Hola! Bienvenidos to my new Peruvian blog. I’ll just start from the beginning. We left on June 19th from Memphis. Our first flight went to Miami and from Miami we had a six hour flight to Lima, the capital of Peru. We finally arrived to Cusco after a five hour layover in Lima. All our flights went pretty smoothly besides the layovers and the being awake for 24 hours straight.
We were promptly picked up by our program, Maximo Nivel, at the Cusco airport and taken to our new home for five weeks! We live in apartment with a Peruvian lady named Patricia. She’s the sweetest thing ever. She has two sons that live with us. Both keep to themselves and are usually gone. One is 22 and the other is in his 30’s. The oldest is a race car driver. Yeah , random I know. Anyways, we have about 7 volunteers that live in our apartmento. So about four people share each bathroom, nbd. We do not have hot water or heaters. It is currently Peru’s “winter” so it gets down to 35 at night and heats up to 70 during the day. Needless to say, it gets really cold. We drink lots of hot tea and coffee to stay warm. #i’mbasicallyperuviannow
So that’s my background, let’s get Cusco. Cusco is an amazing city. It has about 400,000 residents and is one of the oldest cities I’ve ever been too. It’s surrounded by unbelievable mountains. The city itself sits at 11,000 feet, that’s over two miles above sea level! It took a day or two to get acclimated to elevation. I was out of breath just walking around the first day. The architecture here is really unique. The Incas started the city and built with their normal stone walls that fit together perfectly. The Spanish later conquered them and took over the city. So often, buildings have half stone walls and half stucco. The Spanish built on top of the Inca ruins and added their unique style to the top half of the buildings. They have an awesome town square called La plaza de armas. It has two massive churches and tons of shops, restaurants, and discotecas. The plaza is the downtown of Cusco. We went out last night to the plaza and danced at three of the local bars. It was wild. We saw lots of salsa dancing. I will learn to salsa before I leave. People constantly try to get you into their bars by supplying you with a free drink card. Sooo we drank for free last night and just changed bars when we finished each drink. My favorite bar was Mama Africa and my favorite Peruvian beer is Cusqueńo.
I would tell you what my typical day is like but I haven’t had a typical day yet. I love it. This weekend we will be going to Lake Titicaca and then to Bolivia until Tuesday. Lake Titicaca is the highest lake in the world and La Paz, Bolivia is the highest capital city in the world. So I’ll tell you all about that soon. One of the main reasons I came was volunteer time at a local health clinic. I just visited my clinic for the first time today. I was warned several times that it is in a poor and dangerous area. The clinic is well built but the entire place is filthy. They have separate emergency, obstetrics, dental, pharmacy, and lab rooms. I will start in obstetrics at 8 in the morning. I’m pumped but it will be very difficult because of the language barrier. The people working in the clinic and the patients speak no English whatsoever. I feel like a ton has gone down in the first three days. I’m learning something new every minute about culture, language, and life.
Hasta leugo!
Bryant Self
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