The weather keeps changing and breaking my stride

The time keeps flying by! Where did the last two weeks go?

Earlier in the week Rubie, Kurt, Kevin and I went out to dinner at this place called Timbo’s near our house and ordered something called a parradilla which is basically just a huge pile of assorted meat. There was anticucho (cow heart), steak, chicken, pork, blood sausage, some other sausage, some unidentifiable meat which had a non-pleasing flavor and some tubular things we figured were intestines. Sounds disgusting, I know, my inicial reaction exactly, but I gotta hand it to them, Peruvians know how to make surprisingly tasty intestines. Anyway, this dinner was followed by an attempt to watch this Indian movie called Jodhaa Akbar that I had purchased in Chinatown. Which reminds me, we girls earlier in the week had gone to Wa Lok in Chinatown and gottn delicious dim sum and just regular Chinese food for relatively cheap. Yay dim sum!

Well we tried to watch this Indian movie later and it was just a mountain of problems. First we couldn’t put it on English subtitles because none of the remotes in our house worked. Then the subtitles mysteriously worked, but they were so horrible that half of them made no sense and the other half was so poorly translated, it was just hilarious. So we basically have no idea what’s going on in this movie and Bollywood movies are a little overdramatic/bizarre to begin with, on top of which there was so little dancing and singing, which is the entire point of watching a Bollywood movie in the first place! The back of the movie said it was only 1 hour and 40 minutes, really short for Bollywood. But that was all lies. 3 hours in, at midnight, another plot twist was introduced and we just couldn’t take it anymore and called it a night without ever finding out if Akbar lived after his assassination attempt. All in all a pretty comical evening.

We spent a night last weekend hanging out with this group of fun and nice Peruvian guys, first at their house then at Sargento Pimienta. We also hit up Spa, one of the few discotecas in San Isidro. It has no sign at all or any indication that it exists (just a door) but Margarita, our awesome Peruvian friend from the university knew about it and got us on the guest list so we didn’t have to pay to get it. It was kind of nice because it was smaller and not as overwhelming as the discotecas in Larcomar. There was also a VIP section with lots of couches that was less crowded and us looking like the gringos that we are just walked in unchallenged even tho we weren't VIPs.

Saturday night was Passover and Abi organized a really nice seder with tons of yummy food for all of us and her host family to teach us about Passover. Thanks to Wendy, I am a Passover veteran but it was still a new experience being involved in the preparation. By being “involved in the preparation” I mean I tried to help with the cooking but just ended up making the matzah-ball soup really spicy (hey, I liked it but there were some comments/complaints). It was just like the Peruvian twist on the Jewish tradition. Julia decorated paper yamakahs (sp?) with "Uva 08" and we all wore them for dinner. Abi had made a slideshow presentation with pictures and everything to take us through a very abridged version of the ceremony and explain the history behind the celebration. Our seder plate really crossed cultural boundaries because instead of horseradish, which we’re not sure exists in Peru, we used rocoto hot sauce. They also made that yummy stuff with nuts and apples to put on the matzah. Then we ate a great meal of hard-boiled eggs, matzah-ball soup, rosemary potatoes, salad, pardo’s chicken (so good), macaroons for desert, and of course, the most important element – overly sweetened wine. Their host family was so cute about being supportive and interested in the holiday and were very appreciative of our cooking. The mom was especially priceless, she kept commenting “que rico!” about the matzah and exclaiming about how delicious it was, when in reality I feel that people generally agree that it tastes like crunchy cardboard. Abi hid the matzah piece wrapped in a cloth (zusenkamen?) for us to search for and Julia found it under a sofa cushion. After dinner we sat around their fancy antiquey living room and listened to 50’s style music. It felt like we were in a move.

Finally, real life: the weather keeps changing and breaking my stride. The temperature goes from chilly in the morning to hot after midday back to cold at night. And this morning we couldn’t see the sun – just gray clouded/smoggy sky. I’m not looking forward to winter here, when it's like that all the time and the sun never comes out. I went on Monday night with Jesse to play ping pong with the club at the university. It was actually really fun and sort of a work out (sort of…) and I’m pretty much in the middle of the skill levels there so I think I’m going to keep going Monday and or Wednesday with Jesse and Julia. I had a debacle with my schedule in which I was going to a class that I thought I had enrolled in but it was actually full and I didn’t find out until way too late (a month plus in, mid-terms are in 2ish weeks). The situation was complicated and frustrating but it looks like it’s almost resolved and the department is going to make an exception and let me get into the class. That’s pretty much all for now. Stay sexy, America.