stupid technology

I just spent about two hours updating my photo album to give you a new slideshow but it wont show up yet. I will try to link to it tomorrow.
Gotta go or I will have to pay more for the internet, I will write properly tomorrow.
Love you all,
em

friends. leaving and coming.

Adam, Julia and Donnie on the way to Machu Picchu. They spent a day with me before heading out and we had a great time. This was the last time seeing Adam, Julia I will see again in June and Donney doesn´t leave until the end of April, so I´m sure I will see him again. It is definitely strange to get close to people knowing that a day will come when you just wont see them again.





Sunset up the valley from the river. We went down and had a picnic next to the Urubamba which is one of my all time favorite things to do.











Some ruins as you come into Ollantaytambo. One of my favorite things about living here is that there isn´t just one set of ruins that you pay to enter, they are everywhere. The walk to the river is along some terraces and then there is clearly something that must have been a building as the stones are more on purpose and cut into squares. But just everywhere you go, there are more ruins and it´s neat cause you know that they lived everywhere in this valley, not just in one little archeological park or something.


It was Adam´s birthday last weekend and we had a great party in Cusco. The Village People show was rescheduled for April 18 so we ended up going to the Aldea Yanapay restaurant and all sorts of people sang and played guitar and made up songs and a great time was had by all. I have missed this sort of thing so much that it was really soul gratifying. On the left is Julian who came to visit a couple of weeks ago, in the middle is Donnie and then Adam. They make up songs all the time and Donnie made up a beautiful song about me this night and I was flattered and wish I had a recording of it.



This is my old lady. I don´t know what her name is as she has at least a speech impediment and very probably some mental illness. She is the one who can´t figure out how to unlock her door and so just sits in front of her house until someone comes along to let her in. When I see her in the market I buy her some bread and some fruit or something. She is always complaining - non verbally - about her joints hurting and it always makes me think of my grandpa who would tell me ¨Maryjane, don´t get old, you wont like it.¨

I am going to look at a room this afternoon that I might move into. Not as great as the one I have in that it is on the ground floor so no view, but it is in the house of the people I like best in all of Ollantaytambo and so would have a great social aspect. We will see. I am also talking to the people who are taking over where I live to make a hostel about the possibility of working for them in exchange for my rent as it could only help to have someone who speaks english helping them for a while. We´ll see about that as well.

So my friends Matt and Mel both have paid plane tickets to visit me and Geoff is talking about it. I am so excited that I get to share this place with folks from home. It is just so amazing and by then I should really know some great places. My friend Guillermo and I are going to start taking day trips once a week on his day off starting next week - we made a whole list of places last night. And he is talking about some 3-4 day trips as well as a 7 day trip that sound amazing and require horses and stuff. I am hoping to get to some of those when people come visit.

English classes are going better, next week I am going to start with giving two classes on Monday Wednesday and Friday as some people work in the day and some at night so this way I can hopefully get more people in. And I am still talking with people about getting up into the hills to teach but transportation continues to be the problem as hiring a private car to take me up and wait for me and bring me back three times a week is a pretty expensive proposition. Trying to see if I can piggyback someone who goes up anyway. Hopefully I can get some more stuff going.

Oh yeah, and I have had a cough that wouldn´t go away and my neighbor who is a paramedic at the travel clinic stopped me on the street the other day and said he thinks I have bronchitis cause he could here me coughing at night and asked me to come into the clinic. I finally made it in yesterday and he examined me and said I have an infection in my throat that has hit my lungs and if we didn´t take care of it it would likely become pneumonia and nobody wants that headed into cold cold winter at this altitude especially. So he gave me a hard core antibiotic shot and an immune booster shot and put on some pills for three days and a liquid that will break up the mucus. Hopefully that will take care of it and I will feel much better in a few days. I´m glad it worked out like that because I probably would have let it go on much longer thinking that it would just go away. He also didn´t charge me for the visit, just the meds because we are friends. Have I said how much I love living in a small town?

Love you all and see some of you soon,
emjay

That´s right, Village People

Well, I am settling nicely into Ollantay. But it means I don´t feel like I have very new or exciting stories to tell here.

I started teaching English classes this week which is a fun new adventure. 20 people signed up to take classes but on Monday only five showed up and on Wednesday only five showed up, but they were an entirely different five and I have no idea if any of them are on the original list so that´s pretty entertaining. I will be hard to teach very much if I don´t have consistent students.
Monday´s class was pretty awful. They already knew what I had prepared to teach them and there weren´t as many people as I thought so mostly we didn´t have much to do and I didn´t have any idea what to do. I was a little discouraged and left feeling pretty dumb thinking that I can figure out how to teach without any teaching training.

On Monday evening my friend Julia came to visit for a few days and she is a teacher and has taught English in Germany before so she helped me make a lesson plan for Wednesday and came to class with me and even though I ran everything, it was really nice to have her there. Class on Wednesday was fantastic and we had a great time and they learned what I wanted them to and we played games and laughed and everyone really enjoyed it. I am hoping that as I go along I will have more days like that and less days like Monday.

I am also talking with someone who has a group of kids up in one of the villages that really want to learn English so if we can work the transportation out, I may get to go up three times a week and teach which would be great. Any inroads I can make into the indiginous villages that has me there for a reason other than being a tourist is really nice. Their lifestyle and dress really is fascinating but I try to figure out a way to observe that without treating them like sideshow freaks.

Julia left today and I will put together a teaching plan for tomorrow and spend a mellow day. On Saturday I will go to Cusco to see a concert.

The Village People are playing in Cusco Peru. Can you imagine such a thing? Well, we´re going, hopefully it will be as fun and ridiculous as it seems like it must be.

Also I have now TWO people with really solid plans to come here from the states. I just can´t wait to get to share what I´m living here with folks and I´m very very excited.

Love you all,
MJ

hill villages

Some indiginous kids out playing at school - the gringos are the photographers that I went up with. I used to think they just got dressed up in their costumes to show off for tourists, I was glad to see that they actually wear them all the time.









They really are just like postcards.




















see?


















This is one of the women we are working on the spinning wheel program with. They cart wool and spin by hand. Then weave on little backpack looms. Then when we see these beautiful weavings for 50 soles and think ¨that´s too much!¨ I am a little ashamed cause $18 just is nowhere enough, you know? But I´m still a schmuck and haven´t bought any.














Some of the folks with the spinning wheels. There is this really interesting thing that happens where they are willing to be freaks in a sideshow and let people take their pictures as though they were objects so that they can get stuff. You can tell they hate it but they haven´t figured out another way to get the help. It is very strange indeed. I didn´t take very many photos, just piggybacked a little on the photographer but it still feels kind of weird. I did meet a school director today that I really liked though and am excited to get to talk to him more. He wasn´t willing to pull kids out of class just to be photographed for example because so many tourists come wanting to just take pictures of these novelties and he says they need to be in class, not being distracted all the time. And the tactic that many people use is to give candy to the kids to pose and he thinks they shouldn´t be taught that their time and essence can be bought for a couple of pieces of candy. They are doing intensive studies of the native Andian culture also at the school so that as they are ¨westernized¨ their culture isn´t lost in the meantime. Classes are taught in Spanish and Quechuan and it´s run by Peruvians which is nice. He and I got along really well and he asked me to come back and visit with him some more and maybe there are some things I can help with there. This felt nice as one definitely understands that he is not of the ¨yay! gringos to buy us stuff!¨ part of the culture but more of the ¨unless you are actually useful to me I´d rather not have you making distractions¨ as opposed to the other school we went to where the kids were encouraged to come fight for candy in order to pose for photos and classes be damned.
Also I was excited because some of the Quechuan I´m learning came in handy. ¨How are you?¨ ¨What´s your name?¨ Stuff like that. Some of the close ups with the kids that I have came not through candy but through trying to speak their language and having them teach me and laugh at my pronounciation which was very gratifying. Also they really do love to see their photos on the camera after taking them.
All in all a very interesting day and I am really grateful I got to go up and look forward to more of this type of exploring.
love to you all!
em

some pic updates

Laura and Jules up in the ruins













same ruins from a little further away - you can just make out Laura standing in the lower right corner














When I head out to sit by the creek, this is one of my spots.



















I´m pretty sure there are mules for this. I have seen them.













oooops! forgot this one. Some friends in a ruin in Urubamba. Left to Right - Ilipio, Nico, Daniel and some boy in the street that decided to join us. Daniel is a guide so it was great to have his insight. Ilipio and Nico and another cousin Ronnie are becoming fun parts of my daily life and we might have shared a bottle of rum last night playing cards in my house but it can´t be proven.

oh yeah, speaking of my house. terrible news! the landlord told me today that he rented the whole house to someone and I have to leave by April 15. But I figure if I found that place in one day I shouldn´t (knock on wood) have too much trouble finding somewhere else I love in a month.

exploring

All right, so what´s going on in my world?

I live here. I am meeting people and have lots of people to say hello to as I walk through town which I am finding so fun. I know which stall in the market I like best, have a regular juice lady, a favorite set menu lunch place, a few best taxi drivers, how to unlock the door for the old indian lady who can never figure out how to get into her house and just sits in front waiting for someone to come along and help, my favorite bartender, who makes the best tomatoe soup. The small things that make a life, you know?

My friends Laura and Jules from Cusco came and spent the last couple of days with me and we had such a great time. I had been feeling really lonely on Tuesday so I was really glad to have them show up. We did a bunch of great walks exploring where I live. Impossible to say which was best, they were all amazing. We climbed up the hill behind town to a little village and had a beer in the garden of a kind of store and chicha bar and visited with the old local men and laughed about how bad my Quechuan is. We walked down the street of a hundred windows but we kept getting distracted and I still don´t know how many windows there are. We walked along the Incan terraces down to the river and sat by it for a while which was really nice. Yesterday we went up into some of the ruins which was great. They are never quite as cool when you´re in them cause you can´t see them really, but I´ve been meaning to head up to explore them for a while so it was great to do it. Then we went out of town the other way and ended up walking down to the river and along the railroad tracks for a few kilometers then hiked up to the village of San Isidro and walked back along the road. Every single place had me marveling that I get to live here. Also Laura and Jules saying the same. Dang! you live here!

We bought some rum and coke and drank at my house with my neighbor Carlos who is a paramedic here in town and my friend Nico and his friend Ilipio. Then we headed out to the disco and stayed out until about 4:30 in the morning. Today was breakfast and getting Laura and Jules out of here and cleaning house and book reading. Nico had a soccer game tonight at 7 that I was hoping to get to but I didn´t hear from him so I will try to go to their game tomorrow.

I have an appointment with the municipilidad on Monday at 9am to talk about teaching English and then on Wednesday with a guy who started a program to get some of the native women in a small village up above somewhere a few hours away spinning wheels so they don´t have to spin the yarn by hand and can produce more. I guess that they are going up on Wednesday with a photographer from the US and he asked me to come along both to see it and help translate. I am really looking forward to getting up a little into the Indian villages. Also, I totally know how to help produce a photo shoot.

Love you all, I will try to figure out the phone stuff soon so I can make some calls, I know some of you are waiting for them. It might not be until Tuesday when I am back in Cusco though.

off to find some food.

pics of my house.

my house














my house













my balcony













street of a hundred windows. built by the inca and the street i live on. i haven´t counted them personally but one day i will see if there are really one hundred windows.










more of my room.

i have to run but will write a proper post soon. love you!