A few things to think about

I am back now in the U.S. but there are a few things I found really interesting about Peru, and that I have been thinking a lot about.  I'll leave them here, and you (students) can think about them as well, for us to follow up on and discuss more at our next meeting.

Cusco, Cuzco, Qusqo, Qosqo, and the Indigenous and Spanish encounter
This plaque is in the central plaza, the Plaza de Armas.  If you are a Spanish student you should try to figure out what it says before you read the translation underneath!

It says "After five hundred years: glory and honor to the anonymous victims of the invasion, and for the heroes of the Andean resistance.... and they will not be able to kill us." Qosqo, October 12, 1992.  

"Cusco" is written "Qosqo" here, and is also sometimes spelled "Qusqu", both of which are spellings that get closer to the original pronunciation of the word, which is used in Quechua but originally from Aymara (both languages still spoken widely today in the Andean region). The original written rendering of the name by Spanish conquistadors was "Cuzco," but as pronunciation in Spanish and Quechua changed, it became inaccurate, and the Spanish spelling was officially changed to "Cusco" in 1976 (thanks, wikipedia!)

October 12 is the day we usually celebrate in the U.S. as Columbus day, and which in Latin America is known as "El Dia de la Raza."  It both commemorates the Spanish heritage of Latin American people and condemns the loss of indigenous heritage and the indigenous peoples' subjugation and oppression at the hands of the Spanish during the conquest and for hundreds of years thereafter. There are often protests on this day throughout Latin America.

Soles, dollars, gasoline, and the economy

There is an official minimum wage in Peru, which is 5 soles per hour, or about 800 soles per month, a little less than three hundred dollars per month. Logically, the cost of living in Peru is considerably less than it is in the U.S., which is reflected in prices for food, lodging, clothing, and transportation. Gasoline, however, costs almost five dollars per gallon in Peru - even more than it does here. One day on the weekend I hopped in a taxi in the city center - I was going to take the taxi to the bus station, then a bus around to different sites in the sacred valley, and when I explained all this to the driver, he said --but you won't be able to get where you want, get out and look at stuff, it will be really complicated, but you could pay me and I'll take you everywhere you want to go, and you can take your time. He asked for 150 soles, or about $50, and we drove around the sacred valley, seeing the archaeological sites, talking about cultural differences, rural communities, the origins of place names in Quechua, his family, his daughters lives' in Lima. It was fascinating, and he was right - I had a much better time than if I had taken a bus. But when we got to talking about the price of gasoline, which I had also seen listed at the gas stations, we agreed it was hugely expensive relative to the Peruvian economy, and I calculated that the price I would pay him for the trip was barely more than what it would cost him to refill his gas tank when we got back.(We spent ten hours driving around, I learned a ton, and I ended up giving him more money than he had asked for).

Vasilia and David, in a picture from a previous post, live in an isolated area and make a living with the hats, bracelets, scarves and sweaters that they make and sell to tourists. When I wanted to buy something from Vasilia, I wasn't sure I had enough soles in my wallet, though I did have U.S. dollars, which can be used in Peru as well, without having to exchange them. When I said I had dollars, Vasilia told me what the exchange rate was and how much the dollar equivalent to the price in soles would be -- the two interesting things to me here are that the U.S. dollar is an equally used currency in Peru to the Peruvian Nuevo Sol (in fact, in some places, prices are listed in U.S. dollars instead of soles), and that despite geographical isolation, people have a pretty intimate connection to the international economy.

Agriculture, and the Inca sites

This photo on the left is of Moray, a place I visited on my day out in the taxi, and which we'll visit in April. It is believed to be an Inca agricultural experimentation station - the temperature variation between terraces would allow the study of how crops react to being grown at different altitudes and temperatures. This site and many others in the region, which have stood for hundreds, and some for thousands of years, have in the last few years suffered damage from extremely heavy rainfall.

Here's another photo from the same region, and I don't know if you can see well enough, but the terraced plots of land for growing crops go all the way up to the very top of the steep mountains around the town of Urubamba.

Last photos

I know it's a priority for a lot of you to see a llama when we're there. It will happen, and here's a preview:

Next, if you are one of my Spanish students, I'll expect you to explain to me what the "S" and "H" stand for in this next photo (we've been talking about these double-letter abbreviations in class...)

Adios, Peru, nos vemos en abril!