Well guys, we've been robbed. What was stolen from us you ask? Our iPods? Money? Passports? No, no, even worse.. Our dinner knives. It has now been a full week since our 50 cent knives have gone missing. In that time we have compiled a thorough list of suspects.
Suspect 1: Crazy Lady - this chick is nuts and happens to live below us. On the first day we met her, she chased Alison around the kitchen with a broom. We thought, okay maybe she's having a bad day. Then she started speaking Spanish to us and English to our Peruvian landlord. That just doesn't make sense. The kicker was when she told us she doesn't believe in Internet and only believes in person-to-person interactions. This is hysterical because she's the least personable human we've ever met. It doesn't help that her butt crack is always hanging out. We've decided Crazy needed the knives to simultaneously kill us.
Suspect 2: Third Floor Ghost - we don't know why, but every morning at 8am the ghost on the third floor rearranges the furniture in the room. Incredible seeing as the furniture just includes a bed, chair, and side table. Also incredible because we have been living here for 3 weeks and have never seen anyone go up or come down from the third floor. Ghosts could need knives, right?
Suspect 3: 9-year-old Tienda Worker - we know this girl is 9, but she is the devil. Why? Not only did she try to sell us bread for five times the actual price, but she also gives us the smallest pieces of cake. You just cannot trust people who don't serve good desert portions. Thus, she is a suspect.
Suspect 4: Our Quechua-speaking Witch Abuela - we haven't seen our Quechua-speaking abuela since we moved out, and are pretty sure she has been up to some witch business. What better way to drive to two fat gringas crazy than steal a necessary tool for eating?
Suspect 5: Heather*: We're actually pretty sure this is the culprit. Turns out she's the only other one who uses the kitchen. Also, when our mug was previously stolen it was returned with lipstick marks. Heather was conveniently wearing lipstick the night before for Halloween. Coincidence? We don't think so *Name was changed to protect the identity of our suspect.
For now, the case is open, but we'll let you know if we solve it. In the mean time, remember that time we told you we were going to Bolivia? We went.
Usually you have to take a 12 hour bus to Puno, hop in a colectivo, catch a bike taxi, cross the border, and then take another colectivo to get to Copacabana. So when the director of our program, Gabby, invited us to go to Bolivia with her and her friend, Manuel, who owns a car, we were pretty pumped. We thought, "How comfortable! How quick and easy! How safe it will be driving with the locals." Absolutely every assumption we had was incorrect. How is this this possible? Well, let us tell you:
We woke up at 430AM super eager to start the trip. We walk outside and see a beautiful, brand new Chevy SUV, with a warm scrambled egg breakfast waiting for us. This can't be real.. Talk about the best trip ever! We got on the road, and man, Manuel had a bomb road trip playlist featuring One Republic, Don Omar, Katy Perry and some awesome Spanish dance tunes. As we jammed to P!nk's Raise Your Glass, we kind of forgot we weren't in America and instead were roadtripping through the Andes in Peru with an Argentinian and Peruvian. We were literally thrown back to reality when we flew over a speed bump at serious pace. We quickly learned that Manuel had no clue how to drive. It also didn't help that he might be legally blind. We don't have enough fingers to count the number of times he ran into stationary objects. He also actually hit a dog (as dog lovers that part was really hard for us so we ate our feelings away with sublimes and bread. Classic). We were making great time, and by 10AM we were only about 15 minutes away from Puno, the main city on the Peruvian side of Lake Titicaca, close to the Bolivian border. Anddd that's where we stopped. Remember that time when we went to go to the "jungle" and had to ride in an 18 wheeler with eggs and sugar because of a strike? Welp, the strike struck again. The road was covered with boulders and tree trunks so no cars could pass into the town of Juliaca, which was on strike because of raised taxes. Why they chose to protest the tax in the form of closing the roads is beyond us. We parked behind a row of cars waiting to pass, and with nothing else to do, decided it was the perfect time for a picnic. Seeing as we were in the middle of nowhere with very limited food options, we had to make the most of what was available at the closest store. By this we mean we ate "atun" which is supposed to be tuna, but we are pretty sure was canned sardines, white bread, bottled yogurt, and saltine crackers. What a nutritious meal. So that brought us to about noon, giving us 6 more hours until the strike was supposed to be over. What came next? A beer.
Parked waiting for the road to open... Those rocks in the distance are nothing compared to what we drove through later in Juliaca
Picnic lunch in the middle of a Peruvian strike. It makes sense
It's weird how we have found ourselves in a car during a strike drinking a beer more than once.
The boredom was actually unbearable, so we decided to backtrack an hour to visit some pre Inca ruins in the middle of nowhere. This decision ended up being great. The ruins were incredible, and the timing was perfect. When we got back, the road was open. "What luck! How perfect! It's gonna be smooth sailing from here!" We literally couldn't have been more wrong. While waiting 8 hours for the road to open was miserably boring, driving through Juliaca was actually hell. We know we exaggerate a lot (examples: this is the coldest day of my life, She's my nightmare, you're the funniest person I know), but this time we are under exaggerating so our parents don't have heart attacks. People were lighting everything on fire, the roads were covered with glass, boulders, and huge mounds of dirt, people were yelling very mean things at us, there was even an abuela threatening to throw rocks at the car and a child ready to hit the car with plywood. So yeah, whoever said the strike was over was way off. To avoid the madness we found a nice, local taxi driver to lead us through the back roads to get out of this hell. Two hours later and 200 yards away from the road to Puno literally the worst possible thing happened. We got a flat tire. We can't say we were surprised we got a flat due to the facts that our driver was blind and the road was completely covered with broken glass and boulders. Oh, and at this point it was freezing cold, pouring rain, pitch black, and the brand new car didn't come with a wrench to change the tire. So that's all ideal. After a half hour of walking through the pouring rain searching for help, Manuel returned with two Peruvian angels and the proper wrench and fixed the tire. By midnight, after 19 hours of travel, we arrived in Puno. NOT EVEN COPACABANA.
We don't have a photo of the hell that was Juliaca because we were focused on staying alive and guarding our belongings from the lunatics. Here's a photo from the Pukara Ruins though!
The next morning we woke up and began attempt number 2. For some strange reason we found ourselves leaving the car at a police station just outside the border. Turns out you can't really take a car across the border. Good thing our local Peruvian and Argentinian friends looked into that before the trip. Just as we would have had we taken the bus, we took a colectivo to the border where you walk about 50 steps and boom you're in Bolivia. At 2pm on Friday we finally arrived in Copacabana. Though getting there was a nightmare, Copacabana was sick. The town is right on Lake Titicaca with unreal views. The Lake is at such high altitude it looked like it was in the clouds. So crazy. Speaking of crazy, we visited the beautiful white church and the Virgin Mary shrine where it's tradition for visitors to light a candle, each of which has a particular significance. Pretty ironic when us two broke, unemployed Princeton grads randomly were given the candles for money and work. Rather than taking this as a sign to get our lives together, we decided to continue our adventure and go to Isla Del Sol, an island in Lake Titicaca. Isla Del Sol was unbelievable. We got dropped off at the north dock where we hiked up to a Labryinth of ruins. From here, we hiked from the north end through the island to the southern dock. During the 2 hour hike we saw the terrain change from Arizona desert to a forest to a terraced mountainside all while being surrounded by the worlds highest navigable lake. Work and money can wait while we take in sights like these.
View of Copacabana and Lake Titicaca
'twas beautiful
Isla Del Sol
Top of Isla Del Sol with our Peruvian and Argentinian
From Hell in Juliaca to The path to Heaven on Isla Del Sol
The lake in the sky .. Trippy
Luckily we made it back to Ollanta safe, and walked right into a 7 day fiesta. Who would have thought town anniversaries are a huge deal here? Parades, concerts, dances, abuelas posted up on the curb with cases on cases of beer, it's a sight and a half. In the spirit of the fiesta, we decided to go to our first and last discoteca. It would have been culturally insensitive to not celebrate. Unfortunately, discotecas happen to be the hot spot for 15 year old boys in Ollanta. Yes, we do just mean boys. On the opposite end of the age spectrum, we recently had a 5'4", 80 year old abuelo and a 50 year old business man get in a legit fist fight over us. This happened at Urubamba's anniversary party. At first we thought it was cute, we were salsa dancing with the abuelo, he bought us a beer, what a nice guy. We decided it was time to leave when the abuelo professed his love and karate kicked the business man who was also attempting to express his love. Why is it that Peruvian abuelos are fighting over us but we cant get boyfriends in the U.S? All around weird Anniversary experiences. Probably not as weird as our recent trip to the corn fields, though. Our old house mom, Sonia, invited us over for lunch on Day of the Living (yeah, we didn't know that was a thing either.. They really celebrate everything here). After living there for a month and seeing the ragers Sonia usually throws, we were expecting a lot of people and music. So we were a little confused when it was just us, Sonia, and her daughter eating greasy pork and tomales. Just as we were starting to feel special since we were the only ones invited, thinking she really must have missed us, she dropped the bomb. This was all a ploy to get us to work in her corn field. We tried to avoid it, throwing out excuse after excuse, but she was persistent. Realizing we had no other option, we hopped in the van and headed to work in the fields. We didn't really do much, but we learned two things: 1) never give a child a machete, and 2) a day of work in Ollanta always ends with beer.. Two good lessons if you ask us. We also walked away with pieces of Inca pottery because the field is on Inca ceramic grounds. That was pretty cool. As funny as it was to be conned into working the fields it was great catching up with our Peruvian family.
This is Rio, our 5 year old "brother," with multiple machetes in the field. The good thing about language barriers is the entire time Rio was running wild with multiple machetes, we were able to make comments like "you're out of your mind," "who is your mother?" "there's something wrong with you," without anyone understanding and being offended.
Aside from our Peruvian family we have also gotten close with the rural community of Pomatales where we teach primary school. Since we are headed to Bolivia soon, we just had our last day of teaching which was so depressing. The school threw us a little goodbye ceremony where the students recited poems, gave us flowers, and man we got a lot of love notes. We decided we can't volunteer anymore because it's just too hard on our hearts. How the hell do you respond when small children are begging you to stay? That ain't right. But back to us, woof, we were flattered. The flattery faded fast when a five year old boy touched Alison's leg and reacted with "gorda," (Translation: fat), followed by the teacher straight up saying "you girls are fat." Ya hate to hear that. We won't let em get to us though! We still end every night with Sublime time. Also, due to our frequent (read: every night) cake purchases, we were just offered a discount on all desserts and pizzas at a local restaurant. This will seriously save us a lot of money.
Claire's Soccer Squad
Alison's Squad
Where dreams come true.. School on the left. Baller, Nicanor, with the ball
The kids who called us fat.. How cool are they though?
We just went on a hike to Maray Terraces and are now firm believers in aliens. We are going to leave it at that.
WHATTTT IS THIS??
HOW DID THEY DO IT??
WE DON'T GET IT .. But smile!
Passed these Salt Pans on the way .. Lots of salt
Also passed the two coolest women of all time from New Jersey (okay, this might be an exaggeration). Had to take a pic
Well guys, we leave you with the ugliest picture you will ever lay eyes on. Hope you are entertained by this. We are now thinking this "game" where our wrists were tied together was actually a ploy the teachers had to watch two gringas look like idiots. They were successful. How about our hats though? Pretty sweet.
This Is The End:
9. We hear the lunatics of Juliaca yelling "Decapitate Them!" Seriously? Wo says that?
10. Alison gets the first Parasite.
11. Learning that cars stop going back to Ollanta from Urubamba at 6PM. We were in Urubamba and it was 9PM. That's a sticky situation
12. 5 year old Rio swinging two machetes around while we stand in a burning field. That was pretty dangerous actually
13. Sometimes we get really bored in the small town of Ollanta. To curb this boredom, we picked up the only logical hobby: glass cutting. Just so you know, trying to cut a beer bottle with string, nail polish remover, and matches is pretty difficult and ridiculously dangerous
