Visiting the Spanish Inquisition

I am in Peru where I am feeling slightly less tall and slightly more damp. I swear, if I saw blue sky it would be a miracle. Enjoying Lima enough. It's hard because all the bits of the city that are safe and that the guide books recommend are the old parts. Which really are lovely. But lets face it, the old parts aren't likely to be able to compete with the 'old parts' of Europe so it just feels a bit pointless. And because I want to leave Lima with all my money and credit cards, I am not particularly inclined to just go wandering about by myself in areas that are designated as dodgy. Just a personal preference.

I went to the Inquisition Museum today to avoid the rain. One of the tortures tastefully reconstructed with wax figures was especially for women only. They lay you on a bech, put a large rock in your mouth and poured water over it to simulate a drowning sensation. Sound familiar? All I am saying is that if the Inquisition thought this was a form of torture, along side burning the bottom of the feet and stretching you on the rack then Ashcroft, Rummy, Bush etc really need meds for delusion. Or a history lesson. Possibly with pseudo-realistic wax sculptures.

I was sad to leave Quito - I had just felt like I was settling in to the school and learning enough Spanish to not look like a complete moron all the time. In fact, I learnt enough Spanish that I help a (bad) conversation for 40 minutes with the woman who drove me to the hotel from the Lima airport. I discovered that we had EXACTLY the same birthday.

Snap Judgement for the Day
I am doing a tour for a while in Peru and Bolivia and was checking out the list of names that were posted on the board. I noted the following:
1. I am the ONLY one not described with a Ms/Miss/Mrs; and
2. Most of the group is married to each other.
So, I am now imagining myself in a group of over 50s but I will be the under 30 not hauling my butt up the Inca trail, but instead catching the train. Ah well.

Una, Dos, Tres...dance, dance dance.

In my last post I mentioned my lack of rythym and how the verb bailar (to dance) was unlikely to be very useful to me because of it. Somehow, this didn't actually stop me from showing up in the Latin Dance class the school runs every Thursday.

I should clarify that 'showing up' really means 'was dragged up the stairs by my teacher because they were one girl short and I was the only Chicka left in the school'. Talk about desperation. And where in the world, may I ask, is a dance class one GIRL short? If I learnt anything from Strictly Ballroom it's that girls are always doomed to dance with other girls. And Scott will be really mean to you about it when you ask to dance with him at the Pan Pacifics.

Anyway, it was fun, I managed not to maim anyone. In fact I was twirling like a pro in the end and even stopped leading. I think it{s really unfair to teach you the steps one way for 30 minutes, then make the girls do it all backwards. It is very confusing. It was made worse by teh fact the class was in Spanish and half the time I was confused about which way we were supposed to be going. If nothing else, however, I will now be able to count up to 7.

As a side note, wearing thermal underwear to dance class on a warm day was not one of my better ideas.

Went to Otalavalo last weekend were I went to an animal market (weird) and an 'indigensou crafts' market. I use inverted comas because I am not entirely convinced that people who buy live guinea pig to eat have a giant weaving thingy in their back shed to mass produce the lovely, authentic table clothes.

Went to the middle of the world and stood on the fake equator. And the allegedly real equator. Went up the Teleferiqo and saw Cotopaxi which was very, very cool. Apparently the mountain would be covered with snow if it was anywhere else in the world, because it is 4100m above sea level, but being equatorial, it is lush and green. Crazy!

I am actually very sad to be leaving Quito. Just got settled here, met heaps of great people and now I am heading off to Lima. And I hardly speak any Spanish. Argh!! Ah well. There are nice people everywhere. Except Romania, which I am still holding a deep seeded grudge against.

Functionally Illiterate

Does anyone know how many verbs there are?!?!? All these yars I have been taking verbs for granted, not knowing that I was almost functionally illiterate in my own language. HOW IS THIS POSSIBLE??!?!

So, in Spanish I can say I am doing something if it is going somewhere, eating, drinking or dancing. Given my sense of rythym is zero, the last is not particulalry useful. And I can't have done it in the past. I have to be doing it or going to do it. Argh!!! This is killing me. I am a verbal person and my responses are stunted to saying I like things and talking about my family.

We've just done a test on which I managed to not recognise the sentence for what is your name , describe Pedro as a dog when they really wanted words like tall, blonde etc and miss the point of one sentence so badly I actually got the answer right even though I was answering something else entirely. So this isn't going very well.

This afternoon we are heading to an Indiginous town for a very touristy market so I can buy a poncho to drag me out from my depression. Because, as we all know, you can't be unhappy in a poncho.

Rookie Mistake

I should also add that I don't look Latino because I am not a man.

The title of yesterday's post shoud have been 'I don't look Latina'. Which I realised about 10 minutes after leaving school.

Now I am going to conjugate verbs and learn the Spanish word for humourless.

I don't look Latino

SURPRISE!!! I bet wveryone at home is thinking, wow, that's really funny. Who would have thought Kate with her white skin and blue eyes wouldn't look Latino. Well I don't, and it appears to be attracting a lot of attention. The fact that I am at least half a foot taller than Ecuadorian women is probably part of it as well.

In general I can have a predisposition to worrying about the worst while hoping for the best. Which is kind've how I have ended up in Quito at an immersion language school for 2 weeks, staying with a host family that doesn't speak English and hoping that the 7 of 10 weeks of laguage classes I attended in London would be in some way useful. I was also not entirely sure that I didn't need a visa to get in here until the woman had put a computer print out perilously close to my 'DO NOT STAMP' page.

So I arrived on Friday night and discovered I would be staying with a woman named Venus (pronounced Vanoos but it took me 3 days to work that out) and began signalling in sign langauge immediately. After night of sleep and a sleep in to compensate for my 3am start, I managed to struggle downstairs in time to go to the mall. Anyway, I have managed to establish that her bird's name is Coco which is a start. We'll see.

After 5 days I have managed tof igure out how to have a warm shower.

I also signed up for a 'culture' course meaning I have lunch with teacher every day. Which means I am eating a lot of Ecuadorian food and using my 15 Spanish words to attempt to string coherent sentences together, while worrying that the lettuce will kill me, as the Lonely Planet guide suggested it would. But since I've seen Cuy cooked on sticks, whole pigs displayed on the road side and have eaten pretty much everything put in front of me because 'mi gusta mucho' is one of the few Spanish phrases I know, I think the lettuce will be the least of my worries.