Day 4


Yes you guessed it no water. After eating a quick breakfast I headed to the one bank here to break a bill because I had been eyeing some scarves one of the vendors was selling. There is one bank in Contumazá so there is no such thing as service. I waited in a line of 5 people for 45 minutes just to get change for my bill. It’s like that all the time there. They have 1 teller and there is no incentive to work fast at all. In fact, according to my host mom, if the teller wants to leave he’ll just tell everyone the system is down and go home. I bought my scarf, quickly checked my email and headed to my host mom’s sisters for lunch. It was grandma’s 90th so we had a lunch to celebrate.

It’s hard for me to wrap my head around some of the gender/family dynamics here. In most family’s here men and guests are served first then the older family members. It’s always a little awkward to get served first because in the states it’s polite to wait for everyone to get their food. Here not so much and it’s hard to get used to. In this family it’s the sister, who takes care of the mother, and the daughter in law who are in charge of the meal and after the meal is served they eat in the kitchen. It’s so strange to me to have this family lunch to celebrate a birthday and then they go eat in the kitchen. Also at lunch was the 86 year old aunt who is actually the cousin of the grandma. She never married, has no kids, and lives alone. My host mom has invites her for lunch sometimes so I have met her before. She is such a kooky old lady and just talks and talks and talks. The definition of a crazy old aunt. She’s gets so excited when she sees me, “Gringita!” and gives me this huge toothy grin. After lunch she whispered to me with that grin, “I want to know the coin of your land”. I’ve got some US change so I said I’d bring it next time I saw here and she hushed me because “the others will say I’m bothering you so don’t tell them”.

After lunch we headed to the bull fight! Of course they were running on Peruvian time so it’s started about an hour after it was supposed to. Being here I have gotten really good at killing time. Between things not starting on time, being in situations where I have no clue what’s being said and the long bus trips I can space out/day dream for an amazing amount of time. When 4 hours is reasonable amount of time to get somewhere and you get motion sickness this becomes a valuable skill.

There were 3 bulls so 3 toreros (aka matadors). I had never seen a bull fight before so I was really excited. Apparently the first guy wasn’t very good. He was from Mexico and not very impressive. He didn’t do many tricks with the bull then took forever to kill it. Actually none of them were that good because none were able to kill the bull very quickly. After the bull finally dropped they cut off the ear and the torero threw it into the crowd. Worst souvenir ever. The next guy was from Spain and looked like a gringo so when he stepped out everyone started talking about the gringo torero and people turned to make sure I saw the gringo out there. He was more impressive but still took a while to kill the bull. I asked my host dad what happens to the bull after they kill it and he said they eat it but it’s not very good. According to him the meat is black…not exactly sure what that means. The third guy was Peruvian and did the most tricks so he was pretty entertaining. Let me tell you though after the fight you would think Brad Pitt was out there or something. These guys were swarmed by people for pictures. They probably held more babies than any US politician. There were a ton of drunk people at the fight and 3 different times some idiot jumped over the fence into the ring. Now you would think they would be pulled out right way. From what I’ve seen this week the police here are fairly passive and took an eternity to pull them out. Personally, I think they wanted to see what would happen.

Then we went to the sister’s house for a cafecito (little coffee). This is their dinner which is usually a little something to eat but rarely in my experience actually includes coffee. At this point I was exhausted, had a pounding headache and the conversation was pretty much just a gossip session. We were planning on staying there until the fireworks started later. Really, I just wanted to go home but I couldn’t. The thing is I live outside the center of town. While it’s a few minutes’ walk it’s really not the best idea to walk there by yourself at night especially now with all the drunks and out of towners here. Not being able to do things like walk home when you want is incredibly irritating at times.

We headed to the fireworks with actually only started a half an hour after they were supposed. This might be record. While there was only one castle it was definitely the most impressive of the week. They really know how to do fireworks here. Unfortunately I don’t think having some running through a huge crowd of people with fireworks strapped to their back would fly in the states. Too bad.