malo chancho!

Hi guys!!

I hope everyone had a great New Year’s! I spent mine on the beach which was awesome and lovely but I missed you all of course. It involved a bonfire, a little bit of rain, a camping tent and of course, fireworks. Everyone here in Peru celebrates New Years by lighting giant scarecrow-like dolls on fire which I think is borderline creepy.

Yesterday I took my first trip to the Peru- Ecuadorian border to go “classy clothes shopping” with my mom and sister. This took six hours. This would have been okay except for the fact that I only had my mom’s “weight loss shake” she made that morning which is a combination of watered-down pineapple juice and molasses. My stomach has been acting up for the past two weeks with a large amount of “L.S.M.s” as well, so I didn’t want to drink all of the shake with fear of the repercussions it would have n my stomach. The “frontera” as it’s called here, is known for its low prices and overwhelmingly large amount of stuff. I know it as the sludge center where everything smells like feces which was made worse by the fact that it rained yesterday. So it smelled and I was sliding in mud everywhere. We went shopping in the first place because it’s my town’s anniversary this weekend and we’re celebrating with a lot of animal cruelty (see cockfights and horse races) with a dab of debauchery at the two day concert on Sunday and Monday night. Gotta look nice for that! So finally my sister settles on some one-size-too-small jeans and a green shirt with plaid playboy bunnies on it. I kept my vote to myself on that one.

While on the brink of starvation, we sat down to get some street-food lunch. I ordered chicken while my sister got something red- meat related. My stomach, having shrunken with lack of normal food in my system, caused me to eat my lunch a little more slowly than everyone else. This apparently meant I didn’t like it. My sister, having inhaled her high-cholesterol meat and a whole plate of rice began to eye my goods. Seeing this and feeling awkward, I offered her my side of beans which she ate without hesitation. As I paused debating whether I could continue putting more white rice into my body, she asked if I was “done” with my food. I don’t know if I’ve told you all this, my sister is 13 and has a BMI rating of 26 (25 is considered obese) and weighs a good 15 pounds more than my +10 lbs. Peruvian-self. Feeling awkward to say no because both her and my mom were looking at me, I gave up my plate. What really touched my nerve was when she right afterward asked me if I liked my cebada “corn drink” because I had only managed to drink half of it. I finally said “yes I like it a lot” took a huge gulp, and then a fourth of the glass left for her to wash my rice and beans down (she obviously, had already finished hers).

So needless to say, after a six hour ordeal, I was ready for some “family break time.” But during anniversary week, this doesn’t happen. Once it got dark, we walked out to the plaza to watch the “Miss San Juan de la Virgen “ beauty pageant It started a cool two hours behind schedule at 10 o clock which is when I usually hit the hay. What I didn’t expect was that this beauty pageant involved four- fifteen year old girls prancing around in bathing suits on stage to the cat calls of anywhere between 20- 60 year old men. Call me feminist, but I thought this was a tad uncomfortable and a little pedophilic on the grown men’s part. After watching for an hour and a half, I finally decided my time might be better well spent sleeping.

On a completely different note, I have another animal-encounter story for you all. I hope I don’t gross you out too much with these stories, but they seriously are sometimes the most interesting stuff that I’ve got going on. Two days ago, I was sitting in my kitchen just talking with the fam when I heard my cousin’s pig next door scream. I knew they couldn’t be killing it this early because he wasn’t big enough, so I poked my head over to see what was going on. My uncle Keko was trying to haul “Chanco Luiz (his name)” into the house with a rope tied around his snout. Chanco Luiz wasn’t having any of this, with all four of his hoofs dug into the ground. I yelled to my cousin Luiz what was going on as he was trying to kick it in the direction of the house. He replied, “He’s going to the big-pig farm.”

“Big- pig farm? For what? Are we going to eat him”, I said.

“No, he’s just been a bad pig and he ate two of the pollitos”

Pollitos, for you all are “little chickens”. Everything made sense then when I looked at the pig’s mouth and it was blood-stained. In almost perfect timing, the head of one of the chickens rolled out of Chanco Luiz’s mouth and onto the floor. Chancho Luiz, being in his pen earlier, nabbed two of the unlucky chickens that were walking a little to close to his fence, and proceeded to eat them alive. For that, he had to go to a “pig farm” because he couldn’t stay in my aunt and uncle’s pen anymore. Between the yelling and the pig screaming, I managed to grab my video camera and get a video of Chanco Luiz being driven off into the distance. However, I’m glad I wasn’t in their house when my aunt had to break it to my uncle when he got home from work that two of his chickens that he was going to use in the cockfight on Saturday had just been eaten alive. I guess that hurts his chances of winning!

So there you have it, a quick rundown of a few things that went down this week in San Juan. Next week, my English class starts (it was supposed to start this week but I had only one student come). So hopefully that will go well and I can spread some news around to get people to come! I hope you all are doing well.