Yesterday, after a short visit to the Hogar in the morning, (where I managed to learn the entire sign alphabet) I had been invited to go with my host sister, Claudia, and several of her friends, out to a house in the country to spend the night. I, not being one to pass up a visit to a house in the country, decided to go.

I guess that you could say youv´e never really travelled in south america without having ridden somewhere in the open bed of a pickup truck. Now I can happily say that, yes, I have travelled in south america. After picking up supplies, a carefully laid out list of foods and paraphenelia, all nine of us packed into a firends red Nissan extended cab pickup truck, 6 up front, 3 in the back. I, being an avid conouseur of fresh air, chose the back. Huddled on a mattress between all of the packs, under several sleeping bags, we cruised out of Cusco onto the mountain roads, towards Limatambo, where Andres has a family house in the country. It´s pretty cool to be able to cruise through the mountains, looking up at the stars in the clear night sky.

An hour and a half drive brought us to the house, a big, hacienda style property located right off the main road. On opening the big wooden gates on the long adobe brick wall, we discovered a big ranch style house, surrounded by exotic fruit trees, a dry swimming pool, some hens, and a bull. Inside of the house was an even bigger surprise. The whole house looked like a 1950´s luxury country getaway house. A full sized billiards table in the front hall, a big living room with one of those big old Phillips cabinet style self contained radio/turntables, a little bar setup, and a dining room with seating for about 25. All this looked as if it laid unused for a great deal of the year, reserved for vacations and get togethers.

Our first chore was to make dinner, we had brought stuff to make pizza, and to my great surprise, the only oven was a great big adobe woodburning oven. Perfect for pizza, also a hell of a thing to get heated up. In fact, all of the cooking apparatus looked as if it had been used for about 100 years. Lots of big black cast iron pots and pans, antique looking knives and graters, and the oven room was complete with wood fueled range, and various sized pipes for blowing embers. It was decided that the womenfolk would be in charge of the food preperation, and the gentlemen would take care of the fires and general runamuckery. Another couple of hours, and we had 6 delicious pizza pies. By the end of the night, we had none. It was sort of elegant how they decided that we needed to set out all the china and whatnot on the table, and all ate together. Seems like in the states, when me and my friends are responsible for feeding ourselves, its everyman for himself, no holds barred.

Dinner was followed by a bonfire outside and some rounds of Pisco Sours, a local favorite drink. We had a good time sitting late outside, talking in spanish rapidly, and making hilarious jokes that I couldn´t really understand. Good times.

This morning, after getting the hearth fires burning again, we had breakfast and lunch in the same elegant fashion, with baked chicken, potatoes, and chorizo on the menu. All quite delicious. It turned out that the water for some reason had stopped working overnight, so we managed to clean up all the dishes using whatever water we could collect from various buckets randomly located about the property. The ride home in the back provided a fantastic view of the sunset behind the mountains, with Salcantay, Peru´s highest mountain, snowcapped in the distance.