Rio and the end of a wonderful trip!

I have been in Rio for the past week and am just about to leave back to Miami tomorrow night. I find it hard to believe all that has happened in one summer and all that I have gotten to see. There is no other word to describe it but magnificent. I´ve enjoyed everthing from this trip so much, and by everything I *mean* everything: good or bad, pretty or ugly (and believe me, there was plenty of ugly and sad views, even if I neglected to write them down here). I don´t think I would exchange these experiences for much else. I wondered before this trip whether because I am a historian and not an anthropologist that I wouldn´t gain anything from actually being in the country that I am studying (besides books of course). I realize now that no matter what field you are studying (history, medicine, public health, anthropology...whatever), nothing can replace actually living in the place you are studying. You can gain an understanding of the psyche or logic of the country that otherwise might be lost on you...everything begins to make sense historically. Sometimes even the opposite happens, which is actually ideal. I really like it when someting I thought was a completely logical chain of events turns out to make no sense in context, because then I know there must be a much more interesting story that is hidden somewhere is some archive. And, I´d love nothign more than to find it. That, to my nerdy historical senses, is exciting.
All in all, I can sum up the last paragraph by just saying: I enjoyed myself, I´ll miss it a lot, and I can´t wait to do something like it again. And here I should end my long rant and begin to talk about what happpened in Rio. If the last paragraph bored you (which it probably did) I am sorry, I just feel that at the end of something big in your life, some sort of conclusionary thoughts should be made.
Anyways, in the last weekend in Rio a lot of things have happened, though, in honor of Brazilian time, have happened quite slowly. It´s incredible how laid back the culture is here and how ridiculously contagious it is. Everyday I lose half the day on the beach--riding the great surf by literally swimming up the strong waves and later laying down in the sand to dry up. Granted I am not complaining, its just weird that I am so drawn to these beaches. After all, I live on a beach essentially, this should be nothing new for me. But there is truly a mystical beauty to Rio´s beaches thanks to the towering and steep rocky hills, speckled with green that sorround the Ipanema shore. There is just nothing to compares to seeing these formations touching the sky while you are down in the shore diving into the crashing waves. It´s a totally different type of beach than I´ve ever seen before. Another interesting aspect of the Rio beaches are the people. Honestly, you´d think the shore were some sort of runway for guys and girls to strut their stuff and model the latest brazilian bikinis (for girls) and some new type of speedos shapped like "trunk"underwear (for guys...this is the part I find a little disturbing; especially how they are *everywhere*).
But there is a whole lot more to Rio than beaches (although to many cariocas, that is all you will every need here). What was really cool is that I recently got to see a Candomblé ritual (an religion which is a sincretism between the Ioruba african religon and Catholicism) a little ways from Rio in this jungle-of-a-house owned by a french woman (the Mãe de Santos). Inside the house, I was taken into the main corridor where a whole party was being prepared. In essence, a candomblé religious cerimony is quite literally a party for their Orixas (or demigods). It´s not really like mass at all. After a few hours of dancing to different drumbeats (each one representing a specific Orixa), the main candomblé dancers will get invaded or possessed by the spirit of their personal Orixa. This is a little scary to watch as the dancer will begin screaming his greeting in scary deep or high pitched voices that definitely do not belong to the original person. To add to the whole mystical aspect, the body periodically convulses (as if the spirit was about to leave for a second but decides to stay for a little longer).
At any rate, after the posessee calls out his/her name, s/he is tied around the chest in order to keep the fragile spirit inside the body and then taken off into another room, dressed in the a custume which is most comfortable to the Orixa, and comes out to dance, join the party essentially, and just hang out with his and her followers. (By the way, these dances are really really cool). So the deities are really quite personal in this "religion" (which I believe is technically part of catholicism, though I doubt that any priest would approve). What makes the whole experience even more bizarre is that each Orixa is not picky about what gender s/he invades. Thus, female Orixas often invade male bodies. It is an interesting sites to see these men dressed in very feminine clothing and swaying, talking, and trully acting like women. As soon as the whole process is over, if you go talk to them they could be the most macho person alive, it does not matter. The person dancing was not them, it was the Orixa; this idea is key in order for one to understand and appreciate these ceremonies. (You can tell I was accompanied by an anthropologist, can´t you?)
After witnessing the candomblé party I went back to central Rio and headed over at 12 o´clock at night (which is early for Rio, by the way) to Pão de Açucar (Sugar Loaf). This place is a famous rock formation by the beach which is so high up you have to take a little cable car (o bomdinho) all the way to the top in order to get to see a beautiful view of Rio. During the day, it is extremely touristic, but at night it becomes one of the hippest night clubs in town. Imagine having to ride up a cable car to get into your club and then partying it up with all of Rio´s splendor in view at the peak of a huge rock formation! That´s exactly what this is. It is one of the most beautiful night clubs I´ve ever been in. Every friday and saturday night Pão de Açucar is packed with all the hip and beautiful people in Rio as well as with all the European expatriots who have a taste for "high society" (Brazilians like to borrow this world from English). It was a really weird feeling to jump directly from a Candomblé party (generally a religious event for the poor) and then going to Sugar Loaf right after. Nevertheless, it was a great chance to see both sides of the world in Rio, a city which has one of the largest economic disparities in the western world. That is what is most bizarre about this place. Despite it´s incredible beauty, poverty and suffering is always visible right at the corner of your eye no matter where you are.

Back in Lima!!

Hi everyone! Sorry I have been really bad at posting the last...erm...ten days or so. But it was really hard to find enough free time to write everythign that was happening in an internet café (not to mention that sometimes there were no internet cafés; at one point I was staying in an island in Lake Titicaca so isolated from the world that it has no phones and limited electricity produced solely by a generator and a few solar panels.) I had a packed agenda which, although it wore me out, was most definitely worth it and I do not regret anything! Right now, unfortunately, I do not have enough time to write a longer blog with the details of the trip but I promise one is coming up. I just arrived by airplane and so I need to grab a late lunch at Bembos (my new favorite fast food chain which has the most delicious gourmet burgers I have ever tried!) with my friend Ravi then go to the ministry of health and thank a few people personally for all their help. Now it is time to start wrapping up my whole work here. It is kind of sad really. I feel like I could stay for so much longer and be happy, yet everything is going so fast. At the same time, I feel at home here in Lima already, as if I have lived here for a year. It is a weird feeling, but no time to sit and ponder, I got to start moving. Hopefully tonight I´ll catch a bit of free time.

Hojas de Coca

I had a coca leaf reading done yesterday. It was really interesting--almost eerie--experience, but I am definitely glad I did it. The way it works is you go to the house of the curandero (or shaman, although that name is usually reserved for amazonian healers) and sit for a while while waiting for your turn. The one I went to was very popular so I was waiting for quite a while (close to 2-3 hours!). This curandero is really famous apparently so he gets payed to go to Europe, the US, and all over south america to see his patients. Making him not only good curandero, but a man with interesting stories.

To exemplify his popularity I can vouch that while I was in the "waiting room" I overheard that two russians were calling ahead asking for an appointment a month in advance. Not your everyday curandero. Now, I say "waiting room" but I must clarify what I mean. I do not mean a cozy room with comfy chairs inside the house but wooden banks in the backyard of the curandero´s farm. Being a prosperous man (the curandero), I was thus accompanied by four dogs (two of which were mischevious puppies), 4 chicken, 1 rooster, 1 turkey, tons of guinea pigs--cuy--, and I was even granted the pleasure of the company and the smell of a bull and two cows. (Thankfully, they came in only much later in the day.) Weird as it may sound, it was very cool...and I have to admit the animals provided hours of entertainment; especially the puppies who were learning slowly what it meant to be part of a dog family, the hard way. (I.e. Never eat from mommie and daddies plate or they will bark and bite you and don´t try to kill and eat your owner´s baby cuy or the head of the house will chase you with a broom.)

Finally, after hours of waiting, I was admitted at dusk into the vapor filled curandero´s room with my friend Ravi. Everything inside was chaotic to my eyes, though I was aware that everything was exactly as it should be nevertheless. Flowers scattered on the side, different purging instruments scattered about the room, an open wine bottle (half drunk by now) on the right corner of the room, and a tiny desk with thousands of coca leaves scattered in no pattern readable to my eyes. "Who will go first?" asked the curandero without any other introduction. I volunteered and sat down in a bank.

The curandero took a handful of coca leaves, smooshed them into his two hands, then asked me to blow on them three times. I did. Then he asked my name. I told him. And thus he proceeded to scatter the leaves around the desk and read the pattern in order to tell me my future. (Oddly enough, I hadn´t asked to have my future read, but la suerte and bodily health are intimately tied in Andean culture...so I should have known better). I have no idea how he read the leaves, to be quite honest. He seemed to see how they fall and immediately tell me where I am from, what I am doing here, what my personality is like (and all this somewhat accurately), and then reading my future. (It was all hard to hear though, he had a slight slur in his voice thanks to all the alcohol. In andean medicine, I´ve heard, you are supposed to drink a bit of wine before and after each cosultation to avoid being infected by whatever plagues your patients. ) At this point I got really nervous and asked that I just wanted to know about my health. He looked confused but continued uniterrumpedly to tell me exactly what I had at the moment and offer me a cure. Funny too, because his advice is actually pretty scientifically sound too.

He didn´t stop there. Although I had asked that I did not want my future read, he eventually smoothed back into it and I had not much choice but listen and be mistified by the whole process. It is not that I believe that he saw my future, but that I was struck at how accurately he was describing me accomplishing some of my very personal goals without me telling him anything except my name. I don´t pretend to understand this process, or would I necessarily recommend it as a form of treatment, but I have learned enough to admire the art and the complexity of curanderismo. This is not something you learn in a week, or something you try to bogus your way through. You have to have eight years of training at the very least, and there is something to that. Also, while sitting in the waiting room, I saw that this was not just an "interesting experience" for most of his patients (as it kind of was to me) but something extremely real. Even my guide (who looked like a very westernized Andean with her red-dyed hair and down jacket) was excited about getting her consultation. She had explained that this is why she was willing take me in fact; she was due for a consultation right now anyways. And, if you think about it, I had to wait for this consultation about as long as a patient has to wait for a doctor´s consultation (2-3 hours or more). It parallels here very closely.

Picking up from my long digression, after the curandero--Martín--finished the consultation he looked oddly at me for a while with a puzzled look. He then smiled and my turn was over. Ravi then went and had a similar experience. At the end of the whole thing, he talked to us both for a while and seemed to start to take a liking to us. He said to us both (paraphrased) "I know your studies will go well, I hope that you enjoy Peru and that you found what you were looking for." Nevertheless, when the time came to say goodbye, he turned around in a mystic sort of daze, stared at the wall and we both decided that this meant it was time for us to leave and give him our small donation. That was my experience with coca leaf readings with a curandero in a remote town with no paved roads, 1 hour away from Cusco. I probably screwed up some of the details, and added a bit of bias from my westernized perspective, but this is how I felt I experienced it.

In Cusco

Hey,
So after rushing desperately for the last few days to photocopy all the things i could possibly ever need, I am now finally essentially all done and enjoying Cusco (or Cuzco, or Qus´co however you like to spell Quechua words). It´s incredibly beautiful. I just arrived today and am working on developing the schedule for the next few weekends. We have essentially everything planned. Our main thing is that we are going whitewater rafting down the sacred valley for two days (it is essentially impossible to do the Inca trail without bookng two months in advance apparently, at least in this season) and then going to machupichu and staying there for a night! I am extremely psyched. I will also be taking a bunch of city tours in between. And in a few minutes we´ll be heading up to Huazao (think "wassup" to remember the name), a town for curanderos here in Cusco. I am looking forward to witnessing some hoja de coca reading sessions and see how the whole process goes. I know that these curanderos are probably are used to tourists and will make a whole show of it, but i´ll have to take what I can get. Well I need to head out right now. Later I will right more when I find a computer with a decent keyboard (the keys stick BADLY in the one in this café).

Chao.

Back and well again

Hey! I´ve been meaning to write a ncie long blog about my trip to Ayacucho because it was absolutely incredible. Unfortunately, right at the very end of my trip last monday morning I got awfully sick, to the point that I was basically bed-ridden for two days and am still feeling the remnants of it today. I have no idea what it was: Was it the cuy that I ate (guinea pig, a particularly important cuisine of the Andes)? Was it a cold? Or was it sorroche (altitude sickness)? Well, I can cross out altitude sickness, cause that should have been cured as soon as I got to Lima, which did not happen.

Anyways, don´t feel too bad for me. While being bed ridden I read all of Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince non-stop for two days. Haha! So I was happy nevertheless (the ending did not lift my spirits too much though...when I finished I felt like I was in mourning for the rest of the day). Curiously, I ended up reading the british version since I could not find the american version down here. This means that I now know some interesting british slang words, like "snogging" (which apparently means "making out").

Besides reading of Harry Potter I have been mainly staying in this week, recuperating, and also reading the large number of fotocopies that I have gathered after visiting so many libraries. As a break, I meant today to give a detailed description of my trip to Ayacucho. But for that I think I need the (humility aside) incredible pictures that I took on the trip ( :-) ). I do have the pictures with me, but I was hoping that the internet cafe would have its own photo editing program so I can reduce the file size a bit and make them more suitable for internet viewing. Well, they don´t. So I will have to go home and do it with Microsoft Photo editor instead (a program which I hate, but it does the job ... sorta). So my trip to Ayacucho will have to wait just a few more days. I am really sorry. Thankfully, since not too much has happened since, I don´t feel too guilty postponing this blog a little haha.

Write back later. I will also write an update soon about how I am planning to go sand boarding this weekend around the dunes of the Peruvian desert! Yeah!

Hey from Ayacucho

So I am in Ayacucho. This will be really quick since I am about to leave to go to a "peñas" around Ayacucho. These are famous peruvians live music night clubs. What makes them so unique is the fact they play Andean folk music, criollo music, and huayno. I've heard that they are awesome, and I am very excited. Supposedly the ones in Lima are really touristy but these are "real" (which I am guessing just means, it has less tourists and more locals). Ayacucho, for being such a small town, seems to have a very good night life. As soon as the sun sets I hear random fireworks going off and painting the sky. They don't seem to be premeditated as they happen at the most random times and without any pattern as far as I can see (this is sometimes to my embarassment, since when these fireworks catch me off guard I have a tendency to jump in alert ready to dive from whatever bomb is coming my way...understandably, this provides a lot of entertainment for the locals.) *Jumps* See! Another firework just went off!! I simply cannot get used to them.

Erm. Well, back to my point...the night life, so the night life here is pretty good. First of all, in the two out of the two nights that I have been here I have seen party-procession parades every night. I do not know what for, I can only assume they are religious holidays that somehow I, as a fellow Catholic, am not aware of. It's odd, I had been so bumbed that I wasn't coming during a religious holiday (this place is perfect for those times), yet I am seeing exactly what I imagined would happen during these days. I can only imagine how magnificient the major processions must be!

Anyway, gotta run. Got lots of pictures!

Getting ready for Ayacucho! Yay!

Hey everyone!
So this is going to be a very quick blog entry because I am sort of in a hurry and out of small pocket change to pay for the internet cafe. (It´s funny really, I only consider my pocket change as how much money I have. What´s in my wallet is often useless since only restaurants are willing to take my 50 soles bills. Even handing a 20 soles bill to a cab driver will make him grunt and moan in dissaproval). But, I just wanted to give an update. I got invited to a conference in Ayacucho--a nice little town in the central highlands of Peru--on what is called Intercultural Health here. It´s a new term that seems to only exist in Latin America as far as I can tell, but it means that they are trying to develop a relationship between Western health practices and indigenous health practices, thus making a new intercultural health system. The idea is relatively new still. In fact, there is technically no official definition yet, and people in the ministry told me they will e-mail me when they finally decide on one. Either way, they are making a whole conference about this undefined term in Ayacucho and I am so excited that I will be there. Plus, it looks like Ayacucho is a nice town. The architecture is supposed to be beautiful and it has the dubious record of having the most churches per square meter! (I´ve heard people saying that there is a total of 300 at least in the whole town...in other words, one per block!!). Not surprisingly, one of the more popular exports are beautiful palm-sized wooden churches made by craftsmen. Apparently, they will also weave a personalize rug made from real Llama wool at your request as well, apparently usually depicting some of the more painful history of struggle in Ayacucho. (At $300, as tempted as I might be, I think I will pass...but the idea is cool. The whole process also takes 3 months, so you´d have to get it DHLed home.)
So, I will be leaving on a tiny plane tomorrow morning (Friday 15) and coming back apparently on an even tinier plane on monday. This should be interesting! Eek. I am sure it will be fine though. The flight is only one hour. I should be pretty comfy as there won´t be a lot of people in the plane because this is not the high season for tourism at all for Ayacucho. That would be actually in "Semana Santa" (big surprise, considering the number of churches), where people need to book hotels days in advance. Currently, from what I read and have been told, there are so many open hostels and hotels in the area that no one bothers to book in advance. Apparently, this is the classic case of a town over-compensating for really high, short lived seasons. Competition must be hard right now for the poor hotels, I like to wonder how they mantain themselves out of peak season. But on the plus side for the tourist, accomodations are really cheap and nice, since they want to attract the most tourists *beams*
Alright I gotta go right now. I think I went over the pocket change I had. The manager won´t be too happy, I think he is going to have to give me change. *blushes* I´ll write again later, and I will try to write more consistently. I was pretty busy this week and barely had time to answer my e-mail every day!

Chao!