Sunday, September 12, 2010
Zone Z 232
Here are pictures of Zone Z 232. The classroom is higher up the mountain and located right near a cemetery. I teach a 6-9 year old English and sports class there twice a week. The class is very tiring, but the kids are so adorable it's completely worth it.
The classroom with the cemetery in the background. I might have already posted this photo before.
A picture of part of my class. From left to right: Nayeli, 5-year-old Willie, Eleana, Raul, and Jose (I think that's his name. He's new and I keep forgetting). And then Tara, another volunteer, in the background
View through the window of Jhim (left) and Alex (right)
Photo taken by another volunteer of me in the classroom
The canchita where we play sports for an hour before English class
The kids playing Duck, Duck, Goose
Zone Z 231
While LLI normally only teaches in one location within each zone, there are three different classrooms in Zone Z. 231 is the location farthest down the mountain, 232 is in the middle, and Los Alamos is all the way at the top of the road going up Zone Z.
I visit Zone Z 231 every Sunday to teach chess, and the kids are absolutely wonderful. Here are some pictures of the classroom and the area around it.
The classroom
Houses built into the side of the mountain surrounding Zone Z
Paths of switchbacks leading up to the houses
House nearby with campaign slogans painted on it
I visit Zone Z 231 every Sunday to teach chess, and the kids are absolutely wonderful. Here are some pictures of the classroom and the area around it.
Huaycan - Zone D
I was notified that while my blog has a lot of photos of the food I've been eating, it lacks photos of Huaycan itself. So here's my attempt to remedy that. I'm going to put up several posts, each with photos focusing on a particular area of Huaycan, until my internet connection gives up.
This post includes photos from the area around the house (Zone D). A lot of the photos are taken from the roof because I can see all of Huaycan from there, but there are a couple from the street as well.
They aren't the best photos I've taken. Since it's so dusty in Huaycan, all photos come out a uniform shade of brown. But I'm sure they're good enough to show what the place looks like.
Just a note: all of my photos here appear small, but you can click on any photo to see it a lot larger.
An overview of Huaycan during the day. It's almost completely surrounded by "foothills"
Our street near sunset
Gonzalo, our security guard, in front of our house with his moto
Street near our house
Another view of our street
Houses built up on the foothills surrounding Huaycan
A woman doing her laundry on a rooftop near our house, with a view of Huaycan in the background
This post includes photos from the area around the house (Zone D). A lot of the photos are taken from the roof because I can see all of Huaycan from there, but there are a couple from the street as well.
They aren't the best photos I've taken. Since it's so dusty in Huaycan, all photos come out a uniform shade of brown. But I'm sure they're good enough to show what the place looks like.
Just a note: all of my photos here appear small, but you can click on any photo to see it a lot larger.
Thursday, September 2, 2010
More Lunch Photos
At the risk of making this into a food blog, I wanted to share photos of the awesome food I've had. I've been trying to take photos of my food to share. However, I often forget and start eating immediately since it's so good, and then can't take a photo. Lunch is the big meal here, so all of my photos are from lunch.
Peruvian food is really yummy to begin with, and our cook Dina makes it even better. Every meal except for pasta is served with white rice, and most meals are accompanied by a fried egg. Here are some highlights from the last two weeks.
This dish is called Locro de Zapallo (zapallo means squash). It's basically a bright yellow thick squash puree with choclo, served with a fried egg over rice. It's one of the house favorites, so Dina makes it once a week. We just had it today, and since Dina only cooks one meal each day on our "weekend", I get to eat it again for dinner :)
The above photo is fish, even though it doesn't look like it. When Dina and Sara went to the market to buy same fish as last time, the guy told them that there was a different type of fish that's really good. It's such a dark color that it looked like beef, and actually tasted a bit like it too. We spent part of the meal trying to decide whether it tasted like beefy fish or fishy beef. But it was yummy all the same, though we all prefer the normal fish. Then choclo (one of my favorite vegetables so far) made an appearance, along with a tomato, lettuce, cucumber salad that was seasoned with a lot of lime and a little salt. It was absolutely amazing, and I ended up eating 4 servings of the veggies.
This meal was the first time I've seen non-white rice served for lunch. It was white rice, but covered with herbs and spinach (I think), served with a chunk of chicken and more veggies. Wonderful, again.
Then this pasta was absolutely amazing. Dina blended up spinach into a thick sauce, and added pine nuts and spices to make a spinach pesto. It was served with a fried egg, of course. For my dignity, I'm not going to say how many servings I had of this dish.
On another note, tomatoes here are wonderful. They fall just below creole tomatoes and light years above California tomatoes. As I type this, I'm eating a tomato sandwich, and I ate a tomato just like you would eat an apple as a snack earlier today. Other than that, the avocados are amazing, so we occasionally buy 5 or more of them and make a huge batch of guacamole for dinner.
Peruvian food is really yummy to begin with, and our cook Dina makes it even better. Every meal except for pasta is served with white rice, and most meals are accompanied by a fried egg. Here are some highlights from the last two weeks.
This dish is called Locro de Zapallo (zapallo means squash). It's basically a bright yellow thick squash puree with choclo, served with a fried egg over rice. It's one of the house favorites, so Dina makes it once a week. We just had it today, and since Dina only cooks one meal each day on our "weekend", I get to eat it again for dinner :)
The above photo is fish, even though it doesn't look like it. When Dina and Sara went to the market to buy same fish as last time, the guy told them that there was a different type of fish that's really good. It's such a dark color that it looked like beef, and actually tasted a bit like it too. We spent part of the meal trying to decide whether it tasted like beefy fish or fishy beef. But it was yummy all the same, though we all prefer the normal fish. Then choclo (one of my favorite vegetables so far) made an appearance, along with a tomato, lettuce, cucumber salad that was seasoned with a lot of lime and a little salt. It was absolutely amazing, and I ended up eating 4 servings of the veggies.
This meal was the first time I've seen non-white rice served for lunch. It was white rice, but covered with herbs and spinach (I think), served with a chunk of chicken and more veggies. Wonderful, again.
Then this pasta was absolutely amazing. Dina blended up spinach into a thick sauce, and added pine nuts and spices to make a spinach pesto. It was served with a fried egg, of course. For my dignity, I'm not going to say how many servings I had of this dish.
On another note, tomatoes here are wonderful. They fall just below creole tomatoes and light years above California tomatoes. As I type this, I'm eating a tomato sandwich, and I ate a tomato just like you would eat an apple as a snack earlier today. Other than that, the avocados are amazing, so we occasionally buy 5 or more of them and make a huge batch of guacamole for dinner.
Larcomar and La Punta
I just looked at my blog and realized it's been almost 2 weeks since I last posted. Normally I'd chalk that up to being busy. But I actually had no idea that it was that long. Time has been going so quickly here that I thought it had only been a week or less than I wrote.
Since I last posted, I've been on two volunteer excursions. For the first one (August 25), we went to Larcomar at Miraflores. Miraflores is built on cliffs overlooking the ocean, and Larcomar is a shopping center built into those cliffs.
The restaurant itself
Sushi boat for four. You can't see it, but the pieces of fish were massive.
After cutting our trip from 3 hours to 1.5 hours (we got a taxi partway for only 10 soles and avoided all the traffic), we went to a sushi place at Larcomar. I've spent time finding the best sushi in Phoenix, but this place blew it out of the water. It's not that the sushi was different in some way. All of the rolls were normal, but the fish was amazingly fresh. Normally I don't like eating pieces of fish that aren't part of a roll, but I found myself downing big chunks of fish (no rice, no nothing) as if they were candy.
After the sushi, we went for ice cream. There are two types of ice cream in Peru - normal and gelato. While the normal ice cream is just okay, the gelato is absolutely out of this world. One scoop is 6 soles, while 2 scoops are only 7 soles. So I found myself with two giant scoops of gelato - manjar blanco and pecan. (Manjar blanco is sort of like a Peruvian caramel, but is creamier and blended with some sort of milk. I don't know what it is, but it's amazingly good.) Then we followed that up with seeing Inception at the theater, since the other 3 volunteers had never seen it. Then as the combi sat in traffic for three hours, I napped all the way home.
The other volunteer excursion happened yesterday (September 1). There's a part of Lima (technically it's in Callao, which isn't actually a part of Lima) that sticks out into the ocean into a point. Hence its name - La Punta.
Link to a map showing La Punta. The other points on the map are Miraflores (left) and Huaycan (right).
The main town was painted in beautiful colors like this
Our purpose was again food. La Punta has the best ceviche at a reasonable price, and the town is both beautiful and not touristy.
It was a gray, windy, freezing day, so we were probably the only tourists in town. That meant that we got even more attention than normal. Every time we walked past a restaurant, the hostess would do everything she could to get us into the restaurant - waving the menu in our faces, talking about the food, offering deals, and so on. But Sara already knew of the best place to go. It was a tiny little restaurant with no one else there, but it was so yummy. We each ordered a massive plate of ceviche mixto (in the picture above) that came with a huge pile of different types of fish, shrimp, octopus, and who knows what else. Besides that, our plate had regular and sweet potato, a big pile of choclo, banana chips, and an oyster. Then there was also an unlimited supply of this roasted, salted corn and a personal fish appetizer. I also bought an Inca Cola, which the most popular soda in Peru. It's bright yellow and tastes like bubble gum, but it doesn't leave that awful sweet aftertaste and is surprisingly addicting.
After La Punta, we went to Plaza San Miguel for a little shopping. We're going to a LLI friend's party in Lima on Friday, and some of us didn't bring a lot of nice clothing. After all, we're living in Huaycan. So we spent a little bit of time looking around to find something cheap, then got gelato (I sense a trend here). After that, we browsed nearby Inca markets. They were really cool, and I'm definitely going to return closer to the end of my trip to buy some things.
Other than the two volunteer excursions, we've been hanging out with our friends in Horacio a lot, which is a lot of fun. Horacio is a smaller, quieter version of Huaycan. Each night, people gather to play volleyball on the main street. (Horacio is so quiet that they can string a volleyball net across the road every night and not have to worry about traffic.) Sarah is really good at volleyball and played in college, so we go over at night to play. They're really awesome and competitive, so I just sit on a stoop to watch the game and talk to everyone for a couple of hours. They're all really nice, so it's great to hang out with them.
When we went on Tuesday, we brought the card game Uno to play after the volleyball game. Everyone had never seen the game, but they thought it was so much fun that we ended up playing about 10 games. The group of people we gathered was the weirdest collection of people - there were Tara, Sara, Marta, and me; Walter and Bladi, our first friends in Horacio; their friend Victor; Walter's brother Miki; and three flamboyantly gay teenagers. And we had met a hippie named Eberson earlier, and he came back to talk during the game.
Besides that, I've been spending a lot of time reading and making all of my lesson plans, which is probably what I should be doing instead of writing a blog post right now. So far, I've read a biography of Teddy Kennedy (only decent book available at the Miami airport), Walden Pond, Civil Disobedience, and Eat Pray Love (which I finished in 3 or 4 hours). To slow myself down, I picked up two books in Spanish on Quince for only 5 soles. They're short, but it should take me a while to finish them.
All in all, I'm having a great time. I've only been here 3 weeks, but I already can't imagine leaving. 3 weeks is almost a month, which means I'm already done with a quarter of my time here... I actually contemplated taking a gap year from school and coming back here after Christmas. I won't, since I ought to finish college eventually. But I found myself seriously thinking about it.
I think I'm becoming completely addicted to traveling. I wanted to take this time off to slow down and think about my future before I rush headlong into a major and career (which all seems to be coming so quickly). While I haven't had any revelations, I do know that my job will have to take me abroad. In my mind, there's no option about it. And having a solid starting point to work with feels really good.
Since I last posted, I've been on two volunteer excursions. For the first one (August 25), we went to Larcomar at Miraflores. Miraflores is built on cliffs overlooking the ocean, and Larcomar is a shopping center built into those cliffs.
After cutting our trip from 3 hours to 1.5 hours (we got a taxi partway for only 10 soles and avoided all the traffic), we went to a sushi place at Larcomar. I've spent time finding the best sushi in Phoenix, but this place blew it out of the water. It's not that the sushi was different in some way. All of the rolls were normal, but the fish was amazingly fresh. Normally I don't like eating pieces of fish that aren't part of a roll, but I found myself downing big chunks of fish (no rice, no nothing) as if they were candy.
After the sushi, we went for ice cream. There are two types of ice cream in Peru - normal and gelato. While the normal ice cream is just okay, the gelato is absolutely out of this world. One scoop is 6 soles, while 2 scoops are only 7 soles. So I found myself with two giant scoops of gelato - manjar blanco and pecan. (Manjar blanco is sort of like a Peruvian caramel, but is creamier and blended with some sort of milk. I don't know what it is, but it's amazingly good.) Then we followed that up with seeing Inception at the theater, since the other 3 volunteers had never seen it. Then as the combi sat in traffic for three hours, I napped all the way home.
The other volunteer excursion happened yesterday (September 1). There's a part of Lima (technically it's in Callao, which isn't actually a part of Lima) that sticks out into the ocean into a point. Hence its name - La Punta.
Our purpose was again food. La Punta has the best ceviche at a reasonable price, and the town is both beautiful and not touristy.
It was a gray, windy, freezing day, so we were probably the only tourists in town. That meant that we got even more attention than normal. Every time we walked past a restaurant, the hostess would do everything she could to get us into the restaurant - waving the menu in our faces, talking about the food, offering deals, and so on. But Sara already knew of the best place to go. It was a tiny little restaurant with no one else there, but it was so yummy. We each ordered a massive plate of ceviche mixto (in the picture above) that came with a huge pile of different types of fish, shrimp, octopus, and who knows what else. Besides that, our plate had regular and sweet potato, a big pile of choclo, banana chips, and an oyster. Then there was also an unlimited supply of this roasted, salted corn and a personal fish appetizer. I also bought an Inca Cola, which the most popular soda in Peru. It's bright yellow and tastes like bubble gum, but it doesn't leave that awful sweet aftertaste and is surprisingly addicting.
After La Punta, we went to Plaza San Miguel for a little shopping. We're going to a LLI friend's party in Lima on Friday, and some of us didn't bring a lot of nice clothing. After all, we're living in Huaycan. So we spent a little bit of time looking around to find something cheap, then got gelato (I sense a trend here). After that, we browsed nearby Inca markets. They were really cool, and I'm definitely going to return closer to the end of my trip to buy some things.
Other than the two volunteer excursions, we've been hanging out with our friends in Horacio a lot, which is a lot of fun. Horacio is a smaller, quieter version of Huaycan. Each night, people gather to play volleyball on the main street. (Horacio is so quiet that they can string a volleyball net across the road every night and not have to worry about traffic.) Sarah is really good at volleyball and played in college, so we go over at night to play. They're really awesome and competitive, so I just sit on a stoop to watch the game and talk to everyone for a couple of hours. They're all really nice, so it's great to hang out with them.
When we went on Tuesday, we brought the card game Uno to play after the volleyball game. Everyone had never seen the game, but they thought it was so much fun that we ended up playing about 10 games. The group of people we gathered was the weirdest collection of people - there were Tara, Sara, Marta, and me; Walter and Bladi, our first friends in Horacio; their friend Victor; Walter's brother Miki; and three flamboyantly gay teenagers. And we had met a hippie named Eberson earlier, and he came back to talk during the game.
Besides that, I've been spending a lot of time reading and making all of my lesson plans, which is probably what I should be doing instead of writing a blog post right now. So far, I've read a biography of Teddy Kennedy (only decent book available at the Miami airport), Walden Pond, Civil Disobedience, and Eat Pray Love (which I finished in 3 or 4 hours). To slow myself down, I picked up two books in Spanish on Quince for only 5 soles. They're short, but it should take me a while to finish them.
All in all, I'm having a great time. I've only been here 3 weeks, but I already can't imagine leaving. 3 weeks is almost a month, which means I'm already done with a quarter of my time here... I actually contemplated taking a gap year from school and coming back here after Christmas. I won't, since I ought to finish college eventually. But I found myself seriously thinking about it.
I think I'm becoming completely addicted to traveling. I wanted to take this time off to slow down and think about my future before I rush headlong into a major and career (which all seems to be coming so quickly). While I haven't had any revelations, I do know that my job will have to take me abroad. In my mind, there's no option about it. And having a solid starting point to work with feels really good.
Wednesday, September 1, 2010
Friday, August 20, 2010
Pizza Hut and Charades
Yesterday was Kristen's last day in Peru, as well as one of our "weekends", so she wanted a treat for lunch -- Pizza Hut. When she first said that, I thought she was crazy. Why come all the way to Peru to eat Pizza Hut? But I went along with it.
The Pizza Hut is at Ovalo Santa Anita (Ovalos are massive roundabouts that serve as landmarks and commercial areas), so we took a combi for an hour to get there. When we opened the door, I was so shocked. Instead of seeing a normal Pizza Hut, we had stepped into a classy restaurant. It was really big with lots of tables and comfy booths, all painted and decorated nicely. After we sat down, a waitress even gave us menus.
The others explained that Pizza Hut has a really great special, which is why they love to go. For only 11 soles (about $3.50), we each get a personal pizza, breadsticks, salad, and a drink. I "splurged" to change the americano (cheese and ham) pizza to a supreme for only another $1.50.
One thing I love about Peru is that chain restaurants don't survive here unless they put a Peruvian (aka yummy) twist on their food. For example, instead of a soda, we could get frozen lemonade as our drink. The sauce for our breadsticks was a spicy, creamy tomatoey sauce instead of marinara. Then our salad wasn't the normal, boring pile of lettuce with ranch dressing. In addition to the normal salad stuff like lettuce and tomato, the salad had pico de gallo on top with cheddar cheese, carrots, cabbage, and a light creamy dressing. It sounds really weird, but it wasn't like any other salad I've had. It all worked together somehow. The pizza wasn't really different, just way better than from Pizza Hut at home.
In other news, I just acquired a new roommate. I was in the same room as Tara, the girl from Australia. But Marta, a new volunteer, just flew in on the same day as Kristen is leaving. Since Tara doesn't speak Spanish and Marta doesn't speak English, we figured that it would be really mean, though amusing, to make them room together. So we did a room swap, giving Kristen's room to Tara and letting Marta sleep in my room. I can understand Marta when she speaks, but I am having some trouble speaking back to her, so I think that the next two weeks are going to be a really funny game of charades.
The Pizza Hut is at Ovalo Santa Anita (Ovalos are massive roundabouts that serve as landmarks and commercial areas), so we took a combi for an hour to get there. When we opened the door, I was so shocked. Instead of seeing a normal Pizza Hut, we had stepped into a classy restaurant. It was really big with lots of tables and comfy booths, all painted and decorated nicely. After we sat down, a waitress even gave us menus.
The others explained that Pizza Hut has a really great special, which is why they love to go. For only 11 soles (about $3.50), we each get a personal pizza, breadsticks, salad, and a drink. I "splurged" to change the americano (cheese and ham) pizza to a supreme for only another $1.50.
One thing I love about Peru is that chain restaurants don't survive here unless they put a Peruvian (aka yummy) twist on their food. For example, instead of a soda, we could get frozen lemonade as our drink. The sauce for our breadsticks was a spicy, creamy tomatoey sauce instead of marinara. Then our salad wasn't the normal, boring pile of lettuce with ranch dressing. In addition to the normal salad stuff like lettuce and tomato, the salad had pico de gallo on top with cheddar cheese, carrots, cabbage, and a light creamy dressing. It sounds really weird, but it wasn't like any other salad I've had. It all worked together somehow. The pizza wasn't really different, just way better than from Pizza Hut at home.
In other news, I just acquired a new roommate. I was in the same room as Tara, the girl from Australia. But Marta, a new volunteer, just flew in on the same day as Kristen is leaving. Since Tara doesn't speak Spanish and Marta doesn't speak English, we figured that it would be really mean, though amusing, to make them room together. So we did a room swap, giving Kristen's room to Tara and letting Marta sleep in my room. I can understand Marta when she speaks, but I am having some trouble speaking back to her, so I think that the next two weeks are going to be a really funny game of charades.
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