Day 20- Cuzco

This morning, I woke up around 5:30 or 5:45 to finish packing for a few minutes and get ready to leave for Cuzco. My whole family woke up to say goodbye to me, and I was extremely sad to leave them. I took a few pictures with my host mother, sister and brother (the father and son left early to play soccer that morning).

I also completely misjudged when to leave my house… I thought the flight was at 11am, not 10am, and the night before, my friends were saying how there was no way everyone would be at the bus by 7am. I got there just after 7:30 and was by far the last one there, so we had to hustle over to the airport. Fortunately, the drive was shorter than we had anticipated, and we made our flight. The flight was only about 45 minutes, and as soon as we landed, I fell in love with Cuzco.

Lima is a great city but doesn’t feel nearly as “Peruvian” as it does here. Lima is mostly flat with modern or colonial buildings, but Cuzco is hilly with red roofs and mountains everywhere.

However, it’s also 11,200 feet above sea level. As soon as we got off the plane, Kaitlin started blacking out and had to go to the hospital for altitude sickness. We all noticed the change in altitude as we walked through the streets; it was much harder to breathe, especially going uphill.
We went straight to our school, Amauta, which also sits atop a hill with a gorgeous view of the Andes mountains and the city.

We had a brief introduction to the program here and met our families, who were waiting at the school for us.

My family here consists of the mother and father, their son Alfonzo who is 10, the nana (not a relative but they consider her family... she's a bit older and helps around the house) and a little perro. I was hoping one of my host families would have a dog, so I'm really happy about that.

My host family is treating me very well, and I'm staying with my classmate Kris. We chose our respective rooms and unpacked before lunch. Our host mother served us chicken soup with potato chips and noodles, (though it tasted nothing like the chicken noodle soup I'm used to)...delicious! She also served us plenty of mate de coca tea (coke leaf), which is said to help with altitude sickness. In school, we have plenty of this tea available to us, as well as the leaves to chew on.

After lunch, Kris and I both took a nap... the best things to help with altitude sickness are water, tea, and rest. Three and a half hours later, I woke up to talk with my family a bit and wait for dinner. We had rice with chicken and vegetables and more soup.

It was also the night of the election... they predicted Ollanta as the winner but the official results will take 1-3 more days while they count all the ballots. Most people in Cuzco are rooting for Ollanta, and most people in Lima want Keiko, but both of my families want Keiko to win and are extremely nervous.

After dinner, I finished unpacking, did some homework and went to sleep around midnight.