View From Cusco

Hola Amigos!
I couldn't help but to post something about this spectacular night. We've made it to Cusco after a whirlwind tour of Lima and now I'm sitting in a beautiful hostel on a hill above Cusco looking at the gorgeous lights of the city, breathing the cool, fresh, mountain air (we're at 12000 ft by the way), and posting a message that my friends are going to read all over the world. Small world...
I just want to throw out the fact that I'm following in love with the andean highlands and Cusco. If everyone ever wants to come, I'll gladly come back!! Maybe I'll quit school and move here and speak spanish all the time...
I'm thinking of y'all,
Sus amigo,
Colter

Cue the Indiana Jones theme music...

This is an "adios" to all of you! No I'm not going to quit doing the blog, but I'm off on a weeklong adventure to Peru to explore the Lost City of the Incas: Machu Picchu!
Be expecting lots of excitement and fun anecdotes when I return.
Chao, que tenga un buen dia.

Casa Tour Part II

And finally as promised, here is the second instalment of my house tour to you all. For a recap, the first part introduced you to my humble room and my roommates. This will give you a taste of the rest of the house.

Welcome to Casa ACU!

Here we are at the front door. Quite large as you can see. The whole thing opens so the family living in the church building can park their car inside. The size and decorative metal work is left over from the building's days as a coffee factory.

This is a picture of the courtyard in the middle of the house. The windows that you can see lead to our program director's and professor's apartments and the perspective is looking out my room window. It's been really fun to have a central courtyard and be able to talk from room to room across the way. Imagine doing your homework at your desk and being able to ask your teacher a question by talking out the window!

This is a picture of our kitchen. Mariela, one of our cooks, is pictured in the left side of the picture. She and Raquel are amazing cooks! I've probably mentioned that before, but it's good enough to deserve repetition. I also learned from Raquel how to make empanadas, a Uruguayan staple, and am excited to make them back at home. And get excited Dad: I also learned how to make hot, fresh tortillas from scratch! Are you drooling yet?
This is the "loft," where we have access to a TV and couches to hang out, chill, and enjoy movies or games with friends. Through the door on the left is a little work out area that isn't much, but it's always nice to have a space to go and do some pullups, pushups or stretch after a run (when you're hot and sweaty and just want to hide your tired-ness).

This is the computer lab, being demonstrated by Courtney. There are 9 computers with internet access and 2 printers for our use. Most of us have our own laptops, but the internet is usually faster up here and it's nice to be able to work on group projects in here as well since we aren't allowed in rooms of the opposite gender. I understand that they need to do it, but it really gets anoying!

This is a picture of the classroom next door in the church. Posing for us here is Ken Cukrowski, our guest professor who teaches my Christianity in Culture class, and Amelia, my beginning Spanish instructor. They're both really fun!

Hope you enjoyed the tour. If you have any questions or comments don't hesitate to send me an email or comment on this post. Que pasan bien!

Photo Update

Here's some photos of two of the trips that I've already blogged about (refer to BA and rock climbing blogs for a more detailed explanation of events mentioned):

Buenos Aires TripNight on the town: all dressed up for our Tango Dinner
Casa Rosada: Like the Whitehouse, only rosada (pink). The balcony in the center is where Madonna made some famous speeches in her role as Eva Peron in the musical of the same name.

In a rather large church. You are looking at the mausoleum of San Martin, one of the most famous revolutionaries of Latin American independence. I learned about him in my junior year of High School in "History of the Americas" class and now I actually get to visit where he lived. How cool is that?Some statues in the La Boca neighborhood representing three very important people to Argentina: (from left to right) Carlos Gardel, the famous Tango singer, Eva Peron, former first lady of Argentina, and Diego Maradona, the soccer player that led Argentina to a World Cup win.The strange rabbit animal whose name I just learned: a mara, or patagonian hare. Interesting, they let them run wild in the zoo.The tomb of Eva Peron (I said she was famous didn't I?).The Subte, the subway system of BA. My first time on a subway!Just "Monkey-ing Around" in the Natural History museum.

Minas Rock Climging Trip:
My climbing buddies: Mallory and AlanMuchos Uruguayos, Muchos Amigos!
Alan just finishing a route. Notice the non-verbal gesture he is making. Not the traditional US thumbs-up, similar but including the index finger. It means that the person is happy. Alan just got to rock climb a 30 meter route, therefore he is happy :P

Just hanging out, contemplating the answers to life's biggest questions. Oh, and rock climbing too. "Hold me Alan!"

While My Guitar Gently Weeps (or Alvaro Pierri's anyway)

A week ago today, a couple of us students attended a concert at the famous Teatro Solis (theater of the sun, or something like that). The outside of the theater is very impressive: huge white columns decorate the front entrance with a magnificent golden sun at the peak of the roof. Then, being inside the auditorium itself is mind-boggling. The ceiling is high over your head with the names of famous writers, musicians, and playwrights displayed in grand array. The sides of the contained the classic box-style seating that you see in the opera houses of movies. Not quite the immense scale that you would need binoculars or anything, but still pretty cool (although we sat on the floor and didn’t get the whole high class experience…).
When we got seated, we noticed that the stage was set with only one chair lit up with a spot light. Now we had bought the tickets and gone to the concert thinking that it was to be a man playing traditional Uruguayan instruments. However, we figured out right before the show that we had mistranslated the show title and it was going to be a famous Uruguayan classical guitarist, Álvaro Pierri. Not to be dismayed we settled in to enjoy the show.
And boy, were we impressed! After a little presentation of some kind of award, he went backstage and returned with guitar in hand. He sat down and introduced the first song, tuned his guitar, and began to play. I’ve been in very few public places that were ever that quiet in enraptured attention. Pierri’s fingers basically flew over his guitar at times so fast you couldn’t tell where they were on the fret board. Some times during the music he would seem to curl around his guitar with his face a couple centimeters away as musician and instrument became one with the music. He played with such ease, enjoyment, and passion that it was infective to the audience as we sat there and gaped at his ability. By the time he finished his first 20+ minute long opus (completely memorized I might add) we were completely hooked.
Between songs he would give a little incite into the composer and the piece itself (this is all what I could understand with my limited Spanish). And he must have been a funny guy because he would make remarks that made the audience laugh but I couldn’t comprehend. I felt like a little kid again listening to laugh-tracks on TV shows telling me when things were funny. All we could do was smile and pretend that we weren’t as confused as we actually were. “Smile and nod, just smile and nod.”
He also made some sounds come out of that guitar that I never would have thought possible. Some of the songs contained sort of percussion and others strange strumming techniques. My question is how you’d write something like that down on paper? As one sat and listened to the music, you could let your mind go and imagine anything you wanted: soaring over the cerros of Uruguay or through the mountains of Montana. I guess that’s why I like classical guitar music so much. The concert finished with tremendous applause and the audience beckoned him back for three encores, with the last seeming to say, “I’m good, this song is amazing yet short, and I’m tired so go home.”

Everybody Must Get Stoned...or climb them anyway!

I’ve been really fortunate this semester in that I found the only rock climbing gym in all of Uruguay (and it happens to be only a couple of blocks away from our house!). The wall is located in the local YMCA, which is called the Asociacion Cristiana de Jovenes (Christian Association of Young-People) in Spanish, and several of us students have placed membership there. Three of us, Alan, Mallory, and I have been frequenting the rock climbing wall about 3 times a week. It’s been a great place to train for climbing, to make friends, learn about Uruguay, and to practice Spanish.
Recently, we were asked to go on a rock climbing camping trip with the group. Not wanting to be stuck in Montevideo we gladly accepted and went on to have the time of lives. Here’s our weekend in a whirlwind: rode on a rickety, old bus, rock climbed, ate Uruguayan food, rock climbed, pretended to know Spanish, learned Spanish, practiced Spanish, swam in the river, rock climbed in the river, ate Uruguayan parrilla (grill: we had ribs), slept, and repeated.
On the trip we got to meet a lot of the Uruguayans that we had been climbing with over the past couple of weeks and have made some pretty good friends. One of our closest, has been Pablo. We met him from the very start when we toured the ACJ, most likely because he speaks the best English out of anyone I’ve met while living down here. And he’s crazy: he’s the best climber I’ve ever met, he’s single and in his 30’s, and we found out on the camping trip that he’s a ham! While we were waiting for the ribs to grill on Saturday night, he kept trying to get the kids to sing and dance to no avail. And the 3 of us also call him our “mom.” He helped us out a ton on the camping trip, most comically by bringing us every kind of food available to try: “You don’t have to eat it if you don’t like it, just try it” he would say.
He also has one of the coolest jobs ever. I don’t know if he works for the ACJ or not, but we’ve come to learn that he has a private business creating fitness programs for special needs people, especially those with Down Syndrome. Alan and I were able to see him work with a group with DS in the rock climbing area and it really touched me. In the future I want to do something like that. Maybe not specifically with handicapped people, but just the aspect of using something that I love like rock climbing to make a difference in the world really appeals to me.

BA continued

Continued…
So we’re still on the city tour and go to visit more of La Boca neighborhood, specifically the caminitos. The Caminitos were sort of like tenement houses where immigrants fresh off the ships in the Buenos Aires harbor could go and live. They are brightly colored because the only paint that the people could get was that which was left over from painting the nearby ships. BA is extensively European and they can thank the many immigrants who came over on ships in the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries. We got out and walked around one touristy area and were able to walk through an artisan market and were blown away by some of the fantastic paintings and sculptures that we saw. Back on the bus, as we continued to drive around we passed many huge parks or squares that you would picture seeing in any large city. People were stopped for picnics, or tea/mate time, or even that much needed siesta. You couldn’t help but notice another familiar occurrence on the streets of BA, especially near parks: dog walkers. Our guide said it was very common for people to hire dog walkers to take their dog out on private or public walks. As for the public walks, it wasn’t uncommon for us to see a person walking 5 or more dogs all at once! Imagine the pooper scooper you would have to carry around! For our final destination, we visited the Recoletta cemetery where the members of the namesake high-class neighborhood are entombed. One of the highlights was to see the tomb of Eva Peron, the wife of a former President of Argentina, one Juan Peron, and heroine of the working classes. She was both controversial and beloved by the people during her husband’s terms as president and it was a sad day in Argentina when she succumbed to cancer at a young age. There is a Broadway show called Eva Peron telling the story of the young woman’s rise to fame and an Argentine version Evita that we watched earlier as part of a class. Madonna and Antonio Bandera star in a movie version of the former.
After the tour, we were set free until dinner time, and four of us decided to visit the Natural History Museum across town. Because of its distance, we rode the Subte (the BA subway system), me for the first time on a subway! It was every thing that I ever dreamed a subway would be…loud and bumpy and gave me a nasty case of vertigo when I got off. Other than that it was a pleasant experience. At the Museum, we saw all kinds of weird and wild stuff from a South American perspective. When I say that, I don’t mean that Argentine scientists name things differently that we do, only that many of the dinosaur and prehistoric animals I had never heard of before, most likely due to their only being found in South America. It was very fun to wander around with my friends finding funny ways to “interact” with the exhibits to produce comical photos. After our private tour (and being thoroughly exhausted and very hot and sweaty) we retreated back to the hotel.
For dinner, we walked to a restaurant called “La Estancia” (ranch) and had another unbelievable meal. We had the choice of an appetizer, beef or chicken, and what dessert we wanted. I’ve never seen so much meat on a plate in my life! I swear that the steak I got was half a foot long, three inches wide, as many thick, and every bit of it very good. I’ll also have to throw in for my good buddy Alex Cox (wish you could be here man) that we had a course of freshly baked provolone cheese. We pictured it more as an appetizer, but they didn’t serve it until after the main course. Interesting, but I don’t feel as though it cleansed my palate at all, it that was its purpose.
The highlight of the next day was visiting the zoo. I wanted to go to be able to specifically see native South American animals and got what I wanted. We saw capyberras, native wildcats, an Argentine black bear, llamas, and two types of rodents that they let run wild in the zoo: nutria (muskrats) and a strange rabid looking animal that I to this day have no idea what they are called. One funny anecdote: Mark and I walked up to the baboon exhibit and all of a sudden they went nuts! They threw themselves at the front wall of the cage and screamed their heads off! We finally figured out a kid wearing a monkey mask had approached the cage and they were acting out of territorial interest. That kid would have been a gonner had that cage wall not been there.
On the way back to the hotel to gather and head back home, we walked by a huge metal, flower sculpture that is mechanized to open during the day and close at night. I would have really liked to have been there when it opened at sunrise. After that we perused the fine arts museum and saw actually paintings by Monet, Van Gogh, and Rembrant. There wasn’t anything like Starry Night, but it was still cool to actually attend a fine arts museum. I’m becoming so “cultured” on this trip it’s scary!
Later that evening we climbed, exhausted yet enlightened, onto the Buquebus for our return voyage.