Machu Picchu

Where do I start. Hmmm well as we´re traveling with now 5 other artensanos, our plans have been delayed...only to be delayed and delayed again, which turned out wasn´t so bad because I got sick again! I´ve been eating basically only fruit for the past few days until recently when I dared to eat meat and started feeling better. Its a gamble, do I want to feel really sick to the stomach... or really really weak from eating pears for days on end. But anyway hopefully that was the end of the sickyness. So we spent a few more days hanging out playing guitar in Cuzco, and then a crazy crazy day traveling here to Machu Picchu. It was beautiful and spectacular and awful.
We took the long crazy nuts cheap way through little towns perched on the cliffs of the Andes. Vertical farms, waterfall crossings, four meter wide roads under construction, backing up on the four meter wide road to let other busses pass kind of nuts. So that was all day. But then we got here and it felt so wonderful to be in the woods again and I can´t really imagine a more beautiful woods to be in. We walked about an hour along the train tracks towards the town, Aguas Calientes but ended up staying in a hostal along the way because I was feeling really really sick and weak and awful. Our friends had gone ahead at that point and we were walking with a Canadian girl who had been a year studying in Equador.
The next day we slept in and went to go look for our people and miraculously found them camped out by the river. The river has these huge huge white rocks all through it and a strong current. The places where it becomes waterfalls are beautiful and the mountains behind in contrast is quite a sight. So yeah we just sat around relaxing on the main plaza, drinking mate, playing cards, meeting a whole bunch of other travelers. This was yesterday...but it seems like longer ago... So last night there was a huge celebration in the town for the virgin Carmen? I think? It wasn´t too clear but there was dancing and really loud brass bands through the night...and this morning...and right now... Yessirree so we´re going to camp out tonight and head up to Machu Picchu early tomorrow morning, and make our way back to Cuzco tomorrow night. Then we´ll head down to the Atacama desert in Chile and then back to Cordoba! And then home!! Our goal is to arrive in Cordoba on the 25th and we´ll stay a few days on our friends ranch (with horses!) in the countryside, a few days with Cristina and the family in Cordoba and then fly back on the 31st! Oh yeah and there are banana, avacado, and papaya trees that you can pick fruit off of and eat! Whenever you want! For freee!!! Oh and Machu Picchu means big mountain.

Blog writing sucks

Alright well that really really sucked. I just spent all morning writing a really detailed account of everthing we had been doing but it turned out that Noah was signed into his google account when I tried to post it so everything got deleted. So sorry everyone. I´m not about to spend another three hours rewritting that because I´m really frustrated but basically

La Paz
July 3
.lots of markets, fruit venders, veggie venders, padlock venders, touristy venders, llama fetus venders
.overwhelming and beautiful
.had tea with this funny old lady who made us coca tea and talked to us for a while about how much she hates her dead sister and them peruvians
July 4
.picked a mountain and decided to walk towards it to get a view of the city
.walked through the central government plaza where there were a lot of cute kids being really uncoordinated
.walked through all the houses perched on the mountain
.600 winding steps until the base of the mountain
.saw a macaw parrot, a bunny, lots of dogs, and a duck
.had picnic, macramae, and reading material
.beautiful beautiful beautiful
.decided to go to the top top before the sun went down, noticed that a lot of the grass and bushes were burned
.at the top really sketchy broken down houses, no people, lots of trash, and immediately the dogs started freaking out at us
.wicked bad vibes, turned around right away but the dogs didn´t stop barking
.three young teenages boys started following us down, setting the path on fire as they went
.we were really freaked out, really feeling that we´d pushed our luck and starting to feel more like the dogs were trying to warn us to stay away rather than to be protective
.got down the mountain as quickly as we could which took a long time because all the rocks were loose and steep
.went to an internet cafe and found out if was fourth of July, went out to a Mexican place with some friends that we had met from California, really really good

July 5
.packed up our stuff to go to Copacabana and Lake Titicaca and ran into Sarah and Ana and her Cordobese boyfriend from my study abroad program, how cool
.so we spent a few hours with them and then went on
.Lake Titicaca is the most beautiful place I´ve ever been in my life
.stayed in a really sweet hostel on the shore, 10 minute walk from town
.we had our own cabin, bathroom, and shared kitchen for 2.80 dollars a night
.with the three other people staying there, an argentinian girl and two french guys we went to go find some wood for a fire
.amazing beautiful night sky, felt so round and encompasing
.one clear clear planet reflecting off the lake, and the milky way was stunning
.the wood we picked up was Eucalyptus so our fire smelled amazing
.Madu (the french guy) had a saxaphone, a sitar like instrument, this box thing that makes "om" sounds, and a charrango so we played a lot of music
.according to Madu Lake Titicaca is the earth´s 7th chakrah, which if i did believe that the earth is a living being would seem totally accurate, it was really really beautiful which is saying something because I dont even like water, Madu is also one of the funniest people we have ever met, he traveled for 6 years in India and wears really funny wrap around clothes, also he doesn´t walk, he prances.

July 6
.i got really really sick from an empanada that i ate in La Paz, was really sick all day
.read a lot, ate papaya and yogurt
.at night asked about going to the hospital, the woman at the hostel made me an herbal remedy instead which tasted like cilantro
.then gave me a small mug of melted spiced chocolate (clearly she´s read Harry Potter, or has seen Princess Bride)
.i felt completely better after that miraculously
.that night Noah got sick

July 7
.apparently papaya and yogurt together make your body flush everything, good to know
.chilled out the rest of the day but Noah was feeling way better by that evening cause he has a kick ass immune system
. we went to this hostel called "Sol y Luna" which we heard was really cool
. it was this Hare Krishna guy´s birthday (I still don´t know his name) and there were about 10 of us (two little kids)
.by the way there are a ton of Hare Krishna people here, there are also randomly a ton of fried chicken places
.the food was really good, home made wheat bread with humus and cake with roses petals and nuts
.everyone was really wierd like trying to be really cool and relaxed with everthing but really just so hilariously serious about everthing needing to be "chill"
.the Hare Krishna guy was the funniest, he was so up tight about being relaxed!
. we were playing music cause we had brought our guitar and he kept making everyone stop if someone who didn´t know that much about music was trying to join in, including the kids which was really funny cause they were just trying to keep rythem with the drums but didn´t really get it yet and he kept getting so mad hahaa
. it was really silly and he just could not handle anyone playing anything other than a really slow reggae beat, he just completely lost it
.i really wanted dumbledore to come in and say something really awesome and ridiculous
.then the Hare Krishna guy asked everyone to pass around an invisible key and unlock a door to whatever
. everyone said stuff like, i´m unlocking the door to...LOVE! or PEACE!
.we figured out that it was probably because since in Amherst we´re the children of hippies when you say something like "I´m unlocking the door to love" like you´re saying something really profound, its a bit like, ummm yess goood one, loovee
.it was simply ridiculous and i vow never to take myself so seriously
.i just hope it doesn´t have too much impact on the kids...

July 8
.got up early to go to the isla del sol
.INCREDIBLE, i´ve never seen nature be so sureal
.crazy colors on all sides, and the crazy pushing pulling high atitude feeling made it a nuts experience
.wow
.surrounded on all sides by the beautiful waters which had long white and black streaks of water, poofy white clouds with snow capped mountains on one side, colorful rocks jutting up out of the water on the other
.and the atitude is just crazy, its like the sky is pulling, sucking, and pushing all at the same time, no wonder the incans thought the gods were angry and wanted more blood
.we´d be walking and suddenly everthing was bright white rock, or red rocks, completely orange, yellow, even at one point turqoise
.beautiful beautiful beautiful
.saw a bunch of ruins, sacred rock "shaped like a crouching puma" where they did a lot of child sacrificing
.legond is that the sun was born on la isla del sol and then ordered that the first Incas be born
.original name Titi´kharka which means Puma Rock but the spanish heard as Titicaca
.BEAUTIFUL!! AND CRAZY LOOKING!
.bolivians have been really manipulative and never rest from trying to trick us into giving them more and more and more and more money
.ok then we just had a quiet night reading and stuff

July 9
.ran into Emiliano and this guy Rama that he´s traveling with and so we all bought tickets to Puno, Peru together also with two of the other people staying in our hostel and two of their friends, together we are five nationalities
.our party of eight got into Puno and decided to go see the floating islands in Lake Titicaca
.always see that stuff in national geographic but it was wicked cool to go into their houses and really be there
.basically the Incans came and a bunch of people fled to the lake in reed boats with their families but every eight months about the reeds would start to deteriorate and so they would just put more and more reeds on top
.their boats got bigger and bigger until they were more like small islands, then families started sharing boat/islands and yeah that´s what went down
.the ground felt like Kidsports
.went out to dinner, 4 soles each (1.50 dollars) for soup, pasta with meat sauce, tea, and really good "i have no idea what this is" desert
.got to Cuzco at 4 oclock this morning
.showered for the first time since Argentina
.wrote this blog for four and a half hours!

I just wrote a really long thing about what I´ve been doing for the last three hours and it didn´t work. Blahhh

Woops Cochabamba

I´m writing from an internet cafe in Cochabamba, the second biggest city in Bolivia. The title, second biggest sounds daunting but it´s a beautiful, lively, and sunny city. For those of you who have been to Argentina, my impression of Cochabamba has been a combination of Salta, Cordoba, and beautiful Bolivia. But I should start at the begining. How did we end up in Cochabamba, good question. Well we headed up north from Salta to Humahuaca, a pretty little town in the mountains with cobblestone streets a very sweet comfortable energy. I loved it there but we only stayed two days before heading up to the Bolivian border. As predicted, crossing the border was a pain and the border towns were really intensly depressed and a bit overwhelming. That night we headed up to Tupiza where we didn´t do much, met some cool people and pretty much just figured out a little bit more of our trip, walked around, playing music, reading and such. We were going to go to the Uyuni salt flats from Tupiza but the tours were really really expensive. So we decided not to do it and just go to the salt flats for free in the US. Not wanting to spend another day in Tupiza, we went right to the bus station to buy a ticket heading northward. So somehow we got the name Cochabama in our heads, thinking that our friend Caro had strongly suggested we go there and probably cause it´s just such a cool name. But the only bus going to Cochabamba was leaving in 20 minutes! So we ran back to the hostel, through all of our stuff into our bags, left a note for our friend and were off!! It wasn´t until hours later, deep into the Bolivian countryside that we realized that in fact Cochabamba was not the place Caro had suggested at all and that the bus ride was going to be 14 hours! Oy and Haa!! How ridiculous, but I dunno, even then it just felt like the right thing to do, it´s pretty much on the way to La Paz anyway. Somehow we didn´t freak out, probably cause it was so ridiculous, it was just too funny.
So yeah! Cochabamba Cochabamba!! The altitude hasn´t been effecting us too much and the sunshine here is beautiful. Oh man and also all of our bus rides have been georgous georgous georgous. I love mountains I really do. I don´t think I´ll be able to post pictures til I get back to Cordoba but man, the scenery here is incredible. Even the city is picturesque with colorful buses, clothes, and fruit. This morning we bought the biggest avacado I´ve ever seen, a papaya, a pineapple and some bread for breakfast. We sat in the sun, watching this little kid play with a bag of peanut shells and started feeling very very content in Bolivia. Oh yeah and also I was taking a picture of a bunch of enormous fruit and the lady selling them got really mad at me and threatened to through a papaya at me and then started laughing. It was pretty funny but they definitely weren´t happy about us being there. She was kidding... only kind of. But mostly people have been pretty nice to us. We have been ripped off but it´s not too bad cause it´s only a matter of cents to us so I go back and forth, getting pissed off about getting ripped off or not. Ok well well well, I suspose thats it! Lots and lots of hugs and kisses from me and Noah!

And so it starts again...

I will blog more often!! This last month or so I found a great group of people in Cordoba and a great music scene and there never seemed to be time to write. So basically I'm doing really great. I finished up my classes and finals on Thursday and came out here to Salta on Friday night to meet up with Noah and Mary Alice who had arrived in Salta a few days before from Talampaya. It's a beautiful city with gorgeous old buildings, orange trees, and cobblestone streets in the area around the central plaza. Today we watched the England/Germany game at our favorite empanada place and then met up with my friend Patricia from Cordoba who's doing some work up here in Salta for a few days. (And Noah's spanish is getting so much better!) After spending some time trying to tackle Noah's college stuff, we went out to a cafe on the plaza to watch the Argentina/Mexico game. Absolutely nuts. I hope you guys were all watching because it was a really intense game and Argentina totally kicked some butt. And how weird, a guy from Wales who was living one block away from me in Cordoba had just arrived in Salta today and happened to be watching the game in the same cafe as us! It gets better, we randomly ran into my friends Lola, Alex, and Sebastian from France and Belgium on the plaza! I had left them about a month ago when we all went to Talampaya and they had just taken a really long time traveling northward, only arriving today in Salta. Then we went to the feria artesenal and I bought myself some really nice nice silver earings with turquoise stones and now we´re about to go with Mary Alice to the bus terminal. Later tonight I think we're going to meet up with Lola, Alex, and Sabastian to go out to a Peña. And then tomorrow Noah and I'll head up north towards Bolivia! Here's our general itinerary until about the 25th of July:

Jujuy, Argentina -- las montanas coloradas (Humahuaca)

Tupiza, Bolivia -- three day horseback riding excursion

Uyuni, Bolivia -- salt flats (biggest in the world I think)

la laguna colorada

la laguna verde

La Paz, Bolivia -- capital

Tihunacu, Bolivia -- pre-incan ruins

Copacabana -- el lago Titcaca

la Isla del Sol

Cuzco, Peru -- kick of to....

Machu Picchu

Then we'll travel back down through Bolivia possibly going to the jungle depending how much time we have left. We'll get back on around July 25th and head back to the US on the 31st!!!

Talampaya

Alright so on Thursday night we took a bus out to La Rioja, six hours away, hung around the city for a couple of hours and went to a museum about life before and during colonization in La Rioja. We then took a bus to Villa Union, four hours away and were met at the terminal by el dueño del hostel donde nos quedamos. I liked the hostel a lot because it was more like a bed and breakfast but really cheap like a hostel. We were the only ones there and so always had the bathroom, kitchen, patio etc to ourselves which was really nice. This was a pretty tiny little town, much smaller than Amherst, a little bigger than Leverett but we set up a trip the next day to Talampaya National Park with a guide who was from France, had lived in Argentina for five years, and who also spoke English which was great. We headed out after breakfast and picked up three other people, a guy who lives in Villa Union, his sister and their friend visiting from Buenos Aires.

The park was beautiful and very cool. It’s the place where they’ve found the oldest dinosaur fossils firstly and secondly it’s the only place where you can see the Triassic and Jurassic periods in the rock formations. I think in other places they can tell they’re older by taking soil samples and carbon dating? Yeah? I really don't know anything about this stuff but anyway I'm pretty sure it's an impressive thing! She also explained to us what different patterns in the rock face means which I found really interesting. And then yesterday Jacob and I went to the museum of Natural Science in Cordoba which was a great review. Jacob is studying Chemical Engineering and Geology at Tufts and he basically knew everything about everything so I got to have a excellent personal tour guide. But anyway after Talampaya for six hours we headed back to make dinner, Lola taught me how to make those cool bracelets that all the traveling hippies sell on the street, we played a lot of cards and called it quits. The next day, Sunday, Rinna and I went horseback riding in Villa Union which was amazing and beautiful and really really fun. I definitely want to do more horseback riding. Our “guide” was a 15 year old who obviously didn’t care if we went galloping off. It was beautiful and I actually learned a lot! I feel comfortable galloping now, running I don’t think I’ll try... I loved it I really did but my butt hurt a whole lot afterwards. That night we got a ride back with the dueños of the hostel who, as it turns out live in Villa General Belgrano (where Cristina has, had because she just sold them, a few cottages). They have a big white van pretty really similar to Rachael’s van except with little wholes in the floor. We put down a whole lot of blankets and actually slept pretty well. It was fantastic and saved us about $30 and gained us a good night’s rest. So that was my week! It was fabulous!

So now... I like all my classes, I love going to tango, I’m feeling better about being a city girl, starting to think out our Peru Bolivia trip, and basically doing really well!! Tonight I went to a peña, which basically means anything traditionally argentinian and usually includes music, wine, and empanadas. This was a presentation of a book about the cordobese folklorico musician Chango Rodriguez who killed a man and just wrote a ton of music in jail. The other night Patricia had just taught me one of his songs and then we just happened to find out about this great free, close to home event, very cool. Also this guy Facundo Torres who is one of the big young folklorico musicians in Argentina played a bunch of his songs. Beautiful. People here play such beautiful passionate music. It’s great. Also I’ve heard a lot of songs from Brazil which I really like. Well cool. I suppose that’s all I have to say... Tomorrow, Friday I have a violin lesson and then I’m heading out to Capilla. On Saturday and Sunday, Noah and I are going to a close town called San Marco de Sierras and I’m pushing for horseback riding so lets cross our fingers its cheap!

Un Techo Para Mi Pais

It’s Monday afternoon, first day back from May break. I had quite a fantastic week. I’ll start at the beginning. Thursday kicks off the vacation (no class on friday) with a huge asado at my friend’s hostel and then night out at a club with not all tecno music! I have no idea what clubs are like in the US by the way. So the girl Nannick from Holland isn’t still there but my friend Lola was still there at that point so I’d been going there frequently. And for those who don't know, asado means 20 plus courses of meat. And some salad but not really haha. On Friday, I meet 300 other volunteers (all around 18-28 years old) at the Ciudad de las Artes (where Antonio studies cello) for “Un Techo Para Mi Pais,” a program which I didn’t know too much about before I got there other than that it was supposed to be an incredibly well done volunteer program that builds houses in Villa Miserias around South America. We were all split up into “barrios” on the outskirts of the city, the Villa Miserias. It didn’t make a difference for me to be split up because I went alone anyway, but they try to separate people who know each other so that everyone can benefit amply from the immersion part of the experience. We took collectivos which had donated their services to our barrios and then to our schools where we stayed for the weekend. Un Techo renamed our school Mafalda and put up Mafalda comic strips blown up hanging all over the school but I have no idea what the other schools were like. The 50 or so of us in Mafalda were then split into 5 families. My group was working for a mother and five children from Bolivia. There are hardly any men in the Villa Miserias either because they’re looking for work elsewhere or because they obviously found it easier to leave their children and wives than it was for the wives or the children. The other significant demographic fact is that all of the families are from Peru, Bolivia or Northern Argentina and all come to the city looking for work.

Damiana (the mother) lived in Bolivia her whole life until two years ago when she came to Argentina with her four, now five children. Here’s the crazy part, she speaks Quechua and is learning Spanish but it’s hard because there aren’t that many people who speak Quechua who can help her. Her children (ages 1 to 10) are fluent in Quechua and Spanish, I think. They're old "house" is made out of thin thin pieces of wood tied together with nails and rope and is a little bit bigger than a queen sized mattress. There’s also a sheltered space with a fire pit and another enclosed area with a hole for the bathroom. Obviously there’s no electricity.

The first day we went out there all I could think about was the incredible amount of trash everywhere. The streets were paved with broken shoes, bones, rubber, glass, and whatever other broken doodads. That first day, Saturday, we dug holes for wood pilers to raise the house off the ground. We dug three meters before we hit solid dirt, before that, we were digging through trash with some dirt mixed in, some of it disintegrating, most of it not. This is not kids playing in dirt with the animals on the farm poverty, this is kids playing in polluted, rusted, chemical traasshhh. The amount of trash was just ridiculous. These kids are playing in the dirtiest dirtiest trash without anyone to stop them and entertain them with something else because there just wasn't anything else! Trash! Anyway so that first day we put in the 12 pilers to start Damiana’s new 3 meter by 6 meter house. This doesn’t seem very big but it’s enough, enough being something the old ‘house’ didn’t even come close to. Virgenia, Damiana’s neighbor came every day to help out with everything, always coming around with juice or criollos and of course mate. Un Techo Para Mi Pais built her house last semester and as we were talking we discovered that the girl Kelsey (who lived here with Cristina last semester and who had recommended Un Techo to me so strongly) had helped build Virgenia’s house! Out of all the 300 people who could have been working with Virgenia, it was me and Kelsey. Again, Cordoba Cordoba you crazy place. So I got to send Kelsey Virgenia’s love and thanks. Cool stuff. Also Damiana's kids and all the neighbor kids were fantastic and really eager to help out digging the holes, very cute (and strong!!!). Day two we put down floor, up the walls, and started to put together the windows and the door. Day three we put up the beams, the insolation and finally the roof! Well done. It definitely wasn’t easy but it was so do-able!! They just had things done together very well, well enough so that anybody can do it and do it right without needing a million well trained volunteers to help the half million untrained volunteers. Fantastic. And so concrete, a house! A house!!

We also had a really great time just because all the people were so open and patient and really wanting to be there. We talked a lot about different things, about what it means to be a student, what are our rights to knowledge and our obligations to action, what it means to be independent, and how we’re independent today (all in light of Argentina’s 200th birthday on May 25th for which there was a huge hubub all over the country). We also got to play a lot of music, on and off the site and just had a really great time. We didn’t get a whole lot of sleep though thus I was pretty sick for a few days afterward. Luckily I got home and Noah came to the city for a few days! Its fabulous to have Noah around but it does wear me out just because we don’t have our own space to just hang out because it’s not really appropriate for Noah to spend the whole day here at Cristina’s house which I think is ridiculous but there you go. He got a ride to the city with some people he met in Capilla del Monte, who I didn’t get to meet because I was much too sick to go out but next time. We spent tuesday hanging out and trying to get me better but failing; wednesday we read out loud a lot, got lunch, and then walked with Lola, Alex (from France), Sebastian (from Belgium), Rinna (who’s in CCCS and from Alaska) and Jacob (from the Bahamas who goes to Tufts) to the terminal to buy tickets to a national park to the north west of Cordoba via the city La Rioja, called Valle de la Luna/Talampaya. Later that night Noah and I went out with Patricia and her sister Caro to see the Janis Joplin movie in theaters. I think I had seen all the interviews that they did and a lot of the shows but it was really awesome on the big screen with the cinema sound system. On Thursday we went and got Noah’s package from his parents and brother which was very exciting and very delicious (thank you Eckarts!!!). Then for the rest of the day we walked around trying to find a ukelele that I could carry around with me on my travels but failed. We’ll keep trying definitely. Then Noah went back to Capilla and I went to have dinner at Patricia’s house and she drove me to the bus terminal at 12:00 at night to meet up with Lola, Alex, Sebastian, Jacob, Rinna, and we went on our way!

Ok this is going to have to be finished later tonight cause I have to run to hebrew class!!