Conclusion...?

Hi everyone,

I realized I sort of left anyone who was reading my blog hanging when I got back to the U.S. (safely!). I have been busy busy busy, and I'm loving it. Here's a little summary of what I've been up to since my last post:

After hiking the Inca Trail we arrived at Machu Picchu (!!!!!) and it was just as amazing as I had expected and more. In the morning (6/6:30 am) we had to race across the ruins to get tickets so that we could climb Wayna Picchu, the mountain that you see in the background of any postcard picture of Machu Picchu. They only let 400 people in each day, and we got number 345 and 346! So we had an amazing time there, and then got on a train back to Cuzco, but only after waiting for a few hours, wondering if the train would actually come because of a strike on the railroad. That was scaryy because we didn't know if we would make it to our International flight home from Lima in time, because the strike was also affecting the roads around Cuzco, so we couldnt get out on a bus from Cuzco to Lima!

But it ended up working out fine, our bus just left a little late because the strike was only going on during the day the next day, so we went on another 24 hour bus ride to get back to Lima. We flew out on May 29th, and had to RUN to our planes in Miami (Sam was going straight to Chicago, I had to go to St. Louis and then to Chicago), but we made it.

So just 2 days after I got back, on Monday June 1st, I started my summer internship at ACCION Chicago. It's a micro-lending Non-profit organization, and we give out small business loans to clients in the Chicagoland area. About 25% of our clients are Spanish-speaking, so I've been able to use my Spanish a decent amount (I would say 2-3 times/week), especially recently. I do lots of things and keep very busy at my job, uploading documents, making phone calls, drafting letters, visiting client business locations, as well as promoting ACCION at many different events. One of my favorite events so far was one for Latina Style magazine, which was held at the Macy's on State Street. We had a booth there to give information to women who had their own business or were starting one, and either the vast majority of them or all of them were Spanish-speaking.

Well, I'm having lots of fun at my job, but that also means I don't have too much time to update the blog, and 'Carolina en Ecuador' doesn't really apply anymore... So I'm planning on starting a new blog in the Fall when I'm done working at ACCION and I start my senior year at U of I. I'll be volunteering (don't know where yet... so many options!) and working at the Study Abroad Office as a Peer Advisor (Yay!!! just found out I got the job) as well as the normal college "going to classes" thing.

Thanks for reading and I'll be back later!

Inca Trail -Salkantay

We're alive! We just finished 2 and a half days of hardcore hiking, and now we're in Aguas Calientes, the town just outside of Machu Picchu!!!! We're going up to the ruins at 5:30 tomorrow morning :)

So our hike was basically amazing. Our group was just 5 girls: 3 girls from New York, and Sam and I, and our guide Henry. The first day we got up at 4 am and caught a bus around 5 to go to a town about 3 hours away. We arrived in Mollepata (molle=tree, pata= high place... I'm learning all the Quechua I can!) and had breakfast, then we started our hike! There were a lot of flat parts on dirt road, but also a decent amount of uphill parts that were somewhat tough. We stopped and had a nice lunch with soup and chicken and rice, and all the tea we could ever want (with coca leaves! oh snap). We kept hiking all the way to our camp, at the bottom of a glacier on a biiig mountain! It was so pretty :) But that night was pretty cold...

The next morning we had to hike very very uphill to a mountain pass between 2 glaciers. It was hard, and we just kept taking about 3 or 4 (very slow) steps and then stopping to rest/breathe. We finally got to the top of the mountain pass, had a snack, and then started our descent into an ever-changing climate. We had lunch while it was raining, and put our ponchos on preparing for the worst, but it just kept getting nicer out, and it stopped raining about a minute after we left from lunch. We started to get into the jungle... and I saw some amazing flowers (lots of WWPD pictures, Zack) and the river below us. We got to our camp and played some cards, then we got some rest in a much warmer climate, which was nice :)

The next morning (today, actually) we woke up and started our last uphill/mostly downhill hike through the jungle. In the morning it was cold, but it got much warmer within a few hours. There were lots of waterfalls along the way, and whenever we stopped our legs hurt a little, but the hike was just perfect. It was a lot of flat walking and some uphill and downhill, and especially a perfect temperature in the shade. We finally arrived at a small town (the end!) for lunch, and then took a van to a train station.

We got on the train to go to Aguas Calientes, the town right outside of Machu Picchu. It was really stuffy, so I did a little exploring and found a spot by an open window and a place if i wanted to sit down. I met some women from Colombia and guys from Switzerland and Amsterdam. The European guys spoke English (and probably some other language, just not spanish) and the Colombians spoke pretty good English and obviously Spanish, but I did a little translating when they were talking and wondering what a word was in English, heh.

So now we're here in Aguas Calientes and we're waking up eaaaarrrrly and going to MACHU PICCHU!!!!! I just can't wait :)

Chaos!

Cuzco!

So we made it!

After staying in Puno for about a day, and going to some sweet floating islands on Lake Titicaca (thanks workers strike!), we took a bus to Cuzco. On the bus we watched some Bride Wars, Seven Pounds (P.S. the title makes way more sense in Spanish - Siete Almas, or seven souls), and a hilarious made for t.v. movie called Her Best Move (featuring Luke from Gilmore Girls and Miranda from Lizzie McGuire). After the movies were over we had about 2 hours more of bus ride that was scary because we had seats right in the front, so we could see out the window when our bus had to swerve around rocks in the road. The rocks were put there by the people who were striking (actually agricultural workers, not miners, my mistake) to block transportation... apparently stopping work isn't enough to make an impact, which sucks :( But we got to Cuzco safely and found a hostel right around the corner from the one Dekel (I spelled his name wrong before, this one's right) met his other Israeli friend at.

Yesterday we went to a small town outside of Cuzco called Pisac, which was definitely worth the trip. It had a huge market where I got a few things (some gloves for our hike!) and a ton of Incan ruins up on the hill/mountain above the town. We got a taxi up and walked around with some friends I had met in Lima from Canada, and we had been emailing to try to find each other. We hiked back down to the town and then took the bus home, and had a great dinner at a restaurant right across from our hostel. I was stupid and didn't have enough money with me for dinner, so Sam paid with a combination of dollars and soles, which worked out okay, because they pretty much take dollars everywhere around Peru.

So today we're going to some museums and probably a few more incan ruin sites, and then we leave for our hike to Machu Picchu via Salkantay tomorrow morning at 4:30 am! We do take a bus for a little while, and don't start hiking until 8 am. I bought some good hiking boots today that are real comfy and weren't too expensive. I'm so excited to see Machu Picchu!!!!!

Chao for now :)

At the moment...

We're staying the night in Puno, next to Lago Titicaca. We met a really cool guy from Israel, Dakel (i think that's how you spell it?) on the 24 hour bus ride, and we're all staying in a hotel and going on a short tour to the 'Floating Islands' tomorrow. Our bus company said the strike will be over tomorrow, so we're getting on a bus with them at 4pm to get to Cuzco.

EXTREME DETOUR! But we're making the best of it :)

Carolina en Peruuuuuu!

I’m in Peru! Actually, I have been for a while, I’m just very slow at updating the blog… But I left Quito after my last day of volunteering and my last day at school (I had to take an ‘extra credit’ final online for marketing) on and overnight bus to Guayaquil where I would meet my friends Jen and Steph, who were flying there in the morning. We met at the bus terminal and then had to go outside to another office to get our bus tickets to Lima… a 26 hour trip! We thought the bus would leave at 2pm, which gave us a good few hours to eat lunch and hang around the bus terminal, but it turned out Lonely Planet was wrong, and the bus actually left at 11:30 am. So we had to rush over and we got on the bus just in time.

The bus was actually surprisingly nice, the seats turned into semi-beds, with a footrest type thing. It was 2 floors, and the bus actually didn’t fill up at all, so we were each able to have a seat to ourselves. They gave us hot meals on the bus, and it ended up taking 30 hours in total, but it was pretty interesting to ride through the desert in northern Peru and see the coast occasionally.

We got to Lima and shared a taxi with some nice foreigners to Miraflores, a really nice neighborhood in Lima. We picked a hostel in LP called the Flying Dog, and arranged our things and then went to the internet café and wandering around. There was a big park right outside the hostel, and it had a little nighttime market in the middle. There was also Starbucks, McDonald’s, Burger King, and Pizza Hut… but we wanted some Peruvian food, so we came back to a restaurant right next to the hostel where there were some guys from Virginia who we had met in the hostel. Steph actually ate some goat, and we tried pisco, the liquor from Peru, and then we tried chicha, thinking it was ‘fermented corn beer’ and therefore alcoholic, but it turned out that there are 2 kinds of chicha, and we were drinking the non-alcoholic one, which was pretty funny.

We had a good night’s sleep in the hostel, and Steph and Jen caught a flight to Cuzco early in the morning, leaving me for a day until Sam arrived at the airport that night from Chicago. I spent the day relaxing and talking to a lot of awesome people in the hostel, from places like Israel, France, England, and Canada. I went out to get coffee (Starbucks Caramel Frappuchino!) with a girl from Florida, who had finished school and was working on some archaeological digs around Peru. We talked for a while about that because I had just finished my class on Andean Archaeology that covered some of the stuff she was working on.

I also took a walk to the coast, which was a little hazy, but pretty looking. I didn’t go down to the beach, but just went to a lookout over some cliffs that looked out on the ocean.

Later that evening, I went to pick up Sam at the airport, and there were tons of teenagers waiting around and screaming occasionally when certain doors opened, because apparently the JONAS BROTHERS were coming on a flight right around the same time. OMG! haha. I wanted to stay for a little and see what sort of madness ensued, but when Sam got there we just headed back to the hostel. We dropped her stuff off and went out to get food. There wasn’t actually much open because it was Sunday, but we walked down a road with a bunch of restaurants where everyone was pleading us to go in. We walked right past that, feeling a little annoyed, and decided we shouldn’t go to McDonald’s because that would be “too American”… so we went to Burger King instead! hah. Back at the hostel we listened to Wait, Wait, Don’t Tell Me before going to sleep, planning on wandering around downtown Lima the next day.

Monday (May 18th) we got up and had breakfast with some women from Israel, and a guy from San Diego, and then we took a taxi to go find out about buses to Cuzco, that we wanted to get on that night so we could arrive late Tuesday in Cuzco (another long bus ride... at least 22 hours). The bus company only left for Cuzco at 4:00 pm, so that didn’t give us much time to see Lima before we had to leave. Also, at first I thought the bus was terribly expensive, because when I asked them how much it cost they said ‘160’. I assumed she meant dollars, as I had just been reading Lonely Planet where everything was in dollars, but she obviously meant the Peruvian currency, soles, which equates to about $50 (3 soles to 1 dollar). So, after realizing I was a silly gringa, we bought tickets and then went to see the Plazas and churches in the centro.

We ate lunch at a nice little restaurant, and I made Sam try yuca frita and choclo con queso. After seeing the sights we then rushed back in a taxi, grabbed our stuff (I left my big maleta in a closet in the hostel! thank god I don’t have to lug that thing around) and got to the bus station. Now I’m writing this post on my laptop on our bus ride to Cuzco! But we just found out that there’s a mining strike on the road to Cuzco… but there might be another way to get through. So we’re actually on our way to Puno (by lake Titicaca! hm, didn’t expect to be going there… but I guess we’re making a stop) and the bus company is organizing a car for us to either make it to Cuzco tonight or tomorrow morning. We still have 3 days before we have to be in Cuzco to leave for our hike to Machu Picchu, so it actually isn’t a horrifying set-back. Thanks Peru! Oh… interesting travel experiences.

Playa! (Freedom, reading – NOT for school, and spending time con mis amigos)

Once finals were over, and after mother’s day (which I spent with my host family out in the ‘campo’ having a picnic and going swimming) I went to meet Zack and Elizabeth at the beach! We were staying in Puerto Lopez again at the same hostel, and we met our friend Galo who works there. The first day at the beach we went to Los Frailes and hiked around to the beautiful beaches. The water was much lower than it had been when we were there before, so the waves weren’t as big, and we were able to walk to some caves that had been half underwater before. We also (mostly Elizabeth and Zack) built a sand castle, which was washed away right after we had taken a picture of it. We had an awesome dinner at Bellitalia like we had the last time, along with Galo and a friend of his (Joanna, I think).

The next day, we went to a small town south of Puerto Lopez called Las Tunas, which had a huuuuge beach that we played Frisbee on and went swimming for a little while. As we were getting off the bus we had met a group of Canadians who were building a retaining wall on the other side of town as part of a community development class. We went with one of them, who was an older student in her 40s or 50s, to her host family, which was very welcoming, and the host mom offered to make us batidos (smoothies) yumm. We spent a good amount of time just sitting in the shade talking with the woman, who had actually lost her eyesight about 3 years prior, and then later talking to some of the other volunteers who were more around our age. We went back to Puerto Lopez, and I was planning on going to another beach (Canoa) to meet other friends, but Galo had told me that it was really difficult to get there overnight, so I ended up just going home with Zack & Elizabeth to Quito.

It was a perfect, very relaxing way to spend my time after being done with finals :)

Finals

After the Quilotoa weekend, I had a full week of pure insanity, academic-wise. I had a monografía (research paper) for sociology due that Tuesday, then a final quiz on Wednesday in Andean Anthropology (which didn’t turn out to be that bad, partner quiz! love you Angelica Ordoñez…), which I had to study a lot for because for me it would count for double since I missed the last quiz for the funeral. Then Thursday I had 2 finals, Lit (Cuento Hispanoamericano) and Soc (Problemas Sociales en Ecuador), and Friday another monografía (8 pages, 1.5 space… ewww) for Anthropology.

But then, at about noon on Friday after I had turned in my paper… I was freeee! I am now ¾ of the way through college…. WHERE HAS THE TIME GONE?! I have one year left of school… oh goodness.