Dia de los Muertos

The rainy season is tiptoeing it's way into the mountains of Cusco.  Living on the top floor of our building provides us with the most lovely, sleep inducing white noise when the rain moves in.  We are all getting a bit smarter about carrying our rain gear with us, although Krista was caught in a downpour yesterday and arrived at the house soaked and shivering.  Cusco is a city built in some really high mountains, and high mountains have tricky weather to be sure.

Our apartment complex, which was empty save for us for the first month and a half, has filled up quickly with other gringos.  The big apartment across the courtyard is being rented by a Shamanic healer from Utah who was previously a special education teacher.  She is sharing the space with an American pediatrician who was nearly killed here three years ago when a house sized boulder rolled down a cliff and onto the bus she was traveling on.   Our newest neighbor is right below us and is such a sweet guy.  He was a finance director for the mayor's office in Denver and he and his wife (a landscape architect) are retiring to Cusco.  He is enormously generous and has offered to help us in many ways already.  It's nice to have this little community forming around us.

The girls and I visited the city cemetery on the Day of the Dead.  It was quite different from what I remembered in Bolivia.  In Bolivia families basically planted themselves graveside and sang songs, made blessings, drank a lot, and laughed and cried remembering their deceased relatives.  The scene in Cusco was in comparison totally subdued.  The cemetery is more of a mausoleum with ornate diorama-like scenes stacked six high in narrow passageways.  Instead of singing and drinking most people were busy polishing the brass frames of the dioramas or spraying the glass with windex.  I didn't see anyone drunk the whole day which felt kind of weird.  The Peruvian version of this holiday is  more somber than what I remember in Bolivia.  There was sadness in Bolivia to be sure, but also a lot of laughter and song.


We are continuing to settle into our routines here.  I am hoping that we can add some time volunteering in schools/orphanages to our schedule.  We ate dinner last night at a lovely place that exists to fund a school program for impoverished kids.  A seventeen year old boy quit high school and decided to create a charitable foundation funded by a restaurant.  The place was decorated like a page from a Dr. Seuss book and the food was amazingly fresh and delicious.  It was inspiring to see what this idealistic kid was able to accomplish.  There is such an abundance of charitable organizations here that it's hard to understand how anyone is still impoverished.  There are a lot of people here trying to help the poor.

Well, the dishes are not going to wash themselves...  Goodnight all.