THE GOOD.
My Rockin’ Family. We’ve had some times, that’s for sure. The highlights for me include:
Hanging out with my adorable siblings. Their favorite pastime was coming into my room and taking inventory of my belongings. Marcos liked to rearrange my shoes, and Jennifer liked to open and close my “singing card” over and over again (she can now sing “I Say A Little Prayer For You” in perfect English). But most of all, they liked to look at the album of pictures that I brought along from home. We went over the names of every person in every photo at least six times per day. They would then give each other quizzes as a check-for-learning activity. It always made me chuckle when I would be sitting at my desk reading, and I heard the voices of four little Peruvians saying things
like, “No Nicolas, Caroline isn’t blonde, she has curly hair. 
Duh!”
Sharing American deliciousness. Peruvians, for the most part, love sweets/anything sugary. You can find cookies, candies and general snackage being sold every ten feet, even the most remote areas. In fact, my famil
y was horrified that I didn’t put sugar in my coffee. Every morning they would expectantly set a cup of sugar in front of my cup and stare at me with great anticipation, only to have their hopes dashed again and again. Then we would talk about my strange habit for a good fifteen minutes or so, as they each dumped five heaping spoonfuls of sugar into their pre-sweetened cocoa. So I decided to take advantage of their saccharine fixation by teaching them the art of s’more-making. Needless to say, it was a huge hit with the fam. My parents were so excited about the new treat that they didn’t even seem to mind when Marcos got marshmallow stuck in his hair. Success!
Being the official photographer at my parent’s wedding. After nearly 15 years together, Dad decided to make an honest wom
an of Mom. Kidding… sort of. In Peru, weddings are expensive, so most people have what they call “civil marriages.” Which means, from I’ve gathered, that the couple agrees to live together in cohabitation and call each other pet-names. Sort of like common law in the States, but less official. So the ‘rents decided it was high time to make things right between their Union and the Man Upstairs. Mom borrowed a beautiful white dress (I tried to suggest otherwise due to the whole “you have four kids thing,” but I couldn’t think of the word for ‘ecru’ in Spanish…), and we all trucked it down to the church on a Saturday morning. As it turns out, there were nine couples getting married at the same time. Apparently the Lord offers a buy-in-bulk discount.
THE BAD
Rowdy neighbors. On one side of my house lived a lady who insisted on shrieking at the top of her lungs from the hours of 4 am through 2 am. I’m not sure why she screeched or to whom she was making this awful noise, but I know one thing for sure: she always did it at the highest decibel known to man. On the other side of my house lived a family who insisted on rocking out to bad soft rock music from the 80’s. “Making Love Out of Nothing At All” and “I Thought I Loved You, But I Lied” were two constant favorites. In addition, I also had a little store next door where all of Yanacoto’s finest did their stoop-drinking. For those of you unfamiliar with the art form, stoop-drinking is just that: you buy beer from the store and sit on the steps outside to drink it. Sundays were a big day for stoop-drinking, and the men would get rather loud and obnoxious by 10 am. Though it always annoyed me, a few of us finally broke down one night and did a little stoop-drinking of our own. I guess if you can’t beat ‘em… join ‘em.
The bullhorn car. My biggest regret upon leaving the 'Coto was that I couldn't get a picture of the bullhorn car. I believe I mentioned it in an earlier blog post, but at 5 in the morning a car would drive around making announcements over a bullhorn, which was strapped to the roof with an old rope. It wasn’t until a few weeks later that I really learned the purpose of this broadcast-mobile… they are hired by the municipality to call out people who haven’t paid their electricity or water bill. So if you try to screw the system, the system humiliates you in front of your neighbors. Ouch!
The combis. Oh, the joy that is riding a Combi! My life will have such a void without my daily trips on this pleasur
e-mobile. In reality, I do not hate the combis nearly as much as some others, but not a day goes by when I don’t think: A. We are about to crash head-on with a car/bus/wall/mountain, and/or B. There are so many bodies on this thing that I cannot tell which body parts are mine and which belong to my fellow passengers. R.I.P. Combi… you will be missed.
THE UGLY
The food. I love my family dearly, but this doesn’t necessarily mean that we see eye to eye on every detail. Food, namely, has been the biggest source of disparity. Don’t get me wrong, I know that the Peace Corps is about culture exchange, and nothing is more cultural than food. Hence I eat it all, and I do it with a big fat smile on my face. In retrospect, I am not sure that this was the best strategy. The more I ate crazy foods and pretended to enjoy them, the crazier my food array became. This last week has proven to be the pinnacle, as my family is trying to bid me farewell by serving all of their favorite “delicacies.” I can judge which foods I hate the most by how many times I have to swallow whole without chewing. The winner’s circle for this week includes, drum roll please…
#4: Anticuchos. This is grilled animal heart in shish-kabob form. These are a really popular street food here, you’ll see them everywhere. The aren’t so bad if they are beef, but my family went the chicken route. 
Bad idea. I believe they did so because we had these on the same day as my number one pick, which I’ll get to in a moment.
#3: Cau Cau. This is cow stomach. Yep, the most vulgar of the internal organs, save maybe the intestines (getting to that one in a moment as well), the stomach tastes about how it sounds. This meal required me to ask for seconds of my rice/potato mountain, solely for the purpose of hiding the stomach pieces in between.
#2: I kind of gave it away back there, but chicken intestines wins the honor of first runner-up. I’ve been served these a few times, but I only recently found out what it was. It is served cut up in a soup, along with a soggy popcorn-like creature. I thought it was squid. The discovery made things so much worse on a physiological level.
#1: Sangrecita. Those of you who speak Spanish may already have guessed what this is. For everyone else, let me enlighten you. Sangrecita is animal blood, in this case chicken, fried up in big fat chunks. That’s right, fried blood. Yummy! To make matters worse, this was my breakfast Sunday morning, just a few hours after getting in from an all-nighter. No rice/potato mountain to save me this time! As always, I grinned and bore it as any good Peace Corps Volunteer would.
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