Peru 2009

In June of 2009 my dad and I went to Peru!  It was my first time out of the country (other than a day trip to Canada) so I should say it was my first big trip out of the states.  We went for a mission trip with a group from my church and one of my best friends in the world also went with her dad.  We spend most of our week and a half in Cusco. 

Cusco

I love this city!  It is absolutely beautiful and full of Quechuan culture and history.  Cusco was originally an Incan city so there is a lot of Incan (or Quechua) influence.  There are ancient walls that are still standing despite earthquakes and the Spanish conquest.  Actually we were told that the Spanish tried to knock the walls down but they were too strong so they just built right on top of them.  This is beautifully illustrated by the Temple of the Sun or Qorikancha.  

We stayed in a hotel not far away from the Plaza de Armas.  The plaza is beautiful and I enjoyed visiting it often.  There are several nice restaurants and they aren't American chain restaurants.  There is a McDonald's and now a Starbucks but they aren't flashy and at least the McDonald's is pretty hidden.  While Lima is littered with chain restaurants.  I love how Cusco is so Peruvian.  It is fantastic.  There is a really cool museum inside Qorikancha and there is one close by about Peruvian textiles that I wish I would have gone to, but unfortunately we ran out of time.  Another thing I would suggest is going down to the art market but also visiting the local mercados (markets.)  There is some great fruit and bread that you can buy really cheaply and going to a mercado is also an experience in itself. 

There is a lot too see in Cusco and one way is looking at the city from above.  The above picture is the Plaza de Armas taken from above the city at the Cristo Blanco.  The Cristo Blanco is a bit like Cristo Redentor down in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.  It is a big white statue of Christ overlooking the city.  The view from up there is breathtaking.

Cusco is a fantastic city and one of my favorites.  Many tourist pass through this city to get to another one of my favorite places on the planet.  

Machu Picchu

There is me at Machu Picchu.  No one knows from sure what the purpose of this beautiful place but one thing is for sure.  The Incas were genius architects.  Walking around that city is just amazing and all the detail that went into it is fascinating.  The crazy thing is how they got all those rocks to that mountain ridge.  The Incas didn't even have a wheel to help them.  We were at Machu Picchu on one of the nicest days possible but normally it's pretty cloudy and even rainy.  But the Incan people had discovered ingenious ways to drain the water so their city didn't get washed away.  They also left a gaps where they didn't place buildings because they knew that's where the fault line is.  That is one reason the city has lasted this long.  Machu Picchu is an incredible place and I definitely recommend it to anyone and want to go again so badly. 

I absolutely love Peru and would love to go back.  Maybe someday I will return to Cusco and maybe even Machu Picchu! 

French???

I love languages!  Unfortunately I’m basically still monolingual.  My high school did have Spanish classes but they didn’t really focus on really learning the language so most people would take 2 or 3 years of Spanish and still know nothing.  When I was 14 to be honest the last thing I wanted to do was learn Spanish.  But I had no other options.  I would complain about rather learning another language like French or German but that was completely out of the question.  Well I ended up taking 3 1/2 years of Spanish in high school and now I’m minoring in it in college.  I still am not even close to being fluent or really even being able to hold a good conversation in Spanish.  I can hold simple conversations, but I make a lot of mistakes.  And I can’t seem to write a sentence without there being some grammatical mistake.  I can get the gist of most anything I read in Spanish (though I still struggle at times).  And hearing spoken Spanish still blows my mind at times (or most of the time).  To be honest learning a language can be a pretty discouraging process.  There is just so much to a language.  I think part of the reason I am not where I feel I should be after so many years of studying Spanish is that those first few years I didn’t really care and didn’t study any outside of class time.  Hopefully now that I care about learning Spanish I actually will! 

Well I will continue to study Spanish all throughout college and going to Uruguay will help immensely.  I also have friends who help me with my Spanish and we will sometimes talk and that helps too.  This upcoming semester I am going to do something a bit different though.  Since I will be in England I won’t have the opportunity to take a Spanish class, but French is an option. Though I don’t know if it is a good idea or not I think I’m just going to have to take it.  Well I do have to now since I’ve already signed up.  It is exciting but absolutely terrifying at the same time.  I think that it’s just been so long since I started learning a completely new language (outside of studying bits of languages just for fun) that I forgot what it’s like to not know any of a language you’re trying to study.  In Spanish I can write sentences even thought they might not be correct but I can get my point across for the most part.  I can’t do that with French so I feel like I’m a bit over my head.  I did consider waiting to study it until the fall to start but I wanted to know something of the language before I get into the classroom and get graded.  So I’ve been trying to learn a bit on my own.  It is not easy, and I don’t even know where to start.  I knew some Spanish before just because of living in an area where there are several Spanish speakers, but French is a whole new deal.  

We will see how it goes.  I have decided only to take a semester of French just so I can have the experience and get a basic understanding of the language.  After that I will return to studying Spanish.  Though I am excited about the prospect of learning French to be perfectly honest it’s not my first choice for a third language.  That would be either Portuguese or Norwegian.  But French is very interesting and will be good for me to be challenged like that.  It is a widely spoken and important language so I do look forward to studying it.