We had an excellent Valentine’s Day here in Peru! Sunday night we made chocolate chip cookies for all of our friends and Monday night Brittany and I made them all Valentines. They were stinkin’ cute, if I do say so myself. We attached them to their baggie of cookies and then Tuesday morning we walked down to Banos del Inca to deliver them to as many as we could. People love us. The girl who sells us our cheese and yogurt gave us each a DELICIOUS little chocolate and then our bread lady gave us a whole free sol of some bread we’d never bought from her. It’s kind of cool that people want to do something for you in return, even though I felt bad because we didn’t want anything.
After working with the kids we headed to Cajamarca with some of our YSA friends for a movie. Our first Peruvian movie!! And Peruvian it was…definitely not up to Pixar standards hahaha I’ll admit, I fell asleep 20 minutes in. Heck, half the time I can’t stay awake for English movies AND I was running on four hours of sleep instead of the usual 7-9 we get. We decided to buy popcorn for our movie and I was thrilled when I saw that a large was only s/ 5.50 (like $2). I thought to myself “I’m glad Peruvians don’t rip you off like American theaters” (the tickets were less than $2 a piece). Then I saw what a large looked like. It’s more like an American medium. Nowhere near the big refillable bucket. I was sad, and then bought two. It was good, they didn’t put extra butter (I don’t’ even think that was an option) and there was just a hint of salt. Way healthier than an American theater BUT no one eats movie theater popcorn to be healthy.
After the movie we thought we were going to go to some sort of birthday party. Wrong. We ended up going to a YSA dance. Now, I’ve gone to ONE dance at college and that’s only because my roommate was in charge. I’m just not a dancer. I like dancing, I guess, so maybe I just don’t like dances. Anyways, we show up to this dance (of course we’re the first ones because no one here comes on time) and kill some time talking to the guys and teaching English/ learning Spanish. Once the dance started it was pretty much a lets-just-watch-the-gringas-look-like-idiots-because-they-can’t-latin-dance dance. The music was fun but I tired of it after five songs. It all sounds the same when you don’t know the difference between a cha-cha and salsa and meringue…I really should have taken social dance :P
So how do Peruvian dances differ from American? Well the biggest difference is that you stand in two lines and face your dance partner the entire time to dance. There are no slow songs so you just dance across from someone for three hours. Don’t worry, we introduced them to dancing in a group circle at some points. All the dances have dances so there’s not too much free form, crazy dancing. Before the dance they were playing all sorts of American music (some not appropriate for a church dance, but they said it was okay because they didn’t know the words haha) and then they only played TWO the entire three hours of the dance. They weren’t even very good dance songs. The last hours was “crazy hour” and they brought out confetti and streamers and balloons to dance with! It was pretty fun and more like an American dance for the first 20 minutes. They did a sort of circle/ line dance, the train, and some more free-form “dancing.”
We thought we’d just stay for half an hour or hour but ended up staying the entire time (not entirely by choice). The good news is that we got a piece of cake at the end!
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| Roses from Aleksi and a bouquet of wildflowers made by Brittany. |
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| This is a large popcorn. Peru: FAIL. |
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| The dance crew. |
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