half-way down and his yellow underwear showing.  OOPS.