La Luna de Miel Larga

Whew, time is flying by, and we have not updated our blog for over 6 weeks! Instead of writing one long post with every detail, we are going to post several different summaries of what we have been up to, and that way we can include some pictures with each post too. So our lives in a nutshell:

• Early December, we moved to our new apartment! (“Our apartment” post)
• Christmas season in Cusco was very hectic, both with work and parties. (“Cookies and Parties” post)
• Kathie and Silas (Chris’s mom and brother) came to visit from December 24 until January 10. With them we traveled around the Sacred Valley, to Salkantay and Machu Picchu, and to Arequipa and the Colca Canyon in the south. (“Christmas and Travels around Cusco and the Sacred Valley” post, “Salkantay and Machu Picchu” post, and “Arequipa and the Colca Canyon” post)
• Chris has been working all this week on a conference he presented at on Thursday. There has been publicity and hype galore. (“Digital Raymi” post)

See the following posts for more information!

We got back yesterday from five days in Lima, where we had Thanksgiving lunch on Friday and presentations on Monday with the Fulbright Commission.

We spent Thursday afternoon running back and forth to the computer store that will send Chris’s busted power cord to the U.S. and then send us a replacement cord. Everyone keep your fingers crossed on this one! We also ended up at a grocery store that looks like Whole Foods, where we drooled over the cheese selection but just had to buy New Zealand cheddar because that’s what I was really craving. (Its hard to get cheese variety here.) We were all set to have a dinner of bread and cheese when some other Fulbright fellows knocked on our door and invited us out to dinner with them. Friday we met more of the fellows at the lunch, but were surprised by how fancy the meal was and how many other random people there were: dignitaries from the embassy, past Peruvian fellows, business people somehow affiliated with the Commission. Friday afternoon we spent hanging out and then out to dinner.

Saturday we had planned to travel but got a late start so instead went to the Anthropology Museum and to see a movie (Beowulf). Saturday night we had dinner at an overpriced Mexican restaurant but we were pleasantly surprised to get chips before our meal (we are having trouble finding tortilla chips, or tortillas at all for that matter). Sunday we went to the Plaza de Armas (the main plaza) and went on a tour of a church with catacombs and to the Inquisition museum.

Monday was five hours of presentations on our various research, with discussants from anthropology, mining, and economics. The afternoon was again spent hanging out and eating dinner with all the other fellows.

We are happy to report that returning to altitude after only being gone five days was uneventful. We have a meeting today to sign a contract for our new apartment…we are supposed to be moving next Friday.

Last night it rained all night long. Luckily it did not rain on us…in fact it was just starting to drizzle when we got home around 10pm. But it poured for the rest of the night, and I had a hard time sleeping because of the racket it was making on the roof. I’ve never seen (heard) it rain so long in Cusco. We must be getting more into that rainy season everyone talks about for December.

It feels like it has been a long week, although our routine has not changed much. We did indeed spend last weekend running errands or watching movies bought at the black market (Molino), but we also got to go out a few nights and make some friends. We both went to the South American Explorers Club pub-quiz night last Thursday (Nov 8th) and although it wasn’ t that busy, we met a few people and had a good dinner of popcorn and beer/wine. Then Chris went to their poker night on Friday while I went out (after Quechua classes–the other official language here, from Incan times) with some volunteers from the center where I am working. We went out again on Saturday night for yummy Japanese food. Ah, to have a good sushi place to go to…it made us very happy.

This week I have been teaching the kids in my class about Hinduism (part of the curriculum at this particular center). First we talked about the diversity of religions in the world, then we learned a bit of specifics about India. We also went over the continents again, because I guess education on the outside world is a bit lacking in regular school curricula. Here they teach South and North America as one continent. All the volunteers seem to think this is very weird, but I think they are ahead of the curve with a “Las Americas” perspective (which Latin American/Latino Studies in the US is working towards). This afternoon, the kids will perform their version of a Bollywood music video. I cant wait.

So our new apartment isn’t quite all it was cracked up to be. On Wednesday, while I was peacefully washing my hands, the sink in the bathroom proceeded to fall off the wall, breaking all the attendant plumbing and spilling nasty black gunky water everywhere. Luckily the sink itself didn’t break, so it was a pretty easy repair once the landlord finally got around to fixing it this morning. But to be fair, he probably couldn’t find anyone to come fix it yesterday as it was national strike day of the week or something. Prices have been going up across the board here, and the US $ doing so poorly isn’t helping as a large chunk of the economy runs on the US dollar, at least here in Cuzco. So people across the country took to the streets yesterday to get the government to do something about the inflation. There were marches, and on my way to school in the morning I was lucky enough to run into an impromptu roadblock thrown up by some yahoos with a bunch of extra tires to burn and bottles to break. Unfortunately I forgot my camera that morning, so no pictures, but it seems like it must be a pretty common occurrence judging by the reaction of motorists and the police, so hopefully we’ll see some more civil disturbance soon (fingers crossed).

This weekend will be the first we have to do touristy stuff, as we won’t be looking for an apartment to live in or moving at all. We anticipate lots of sleeping in and maybe a day trip or two to see some sights that we’ve been neglecting. Or we might just go to the black market and load up on DVDs.

You can continue to access our wedding photos at one of the following sites:

Prints — you can see all 1500 of our photographer’s photos and order prints (for both the wedding and our engagement photo session)

Wedding Slideshow — you can see a selection of photos that tell the story of our wedding day

Our Shutterfly Collection — you can see photos that other guests took and add your own! (Please do help us collect together the best of all the photos by adding yours!)

Engagement Session Slideshow — you can see the slideshow of our engagement photos

We have finally found a bit of time to work on our website. While this used to be just our wedding website, we decided to make it more multi-purpose and use it as a type of blog for our time in Peru too. You can still connect to the wedding part of the site (where there are links to photos!), and we have also added a section on our honeymoon in Paris and parts of Turkey.

As far as settling into Peru goes, we arrived in Lima on October 17th, without our luggage (as expected, since we had sent it to connect between different airlines and without a complete list of stop-over and flight connections). Luckily it arrived later the next day so we had clean clothes to wear to our embassy security briefing. We arrived in Cusco on Saturday, October 20th, and spent the weekend adjusting to the altitude. We are at 12,000 feet/3,000 meters, and the headaches seemed to last longer into the weekend than Aviva remembers from past trips. We started Spanish classes on the Monday, and have been spending our time since then looking for a place to live, meeting new people and doing some volunteering, buying things like hangers and slippers, and watching episodes of Lost (that’s right, Chris got Aviva addicted over our honeymoon).

On the place to live front, we found a place that we like (close to the center, roomy and with nice sun, fully furnished also with kitchen stuff so we have very little to actually buy, even has an oven and a fridge), but…it is not available until December. So we are now renting a much smaller bachelor-type place, which will suffice until we can get into the bigger place in December. We have really enjoyed living with our host family (same one that Aviva has lived with in 2005 and 2006), but it is also nice to have our own space and be closer to the center. No address to speak of yet, but we both now have our cell phones set up (so email us if you want the numbers!). Of course email and skype are the best ways to communicate with us, so we hope to hear from you soon!

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We spent September 11 – October 2 in France and Turkey (Paris, Istanbul, Goreme, and Bodrum) for our honeymoon. We have attached some photos and some stories that we hope you will enjoy!

In Paris, we spent two days at a hotel near the Eiffel Tower. We went to Notre Dame, the Louvre, up the Eiffel Tower, and spent some time walking around the streets and gardens of the city. Our favorite thing to do was eat and drink wine. On the first night, after a delicious dinner ordered off an easel, a woman in the street asked us if we were Jewish and then invited us to her home for Erev Rosh Hashanah (Jewish New Year) dinner. It was a bit random, and a bit difficult to fit in two dinners along with the jet lag our bodies were already experiencing, but it was also really touching and fun.

We flew to Istanbul on September 14, and then spent our two full days there seeing all the different mosques and museums and old buildings and bazaars that we could. We stayed in an old mansion and had a delicious breakfast every morning of yogurt and cheese and eggs and tomatoes and bread. We went to the Blue Mosque and Aya Sofia (used to be a church then was a mosque, now is a museum and a UNESCO site, used to be the largest indoor space in the world before St Peter’s Basilica in Rome was built). We especially loved the Basilica Cisterns (an underground Roman cistern that was discovered in the 19th century when locals told an archaeologist that they could get fresh water out of holes in their basement floors) and Topkapi Palace (where the sultans used to live, with four different courtyards and lots of rooms of cool stuff). We spent some time on the second day at the Archaeology Museum, taking a ferry up the Golden Horn, and having dinner at a cosmopolitan restaurant in Taksim Square (the newer part of the city).

Next we flew to Kayseri, which is a town in Cappadocia in central Turkey. We took a shuttle to Goreme where we stayed for two nights. We stayed in a fairy chimney, which was like living in a cave. We spent our day visiting the Goreme Open Air Museum and hiking in the surrounding Red and Rose Valleys. The landscape is incredible: the first settlers there built all their houses and churches into the rocks and cliffs, and carved or painted the most beautiful frescos. The museum is a walking tour through some of the best-preserved examples of churches and dining rooms. But even when just wandering through the countryside, you can find all these abandoned caves. Many of the town’s residents (and all the tourists) still stay in the fairy chimneys, but many more are empty. Hot air ballooning is also a popular thing to do in the canyon, and although we did not partake, we woke up early one day to watch the sunrise and all the balloons that were out.

Our next stop was the Bodrum peninsula, where we stayed for 10 days in the beachside condo of one of Chris’s dad’s colleagues, near a quiet town called Gundogan. We mostly spent our time there relaxing by the water or reading on the fantastic deck, but we also did some day trips into the town of Bodrum to see the famous Underwater Archaeology Museum and do some shopping and eating. We also took a day trip to the old Roman city of Ephesus (which is up the coast a few hours) and another day we spent scuba diving.

Our last stop was Paris again, where we spent the majority of a day in the Centre Pompidou, which is a modern art gallery.

We hope you enjoy the photos (despite them being a little out of order)! svgallery=honeymoon