Springtime in Cusco and a Scorcher in Curahuasi!



Cusco with a storm

Julie had a rough four days with her food poisoning but she was able to return to work on Thursday and is feeling like herself again. Since we work just up from the university there are always hoards of students around and they congregate at the small food stands all over that sell hot drinks and sandwiches, kind of the Peruvian version of McDonald’s breakfast sandwiches. A popular drink is the “Agua de Manzana” made with hot, sweetened apple juice and quinoa. They also sell Quaker (said cwaa-care) and is a soupy, sweet oatmeal. Then they have Macca the root that they sell dried and powdered and it’s supposed to do all kinds of impossible things for your health. They sell all of them as thick, sweet drinks for breakfast. They also sell rolls with cheese or rolls with “palta” (avocado) but never the two together on one sandwich. They believe that avocado and cheese together will make you deathly ill or kill you. We have never seen anyone with one of each kind of sandwich, it’s an either/or kind of thing.  You honestly cannot buy the two ingredients together in one sandwich. It’s given us some laughs.

On this theme, when we have been sick and particularly hospitalized, we have always been a little amazed at the attitude towards cold beverages. In general, cold beverages are thought to be about as dangerous to consume as ground glass. Most people in Peru believe cold drinks will cause anything from pneumonia to sudden death. In the hospital, we used to get a thermos of hot water by our bedside instead of shaved ice. It turns out, that people get well drinking hot water too…

Sometimes we would love to be able to run into a Walmart and get everything we need in one stop. We can find almost everything we need or want here but it takes hours of running around from one store to another. Rich has been looking for a clip-on lamp for his painting easel. So far it is an unheard of thing here, no luck yet. And pie pans, they are nowhere to be found. We did manage to find a tart pan so we’re going to attempt a sweet potato pie (since there is no pumpkin in Peru) for our “First Thanksgiving” here. We’re going to have the Agüero family join us, we need to track down a turkey, a pan, and take it to an “horno” (wood fired oven) to roast. There is one right next door but we’ve heard that it is dirty, so we’ll take it a block over to another one that the Agüeros use. These ovens are all over since most people don’t have an oven in their homes.  And for those that do, it’s much cheaper to use the “horno” than pay for the bottled gas. It will be an adventure to say the least!

We managed a pan of brownies with the new oven. We cooked a pot of beans on the new stove. You can’t cook beans long enough here without the use of a pressure cooker and the counter-top burner just got too hot for our pressure cooker. The oven has no temperatures, just high and low. We may have misgauged the coco in the brownies since neither of us could sleep after we ate them and  watched a movie on the computer...

Rich’s grandmother cooked for CCC and WPA camps during the depression (Read "The Grapes of Wrath" if you don’t know what this is about). Anyway, grandma did it all with a wood-fired stove and had few measuring implements for doing it. She always kept a wood stove and maintained that it was better than that electric monstrosity that her husband bought her late in life… Rich always has maintained that she was the best cook he ever knew. Our respect for her just went up vastly while we fiddled with the oven and jockeyed ingredients to pull this off. Both were delicious, in any event.

The big markets on the weekends are full of every kind of plant and flower, and soil and gardening implements. Spring is in full swing here, it is still hard to wrap our heads around springtime in November! Spring plants, flowers and the smell of fresh cut grass inter-mixed with Christmas decorations and trees just feels wrong somehow! Julie always laughs at the mannequins modeling bikinis in December.

Rich popped off a crown and had to go to the dentist to have it put back on. Fortunately, it came off all in one piece and with the root canal post intact. The dentist repeatedly mentioned that this was a fiberglass post. Then he said, “We use titanium posts. We need a different kind of glue for these.” The result was that we had to go to the dentist supply store first and I had to buy a tube of the special epoxy for fiberglass. I let him keep it so that we can go back to him for any more emergencies. While there he told me that I had a hole in a tooth that needed filling so he fixed it.

We have had rain practically every afternoon. Rich got caught in the downpour twice and came in to the house very “drowned rat-like…”

We had a kind of hair raising trip to Curahuasi. The car we went down in was less than wonderful and the driver was worse. We were both nauseous when we got there. The wind howled though it threatened, we got no rain. In fact, on Sunday it was uncomfortably warm. We waited for two hours to get a ride back.

This concerned us because we had a special devotional in Cusco with Elder Russell M. Nelson, one of the twelve apostles and Elder Rasband of the Seventy. We did make it but it wound up being an exhausting day. When we arrived at the meeting, we found people lined up for blocks. We got in but did not have very good seats. We sat there for a few minutes and then one of the leaders came and asked us to take our seat on the front row. Rich asked, “Are you sure, we are just regular missionaries…” He said he was, and then when we got there we found that we had been included with all of the elderly, crippled and hard of hearing… We had a chuckle about that. They asked us to be a kind of buffer to help limit the hordes trying to shake the dignitaries’ hand. In the end, the folks were very well behaved. The meeting was remarkable, to sit literally at the feet of an apostle and have him look directly into our eyes was an unforgettable experience. There was such a powerful spirit there.

We ran into a very dear, old friend at the devotional, he is now the stake president of Sicuani. That was wonderful. Julie got to see a family from Espinar that she had missed seeing last week. It was really great.

 



The quail egg dealer

Cheese

The olive, cheese, nuts and spices lady

Ben Hur grocery store

Papas ala Huancayna breakfast of champions

The Flan lady outside of a grade school

The Shoe Shiner

Mana, Fluffy sugary, large-kernel popcorn.