Holidays in Cusco!

Hola friends & family!

I have been terrible at keeping up with posts! I’ll try to get a few in this weekend. First off…holidays in Cusco!

We got home from Machu Picchu late on Friday the 23^rd. The next day, we had to move out of our beloved “family home” by the late morning. Still exhausted from our trip, we packed up all of our crap and booked a hostel for the night. We had a potential apartment, but it was Christmas and people were busy so we couldn’t move in for a few days. The hostel was fine, but a little cold and dreary which was exacerbated by the cold and dreary weather. Nonetheless, we geared up and met our TEFL friends out for a nice Christmas Eve dinner and drinks. We talked about our own family traditions and funny stories, so I naturally told the infamous “black panties” story which will forever crack me up. With no other way of dealing with the fact that we were all away from home for the holidays, we set out for the bars and got a good amount of drinks in us.  We eventually went our separate ways, but Maggie and I stayed out until well past Santa would have come to visit. We met some really awesome friends from Argentina! Christmas Day was a hard day. It was cold and rainy, and we were really feeling the effects of missing our families. I thankfully got to Skype with Mom and Ben, but not without a few tears.  Christmas away from home is something I’ll never get used to, and hopefully won’t have to do again for a while! We went out again as a group for dinner which took like 3 hours and was awful…such a lovely end to a lovely holiday!

Post Christmas Dinner!

We spent one more night in the hostel, and then moved into our apartment on the 26^th! Finally, a permanent place of residence in Cusco J Only one room was open for a few days, so Maggie and I threw all of our stuff (which  I have WAY too much of) in the room and slept on the couches for a few nights. Finally though, we were able to move into our rooms and unpack. We are living with 2 guys who went through TEFL a few months before us, one of which is a fellow teacher. Both are awesome guys and are from the East Coast! Dennis is from South Jersey, aka a Philly fan (woo!) and Ken is from New York, and much to my dismay a Yankees fan. My room is called “The Command Center” because it’s in the center of the apartment and came equipped with a desktop computer and TV that someone had left here before. The only window it has opens up into the living room, which is entertaining for me because I can stick my head out and talk to whoever is out there! The guys also started the awesome tradition of writing on this window with our teacher markers, and everyone who comes to the apartment gets measured so they have a line with their name next to it on the window. It’s kind of awesome…except it was a reminder of how short I am. I really do have a complex…I think I’m so much taller!

For those of you who are going to ask the standard questions: Yes, we have hot water, but only in the shower and kitchen sink.  We boil our water to be able to drink it. Yes, we have a kitchen! I will be cooking. We have a laundry room, but just a big sink to hand-wash things in. I take my laundry out to be washed, but will be washing my teacher pants and some other things in the laundry room. Yes, it is very safe. We’re on a very safe street, have a gate, along with a security guard. We’re also on the 4^th floor. We have really good cable…HBO and everything! No, not all 4 of us share the bathroom. One guy has his own bathroom, so only 3 of us have to share.

Overall, I love the place and my roommates. All good things.

Sadly, a few days after Christmas most of our TEFL buddies left Cusco L They are currently traveling up the coast to beach towns and eventually Ecuador, Colombia, or Iquitos respectively. We miss them TONS!

Next up came New Years! The traditions in Cusco are interesting. (1) Everyone wears yellow underwear and décor. It’s supposed to bring good luck. All of the markets were stocked full of yellow panties, shirts, leis, boas, masks, glasses, confetti, etc. (2) Amateur fireworks are HUGE. You can buy tons of them for dirt cheap. People set them off randomly every day, but on New Years it’s madness. (3) At midnight, everyone circles the plaza 1.5 times to bring “good travels” for that year or something.

SO, Maggie, Thor, and I were some of the only ones left in Cusco from our original crew. We got some yellow stuff and booze, and started drinking in our apartment with our roommates and a few people. Around 9, we went up to the Plaza to join the festivities and find one of our friends (who we never found). The plaza is like a tiny Times Square minus the ball. There’s a stage with a live band and around 20,000 people running around with fireworks and bottles of booze. Children walk around selling beer (no joke). It was mayhem. We found a good spot on the stairs and posted up drinking our vodka and people watching. Random people would set off bottle rockets no more than 2 feet away from us which was scary, but you got used to it. Maggie got her camera stolen which was a huge bummer, but we stuck it out until midnight! I had no idea it was even close to midnight until the crowd started the countdown. At the strike of 12, I made Thor pop open our champagne and run around spraying it on people. Then, we joined in the mass of people running in a circle around the plaza! It was like a stampede…pretty nuts. Afterwards, we posted back up on the stairs to people watch some more and met up with some friends. Thor had wandered around alone and gotten his wallet stolen. Such bad luck on New Year’s! My friend and I took a cab home with Maggie, and then headed back out to celebrate some more. I spent the rest of the night with a group of Argentinians drinking beer that we bought from little old ladies or children and dancing around the plaza. Like I always do when I drink with Spanish speakers, I ended up talking to a girl for an hour teaching her English so she could talk to a boy she met in Peru. I highly doubt she retained any of what she learned!

New Years Day was spent recovering and preparing for the very very very long week ahead of me…