Claire takes on the world….

My three new room-mates from Belfast had booked a holiday in Cusco for the end of July. I had no intention of joining (I was waiting for my mom to come over to see this part of the country) but after a particularly stressful day in work I changed my mind. On the third floor of Casa Del I found one of the kids I live with. I thought she had her face into the corner for counting purposes in some game but when I turned her around her neck was slit and her hands covered in blood. I rushed her away, possibly a little too dramatically, and handed her over to the boss. One of the other kids I live with had done it in a game, never did find out was it done accidentally or what. So after that I decided maybe I should take the week off I never took and booked myself on a flight to Cusco for the following day.

Stephen, Jenny and Aisling had arrived a day before me and came to meet me at the airport. First impression of Cusco; what a pretty place! As sappy a word as pretty is it’s all I can really think of to describe Cusco. All the streets are narrow and cobblestoned. The only thing that could possibly take away from the niceness is the air, or lack of it. We were all on altitude pills and still found it hard to breathe. Our hotel Casa Del Campo, was up in San Blas, which was quite a hike from the main square, then when you reach there it’s upwards and onwards again, and when you get past reception there’s another 30 or so big stone steps. I now have major respect for anyone who survives the Inca trail. Putting one foot in front of the other is a challenge here.

Like the magnets that we are, we instantly found the Irish bar. The highest one in the world; Paddy Flaherty’s. While talking to two Irish girls we realised I hadn’t had the necessary Coca tea and mid-day nap needed to acclimatise so I set about doing the two of those before I collapsed from lack of oxygen. It’s the pressure that’s the problem here, so you really have to remind yourself to breathe, it doesn’t just go in as much as it normally does.

We decided to do some adventure-type things while in Cusco. In my absence the others found an adventure shop to see what we could do. First up: horse riding. I have had a long bad history with horses and generally prefer to just look at them from a distance. I was going to make up some elaborate excuse to get out of this when I discovered my team weren’t much better off. Jenny was still traumatised from an incident a few years back in which she rode a horse with hiccups. Stephen had never been on a horse before, and Aisling is allergic to horse hair, but figured she might be okay seeing as we were going riding in the open air. With that information I confidently got out of the taxi in Sacsaywuman (pronounced sexy woman) and started looking for these beasts. Confidence left me once I saw them riding over the horizon in the distance. I like nice, tame, well-disciplined horses, and these seemed to live easy in the wild. I made sure the tour guy gave me the smallest horse, but noticed he conveniently kept the ‘littlest’ one for himself. We were put with three British students and an Australian lady.
Once my horse got over his unfortunate twitch we all set off over the mountains. It was incredibly peaceful, even for a horse-phobe. We stopped at the Inca’s moon temple and snooped around where they sacrificed animals. Then set off up over the mountains looking at other random things for a few hours. Saw some people herding sheep, one horse drank some water. It was nothing crazy but it was just really amazing to be up there, on a horse and have no one else around for miles.

We stopped at a little town for lunch, but being cheap we had a packed lunch ready to go. The other four in our tour were taken off to check out a water fountain the Inca’s had but, again, we couldn’t go for financial reasons. The four of us had decided we didn’t want to do enough of those archeological things, to fork out $21 for a tourist ticket needed to see them. So we sat in the sun and enjoyed our cookies.

When the other four rejoined us we set off over another mountain on the horses that I was now starting to like. But they seriously need to change their diets. Even with limited horse experience we figured it couldn’t be normal for them to ‘break wind’ so often. I freaked out whenever my guy went to close too the rear end of another horse.

On the last leg of the journey everyone got a little more confident and broke into a gallop through the forest. To savour the scenery I decided to scream at my horse everytime he attempted to go faster than a slow walk. Some pedestrians passed me out at one stage but they were walking fast-herding sheep. Eventually I was alone in the forest but perfectly happy as I could see the others racing each other in the clearing up ahead. Silly gringos, someone should tell them what happens to people who ride horses without helmets.

The horse day ended up being one of the best in Cusco. I can’t believe I’m recommending horse riding as a thing to do but for $10 it’s well worth it. And the most fun is to be had on the smallest and slowest horse, remember that.

On Saturday July 21st I had the honour of attending a Peruvian baptism. I was still in trouble stomach-wise after my dodgy chicken but I was determined to struggle through. Kelly and her family had put a lot of work into that party so I was not missing it because of a stupid piece of poultry. She even brought me shopping for clothes for the occasion. She helped me pick out a very exciting jumper and shirt. I was shocked and appalled to learn that the shop I was in rewards rich people, seemingly just for being rich. If one earns a certain amount every month they can apply for a card that gets them up to 50% off everything. Being a student on a part- time wage Kelly doesn’t have one of these but still wouldn’t let me pay full price. She went around the entire department store asking just about everyone if they had a card and if they did would they buy my clothes for me. They must have thought I was one tight ass gringa because by Irish standards the clothes were still pretty cheap. She eventually found a nice couple who did the deed and saved me what is usually my weeks budget.

Fast forward a couple of days and I’m sitting in a (this time roofed church) with Jenny, Stephen and Kelly, who chose to sit next to us over her family. The service started at 8pm which is very different from the early morning baptisms I’m used to. The people of this town reminded us of their disregard for institutions and acted very much the way people unused to a church would act. Kelly answered her phone early on and I instinctly gave her a ‘the hell are you doing??’ look. I felt pretty stupid when I realised what face I had on. So she chatted away while people walked around, found some different people to talk to, chased some misbehaving children and all the while the priest was talking away. It looked more like a First Communion to me. About 20 kids were there to be baptised, all sitting scattered around the church in their white dresses. Most looked around nine or ten. The priest called out all the names and we all made a point to make it known that we had actually heard the names of Kelly’s sisters. Things went back to chaotic after that. I think the priest walked around blessing people or something. The lights from the camera crew blinded me for a bit. When the priest got back to talking (or maybe praying) everyone stood up, but as they got tired they just sat down. I was admittedly the first to sit. The climax of the service came when all the children went up for the water part of the service. No one paid any attention to other people’s children, they seemed to be busy readying their own little ones. Luckily I spotted Kelly’s sister Samantha heading up and told Jenny and Stephen to look interested. Good job we were looking interested because Kelly looked back while on a stroll to see if we were looking. I think we cheered a little after the second sister, Emely, was done and the service just seemed to end after that. Guess it wasn’t a mass after all. That or the priest didn’t want to break bread with non-regular church goers.
I had to leg it out of the church to get some sort of sugar into me. Even if I wasn’t sick the sudden lack of sugar and salt in my diet would knock me out. Everything is laced with either salt or sugar, and very often both. Doctors orders are no fried food, sauces, salt, sugar or fizzy drinks. I broke all of them at once on Sunday by skipping off to McDonalds. After some fruit punch soft drink type thing I was ready to face the photo session that followed. Myself and Stephen made excuses that we had to take the photos ,to get out of being in the photos. Usually I’m not one to shy away from a camera but being centre stage of someone’s baptism photos would be a little weird. So we let Jenny do it on her own. There’s now a few lovely photos with the two girls, their Godparents and parents, with a blonde Irish girl bam smack in the middle.

While on our way back to Tres de Mayo I realised I had forgotten the white and pink frilly bell decoration I had won the previous week. I had been telling people in work about this all week and how I was going to bring it to the party. So I had to drop in home, pick it up, have a beer and make Kelly late for the biggest celebration her family has had in a long time.

When I walked in I was absolutely bowled over. It seems to be a tradition here to not have furniture at a party, but to empty the room and have white plastic chairs along the sides. It’s a great set-up for dancing, if you’re that way inclined but I’d love to know where these chairs come from. No one seems to have any on a normal day of the week but once someone has a fiesta they suddenly have 50 or so. The Ruizs had put all their furniture on top of their house to facilitate our partying. It was like Barbie’s dream party. Big pink and white streamers everywhere. I think I’m going to have to post another photo because there’s no way I can describe this. I have one photo of Samantha over in the food area of the house and if you look at it briefly it looks like her head if floating because her pink clothes blend in so well. They had a little fountain on the table and two three-tier cakes (one of those tiers made it back to my house). Because of my illness, I had to sit a lot and observe. I saw Stephen and Jenny struggle with the food and try all the tricks I’d tried over the weeks to hide bits behind other bits. I was amazed by the dancing. Young and old were able to dance properly together because they all knew how to salsa. It was cool to see big middle aged men glide lightly on their feet and for the women it was all in the hips. They couldn’t understand why Jenny or Stephen wouldn’t dance with them. I used my old ‘I’m sick’ line. To convince the other two to get grooving they put on some English music. Out came ‘Hits of the 80’s’ and it was very appropriate. With the pink and white steamers, grey suits and mullets the evening did have a distint 80s feel.

Many speeches were made and photographs were taken. The ‘padrinos’ aka Godparents traditionally organise the party (and pick op the bill). In return they get a gui (guinea pig) and a chicken. Both of these were received dead, cooked and on a bed of lettuce. I got up from my seat long enough to take a few photos of the animals and make jokingly disgusted faces at Kelly. After the ‘thank yous’ the two newly baptised chicas went around to everyone in the room and gave them a momento of the evening. These reminded me of the type of thing you would get after someone dies. Samantha’s had her photo on hers, together with the date of birth and the day’s date. Emely`s was simpler. It was a tiny baby figure with a ribbon containing her details. Soon after getting these we had to hit the road. It was looking suspicious how I had missed two days of work and was now out past midnight at a Latino fiesta. We had some trouble getting out of there without dancing, apparently no one leaves without dancing, but after doing the usual kissing rounds of the room we were on our way.

Amazingly it was only a small part of her family at the celebration. It was at least 5 times the size of my extended family. I’ve often seen the stereotype Latino family on TV where they have a cousin for every occasion. Kelly seems to really have an unending supply of cousins and one seems to be trained for every sort of service one could possibly need. And each and every one of them looked like they might be a professionally trained dancer…

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