This is my last night in Cusco! I'm actually quite sad to be leaving, as I enjoy the company of my host family very much and I was starting to get into the rythmn of how things go here.
Last night Anselmo returned from their property in Acomayo and had brought in tow a giant boom box. Before dinner, during dinner, and after dinner while we were talking about all sorts of things (he's a very down-to-earth guy and great to talk to) he was blasting huaynos...the música típica of the sierra. Now this music is great for the first few songs. There's guitar, violin, accordion, men with great voices, a danceable rythmn, and interesting lyrics. But after about five they start feeling...grating. They all seem to have the same melody and they all have the same dramatic flourishes and then when the women sing...it's over. For some reason a woman singing huayno just makes it worse, I'm not entirely sure why. Anyway, so that was fun. Thinking about it more, though, if one is able to really plunge into the spirit of huayno--dancing, singing along, etc.--then they're not all that bad.
Today I met up with Renato and one of his friends and we made a slapdash lunch that turned out decently. We walked up to the Supermarket Mega (which I learned is one of the few really big companies from Cusco), pondered over pasta, then walked back, trying to avoid getting hit by cars while walking around construction sites. Anyway, Renato and I had some great conversations, ranging from 80s music to different accents, both in Spanish and English.
Later I helped three twelve year olds (one is the grandson of Rosa and Anselmo) with their English homework. This consisted of me summarizing news articles and then "presenting" them, on camera, as reporters who were going to give us the daily news. They then read the (slightly altered) summaries for the camera as their mothers looked on making suggestions about pretty much everything. It was actually a lot of fun.
Tomorrow I leave pretty early in the morning for Pucara, a town near Chijnaya, where I will meet up with David Cajo, the project coordinator, and then proceed on to Chijnaya.
So until I surface from the netherworld of Internet,
un beso y abrazo,
Leah
Los Andes
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment