Pick up a cuy and some bread.......Evidence of E.T visitation....

 Here is a common scene in markets around here.  A woman is selling various animals including chickens, turkeys, ducks and guinea pigs.  The guinea pigs are known as cuy and were domesticated by the native people of Peru along with the Llamas, potatoes and quinoa.  Cuy are considered by some to be a wonderful source of meat, however, the upper class consider it to be an inferior food.  It is kind of "cute" but not taken seriously.

 These juice bars are very popular in the markets.  Here the different juices are in pitchers with cotton "lids" made with different patterned fabric.  These fabric lids are common and serve to keep the bugs out as well as the dust.  I always go to the market in the town I am visiting and get some fresh juice. A great place to get a Juice Boost!

 This huge stone wall is found in the mountain top fortress of Kuelap near Chachapoyas.  It is second only to Machu Picchu in size and significance to the archeological history of Peru.  Interestingly, only Peruvians know about it so it is much easier to access the other, more famous destination.  This is another example of a pre-inca culture.  They built this city betwen 1,000 and 1,300.  The Inca´s took it over in the 16th century but did not destroy it.  Rather, they added to the construction.  There is a photo of what they added below.

 Much of the site has been left as it was found about 100 years ago.  The forest has overgrown the three tiers of stone walls.  I have never seen anyting quite like this.  It seems that there is much left undiscovered at this place.  The fortress is on the top of a mountain at just above 3,000 meters.  It has a commanding view of the surrounding valleys.

 The structures inside the walls are almost all round.  There is evidence of artistic expression in the designs found in the walls.  It is not clear what these are supposed to be.  It is belived that due to the predominance of snakes carved in the rocks here that the people held serpents in high regard.  The wall below is about 15 feet tall.

 The walls here are about five feet tall.  They show other patterns that stand out.

 Here is a collection of round homes that were perched at the edge of the wall.  You can see the valley beyond off to the left.  Each house is about 20-30 feet in diameter.

 Below is shown a photo of what the Incan engineers added to Kuelap.  It is clear to me that this is the space ship landing site.  It is at the highest point on the mountain top.  There is an alien face carved in the rock at the base of this platform.  This place is awesome!

My Peruvian family

These photos are of the neighborhood and house that I am living in.  The park on the left is in the middle of the block.  The house on the right is where I live.  The houses surround the park and look out onto it.

This is Barena, our dog.  Conventions with dogs in Peru are different than in the U.S.  Dogs are not neutered and they do not have leashes or collars.  There are not any rules for them as far as I can tell.  There are many dogs that appear to be stray in the streets but it is possible that they have owners, I'm not sure, it is hard to tell.

My room is on the roof, or sort of.  The roof is the utility room it also has a room for me.  The roof space in a Peruvian house is an open-air space where all sorts of housework gets done.  I sort of have a roof patio outside my door, not bad huh?.  The above photo is taken from the patio looking into the park in the middle of the neighborhood

 The photo above is of Sebastian, my Peruvian brother.  He is in fourth year of secondary school.  This means he is a sophomore.  I think he is 15 years old.  We have hooked up the trailer with his "quatro moto" and we are going to the beach.  The trailer has no license plates or lights and he does not wear a helmet when he rides this thing.  There are some rules about driving such a thing on the road and the beach but he does not have to follow them.

 The above photo is taken with the first dog I have ever met that has the same name as me, Aaron.  This is pronounced "are-rone" with emphasis on the strong "o".  The dog is owned by my paternal grandmother.  We go to her house on Sundays for dinner.  Extended families are important here.  Grandparents are visited regularly.

The women in the above photo make up the household of the paternal grandmother.  She is wearing the green sweater.  Her sister, Conchito, sits next to her in a blue jacket.  The women standing next to me are housekeepers, Christina and Victoria.  If the seated women were standing they would be the same height as the other two.  As with everyone in my family, they are very welcoming and generous.  There are many jokes between these women.  

Here is the rest of the family.  Eliana and Antonio on the left and Sebastian on the right.  This is the kitchen in the grandmother's house.  Antonio, grew up in this house.  It is about a 25 minute walk from his house shown in the photos at the beginning of this blog.

Here are the two sisters.  They are wonderful people.  They cook lots of great food and love to watch us eat.

Here is another photo of my Peruvian parents.  Eliana is a school psychologist and her husband, Antonio is an opthamological surgeon.

Peruvian public schools and pre-Incan archeology

This past week I was detailed out on a field trip with the students in sixth grade primary.  We went to an important archeological site in Northern Peru that was built by the Chimu or Moche culture between the first and 12th centuries.  The place is known as Tucume.  A book by the same title was written in the 1980's by Thor Hyerdahl the Norwegian explorer/self-taught archeologist.  You may remember the story of Kon-Tiki another earlier and well known adventure by Hyerdahl.  He came to Peru in the 1940's and built a large balsa wood raft and sailed it to the S. Pacific in an attempt to show that S. Americans could have populated the S. Pacific islands.  Tucume was built by the people that had the folklore telling a story of a great leader who sailed to the west.  This is also the place where you can see images of glyphs made of adobe depicting the large balsa rafts with strange bird-people sailing  them. These people also used reeds to build seafaring rafts and it is not clear to me if those depicted in these reliefs are supposed to be reed or balsa... for the record....most formal archeologists in academic fields think that Hyerdahl is totally wrong about S. Americans sailing across the Pacific. Just because he did it doesn't prove anything.   His book about Tucume is less controversial because he actually worked with trained experts  when he excavated the pyramids here.     

Below is a photo of the images made in adobe.  There are two of these large rafts in the relief.  It is hard to point them out with this photo, but have a look at this website to see them

http://www.kon-tiki.no/E-Exp_Tucume.php

These people were definitely not Incas, they were pre-Inca.

Below is a photo of part of the remains of a once magnificent city.  The buildings and pyramids were made of adobe and over the years have suffered from El Nino events.  If you thought that the impact of El Nino was big in N. America in terms of rain and snow, this is where it all starts and where the weather phenomenon was first named.  These pyramids show the effects of many El Nino years that have nearly washed away these structures.  In fact, many archeologists think that it was the severe precipitation events of El Nino that contributed to the decline of this culture.  Right now it is hot and dry, but apparently they have serious inundations of water every 5-7 years.  You can see from the landscape photos why the Incan ruins might be a bit more popular with tourists.

On the same field trip we stopped at a small public school on the outskirts of Chiclayo in a place called La Raya.  It was not clear to me what we were doing at first, but it became obvious that the students were doing a bit of charity work in addition to seeing how the rest of Peru lives and goes to school.  It was a huge eye opener to me and I'm sure that a few of the students felt the same way.  This school has significantly fewer resources than the well- fortified halls and classrooms of San Agustine.  The school in La Raya (essentially a colonia) consisted of a few scattered buildings around a sandy and dusty playground with one soccer goal made out of broken bamboo poles.  We organized some relay races for the students to do with mixed teams of students from both schools.  After a few "races" the students from San Agustine opened their backpacks and presented the local kids with new notebooks, pens, pencils, snacks and juice boxes. It was a touching moment clearly part of the social mission of the curriculum at San Agustin.  The students from La Raya were having a great time, it was obviously a special day for them.  I've never seen anything like this before done in the US.  Maybe private Catholic schools do this in our country as well.

Easter Sunday, making copies and table tennis

 

Last weekend was a big deal for Christians around the world.  Latin America history is of course heavily influenced by the Catholic Church so Easter was huge here in Peru.  Two days off of school, fireworks, parties, parades and of course mass at all hours, in all churches for several days in a row.  I went on Sunday to see the Transubstantiation happen in a Catholic church on the biggest feast day of the year.  Alas, I didn´t have the patience to sit and stand through however long it was going to take to get the the big Mysterious event.  Meanwhile, as I´m waiting, I find a place to sit down.  After a few minutes the folks around me are gesturing and saying something to me that I don´t understand.  I don´t know if you have ever been in a huge 19th CenturyCatholic church but they retro fit them with these awful sound systems that prevent anyone from understanding anything including the person sitting next to you. Oh,yeah, he was speaking Spanish.  Anyway, I eventually figure out I´m in the line for confession and these people are wondering if the gringo is really going to confess because if he´s not maybe he should show some courtesy.....Only a minor disturbance on a normal day but this is Easter! For Christ´s sake does anyone care about the rules!  The photo below is of the colorguard ceremony in the plaza in front of the church on Easter Sunday.  

 

 This is Ceasar in the photo below.  As far as I can tell he runs one of the key offices at San Agustin.  He is the one and only manager-employee-BMOC of the one room office that handles all of the photocopy requests for all of the classrooms and teachers at the school.  The school has grades K-11.  He operates with one very important rule.  This rule states that all copy orders MUST be posted with 48 hours advance notice.  This means that if you want a worksheet, handout or exam prepared for your class you have to make the request 2 days in advance.  This stikes me as different than the way we do things in the US. Ceasar has awesome organization skills and as far as I can tell does his job very well.  I have no idea how he keeps all the requests straight.  I've heard no complaints from the teachers.

It turns out that photo copies are something of a cottage industry here.  I needed some copies made from a text book in the library.  This is one request that Ceasar can't complete out of concern for copyright laws.  Therefore, I borrowed the book and took it to one of the thousands of photocopy businesses around town.  These businesses amount to someone who has bought a copy machine, put in their garage, backyard or laundry room and  placed a sign on the street that says "copias".  Below is one of these businesses.  The neighbor has a computer that is available for internet use while you wait for your copies.  These businesses are really little and I don't understand how they make any money at all.  No matter, they are everywhere.  

Here are a few more photos of the school.  The one below is the library.  I hang out here quite a bit.  For the first week every time I entered or exited I set off the book thief alarm.  I feigned ignorance for awhile and then was forced to figure out what was going on.  It turns out that the Spanish-English dictionary that I bought in the states before my trip had a little magnetic sticker in it that set off the alarm.  To the staff of the library It looked like I had stolen this book from another library or bookstore.  At least I'm easy to spot in a crowd around here so they can find me when a book really does go missing.

 

 

Here is a photo of the ping pong team practicing.  I play with these guys a few days a week after school.  I'm totally impressed with their coaching staff and level of play.  There are three coaches for about 15 kids.  They are mostly grade school age.  I have played a few of them in matches, mostly we simply practice volleys and serving.  They define a match as the best of five games to 11.  You must win by two.  You serve two points then trade.  I have won a total of between 7 and 9 points to players that are between 9 and 13 years old.  They are AWESOME!  I can't recall seeing top spin like this before.  It turns out that this school sends competitors to international contests regurlarly.  I hope I get a chance to see them compete.  They have the best tables I've ever seen and each player has a totally killer raquet. 

  

 This weekend I'm taking the bus to Cajamarca it is in the mountains, yes!  This is the city where Pizarro captured the last Incan emperor, Atualpa, and held him for ransom.  You may have heard this story. The conquistador demanded that a huge room be filled with gold or else the Inca would be executed.  You can guess what happened.  The room was eventually filled with gold and Pizarro excecuted the Inca anyway.  I guess that is what conquistadors do.  There is a famous market in this town.  I'm on the lookout for a good curandera or witch doctor.