The beginning of the beginning!

Hola mi amigos! Tu comprende Espanol? No? Yo tambien! :)

Holy smokes, the time has come and I am here in Cusco, it still doesn’t seem quite real! I will be here for the next 11 weeks trying to blend in with my pasty skin and hopefully learn how to say more than I want a quesadilla, gracias! Here’s what has happened the first couple days!

Oh yeah, sorry this post is pretty long because it's my first week!

Sunday and Monday March 28 and 29:
I flew out of Salt Lake Sunday morning at 8:30 to LA where I had the privilege of sharing half of my seat with a rather large man, he didn’t ask if he could have part of my seat but I figured it was the right thing to do.... :) Once in LA I made my way to the international terminal, which if any of you have been to the international terminal you know that means hordes and hordes of Asians! Luckily I was 5 hours early so there was no line and I checked right in. I decided to check out the food joints and walked around for a bit when I decided to go through security I reached for my passport only to find an empty pocket! Panic set in and as I started to frantically retrace my steps I hear over the loud intercom “Natalie Jane Smalley, please come to the information desk” oops! I ran to the information desk and asked the man if someone had turned in my passport, he looked at me with skeptical eyes and then down at the passport, “Name?” “Jayne Smalley” I said, he finally handed it to me and said “You’re a very lucky girl.” Ya think? :)


This is one of the main cathedrals in Le Plaza Del Armas, they have cathedrals and churches everywhere and they are so beautiful!

The flight from LA to Lima is about 9 hours, ya know a little longer than the average person would call a work day, I say average person because I am most definitely not average. :) Got in to Lima at midnight and my flight to Cusco wasn’t until 5:30 the next morning. Luckily I had sat by a kid on the way over from Oregon whose flight didn’t leave until 6, so we watched each others stuff and tried to get some sleep in the airport.


This is only one side of my bedroom.... The other side has the feel and look of a discotec, maybe you're thinking Jayne discotec was so 1980, not in Peru that kind of thing is modern art!

I finally got to Cusco at 6:50 in the morning after almost 24 hours of straight travel! The airport in Cusco is pretty dilapidated with only two tiny baggage claim areas and maybe 20 carts total. I grabbed my stuff and headed out the door to see the sweetest looking lady with a big smile on her face holding a sign with my name on it! Her name is Isabelle and she hugged me and I assume told me to follow her, I say assume because she speaks no English and as previously mentioned my Spanish is slightly above that of a house trained goldfish living in Peru! As I was following her out of the airport parking area she was just a chattin away and smiling and nodding, to which I could only look at her dumbfounded thinking, what did I get myself into?! Taxis kept coming up and she would ask how much and they were apparently way too much because she made us walk away from the airport a ways before one finally told her an acceptable amount (I think they had been saying 20-30 soles and it should have been around 5 soles! There are a little less than 3 soles to $1). We took the taxi home where I met Caesar my host dad and ate breakfast consisting of hard bread and jam, some type of almost lemonade type juice and hot water with coca de matte. Which is a common tea type drink down here that looks and smells like ground up wet green hay! It wasn’t too bad….. with the 6 spoonfuls of sugar I added to it! :) As we left the house Isabelle gave me a set of keys and tried to explain how to use them. There’s a lock on the door and then a built in lock on the gate and then another manual hard lock you have to undo on the gate!


Do you think that I maybe have an irrational fear of going hungry?

She came with me to school where a lady put me in a classroom and gave me a test to see what level I was at. 10 minutes later my teacher walked in to the room and the only answer I had known was my name, and I was even a little unsure of that at this point... :) My teacher this week was Jose, he’s really great and helped me learn so much, my head just kind of permanently feels like it’s going to explode right now! We have a 30 minute break in the middle of the day where I met a bunch of the other students. They have a teaching program and a volunteer program at the school the majority of the students are learning but there are quite a few volunteering as well and almost everybody here is traveling alone. It’s crazy to meet all the different kinds of people! After class got over I had to quickly learn how to catch a cab and even though I had printed off the address of my host family when the taxi asked me which street the house was down I had no idea! Luckily he was really nice and I told him the house number and we drove around a couple blocks until we found the right one. When I finally figured out how to unlock everything and get in the house Isabelle greeted me and had lunch all ready. Lunch is their big meal here because it’s at 11,300 ft in elevation apparently it slows their digestion down, so lunch is big and dinner is just a light snack. We had a delicious creamy cheese potato onion soup and then grilled chicken on the bone with carrots and onions, it was very delicious. She talked to me all the way through lunch and I just smiled and ate. After that I headed back to school for a city tour which was also in Spanish (are you seeing a pattern yet?) with a girl from New Jersey and a kid from the UK.


This isn't the best picture cause it's dark but this was during the Procession on Monday night. They have a statue of Christ that they march around and I think everyone comes out to hopefully receive his blessings, it was pretty cool but so slow and so many people!

Later that night I was supposed to meet a girl to go watch the Procession, but of course was late! :) I talked to these two other boys from the school, one is from California and the other is from Denmark, and they were going to get a view of everything from above the city so I tagged along! Afterwards we headed down in to the thick of things and I’m pretty sure every single person in Cusco was there! It was nuts there were so many people everywhere and it lasted forever! By the time it was finally over it took another hour to get out of the main square because there were so many people you had to follow the crowd whether you wanted to or not! By the time things cleared up a little bit I had to try to catch a taxi home but of course everyone else was trying to catch a taxi as well! I started to panic after 15 minutes of no luck with a taxi, and I was thinking, I’m never gonna make it back and I’ll probably die right here! Haha I did finally get one (he charged me double, but I didn’t even care) and got home about 10:30 at night! Needless to say I slept like a log!


Isn't this hot? Oh yeah and the La viva Peru is pretty cool too! The house I live in is right below this!


Tuesday March 30
Woke up at the butt crack of dawn aka 6:30, and felt quite refreshed! Breakfast consisted of manzanas (apples) and platanos (bananas) in yogur (I bet you can’t guess what that one is) with this oatmeal type drink in a coffee cup. Es bueno! Finished my homework in the taxi on the way to school (some things never do change) and for the first time in my life was 10 minutes early to class! Class was great again, but also like information overload! After the break we were playing a game with all the new phrases I learned and I was forgetting simple things because my brain felt like it was going to explode! I hope it gets better! Went to dinner with a bunch of the other students at this vegetarian restaurant, where apparently all the intellect slash tree huggers meet and by intellects yes I mean I saw lots of dreads and chacos, however sadly there were no subarus! :)

At dinner I was telling a few people about the ginormous Hispanic population in Utah and they were all way surprised, one girl even said, “I thought the only thing in Utah was mormons!” I almost died laughing!


This is what the plaza looks like during the day, it was completely packed during the procession and so we were all the streets where it started!

Wednesday March 31
Another espanol filled day of school! My teacher Jose was asking me if I liked to dance and what type of music I liked to dance to, I told him hip hop. He wasn’t sure what hip hop was so he asked me to write down my favorite hip hop song to dance to so he could look it up. Naturally I wrote down Low by Flo Rida and he asked me to sing part of it. For those of you not familiar with the song it goes:
“She had them apple bottom jeans (jeans), boots with fur (with the fur) the whole club was lookin at her
She hit the flo (she hit the floor) next thing you know shorty got low low low low low”

So after my incredible music performance the first thing he says is, (in this accent) “Wot ar apple ba-ttom jeans?” And then the rest of the day he just kept saying apple bottom jeans over and over! It was so funny!

On the way home the taxi driver tried to charge me 3 soles instead of 2.50 soles, don’t even worry I told him what was up and he won’t try to pull that business again!

Thursday April 1
First off can I just say I didn’t even realize it was April Fools until 6 o’clock at night which means I didn’t pull a single prank! I mean can you imagine the fun I could have had with my host family? Seran(how the heck do you spell that?) wrap on the toilet, short sheeting their bed, replace salt for sugar, oh man did I miss the boat on that one!


This is Ceasar and Isabelle, I seriously can't get over how sweet they are! This is their garden and they are so proud of it!

Oh yeah and did I mention we didn’t have school Thursday or Friday because of Easter weekend? They call it Semana de Santos (week of saints) and it’s a huge deal! We’ve been eating special food and desserts and everyone has work and school off on Thursday and Friday!

After breakfast I met this girl Lauren from Oregon in town to explore! As we were at the top of the church of san cristobal, this guy came and asked us if we wanted to do a horse back ride to a couple different places, so we bartered for a fair price and then followed him 20 minutes uphill to his ranch it was brutal, but so much fun!


If you think that maybe this picture looks familiar like maybe you saw it in the last action western movie, well then you would be wrong because it's just me!


Como se llama? Llama! I thought this was the funniest thing I'd ever thought of in my life, but apparently nobody else did!



So apparently it’s not just a rumor that you burn more easily at a higher elevation... This is from a couple hours on the horses!

Friday April 2
Wanted to go for a run after breakfast and when I asked Isabelle if it was safe, and by asked her yes I did it in Spanish! Who’s impressed? :) She told me it was safe and if I just went down a couple blocks there was a grande parque, now my Spanish isn’t the best yet but I think I knew what this meant without having to look it up! As I went running pumped to find the place where I could potentially chillax and play soccer and read outside this is what I found:
Picture of the park

Running felt great, except for the part where it was lots harder to breathe, but there are stray dogs everywhere here! They’ve all been really nice so far and pretty much just leave you alone and do whatever the heck they want! But I went running past these guys just sitting on the sidewalk and there were about 3 or 4 dogs by them, one of the little yappy dogs came running at me and started barking but as soon as I turned toward it, it stopped and ran away. I thought ok no big deal, I’m fine. Not 5 seconds later I hear this dog barking like it’s ready to tear something apart, I looked back and this big dog is running straight at me! I tried to play it cool, because I'm pretty sure the guys thought it would be funny to sick the dog on me, but inside I flipped a brick! I think I lost 10 years off my life in that instance! Luckily it was all bark and no bite and left me alone after a minute!

After that I went in to Cuzco to meet Lauren and we met up with this lady Caroline, she in her 30's and from the UK, she's way nice and we just kind of tagged along with her to check out some of the churches and stuff!


I have not been homesick this entire trip until I found this park and watched these guys play a pickup soccer! It seriously made me miss soccer so much! haha


I don't know why I love it so much, but all the streets are paved in cobblestone like this and they're all either going up or down!


This is the only 5 star hotel in Cusco, it used to be a monastery and it very beautiful, but it's a couple hundred bucks a night to stay, when you can find a cheap hostel for $4!