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Birthday Time in Cusco
My birthday in Cusco was a very interesting day, to say the least. I woke up and wandered downstairs for breakfast where I found a random woman in the kitchen. As it turns out, she is another of my homestay sisters who came to visit from Puno especially for my birthday. As I ate my fried egg with random green vegetable sandwich, the perfam gave me the rundown for the rest of the day. They were going to spend the day preparing for my birthday by making “vino calientito” and lasagna, and I was supposed to make sure that all of my classmates were coming and knew the time and place for dinner.
Class was a prolonged birthday party for me and, to be quite honest, far too much attention. I got some goodies from the bread store from Casey, Emily and Ella as soon as I got to class—some chocolate bread, something cheesy and delicious, and a mini Danish. Then, for the second half of Quechua class, we went out to buy supplies for our afternoon seminar in which we were going to pay back mother earth, or Pachamama, in a spiritual celebration. While we were out, though, our professors told us that it was also Irma’s birthday, our Academic Director. So we bought some flowers and headed back early to learn a birthday song in Quechua. As it turns out, this was a just a rouse. The flowers were for me and when we got back they all sang the song to me and presented me with a huge cake, of course, with my name on it in chocolate sauce.
After lunch with the perfam, I headed back to the school. The ceremony was really interesting. Irma had brought in some Quechua speakers who still followed the spirituality of their ancestors. The two men chanted for quite a while, while each prepared gifts for the Pachamama. The gifts were sheets of paper in which they placed the petals of carnations and coca leaves. We were then each instructed to gather two sets of leaves, one of 3 and one of 2. We each then gave one set of leaves to one man and the other to the next. At each time that we presented our leaves, we knelt before the man and received a blessing before he placed our coca leaves in the offering. Later, many other things were added to the package from animal crackers to confetti to silver beads—there was really too much going on to take it all in. Then we each offered some Pisco and wine to the Pachamama by sprinkling some on the floor and then drinking. Finally, Irma brought up the fact that it was my birthday, so of course I received another blessing. I just wish I had understood any of it!
After class Dulce and I went shopping for my birthday gift to me, which was a shirt and some boots to go out in that night, and headed home to get ready to party with the perfam. The dinner was fun—everyone was able to make it except for Meredith and the food was amazing. I don’t generally like lasagna, but this was really good in a very weird way… they put ham slices in the middle and used a funky type of cheese. To go along with this, we had the vino calientito which turned out to be hot wine with orange juice. Again, this sounded awful to me but it ended up being really good! We went out after dinner, hitting up all of our regular places. We got a couple drinks and then went dancing. The night was a blast with the exception of two problems: the worst drink of my night and my camera being stolen.
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