Reverse Culture Shock

I’ve officially been home for a little more than a week, and I’m already experiencing reverse culture shock. There are things that I never thought about that are so entirely different from Ecuador that I’m constantly either annoyed or awed.

Such as:

• 38° is cold. I do not understand how everyone here thinks it’s not.

• I can now flush toilet paper. For so long it’s been drilled into my head that I can’t, that I feel like I’ll get caught whenever I do. My mom and sister have been subjected to frequent whoops from the bathroom because of it.

• I have realized that traffic lights are by far the most inefficient method of controlling traffic. Traffic circles make so much more sense. I never thought I’d say that, but there it is.

  

• People really do use the elevator to go to the second floor. I suppose I get annoyed because at 8,370 feet above sea level, I practically climbed a mountain and literally climbed 135 steps in order to get to my classes every day. (Unless I took the bus, in which case it was only 85 steps.)
  

  

• Everything is sweet here. I went to a restaurant the other day with my extended family and realized that my sister couldn’t taste the way the breaded shrimp was sickeningly sweet. She’s used to it; I’ve gotten used to salty things being salty (and just salty) and sweet things being significantly less sweet than they are here.

• I’ve come to the conclusion that lemon juice on my popcorn just doesn’t taste the same as lime juice.

• My mom has never had a tree tomato, and I have the niggling feeling that it’ll be hard to find a tomate de arbol anywhere around here. (Any suggestions?)

• There are no palm trees here. In Ecuador, it was a weird feeling not seeing pines. Apparently I got used to that, because now I feel like there’s something missing when I don’t see palm trees.

• Potholes, while not found exclusively in the States, were not something I missed.

• It’s fun to drive my own car, even if I do have to sit in traffic.

• Speaking of which, it’s actually nice to see orange construction cones again, as opposed to ones striped with black and sickly yellow. (Another thing I never thought I’d say: “Orange construction cones! How lovely!” Traveling abroad does weird things to you.)

• Air pressure was something I never noticed until there wasn’t any. Now it feels like I’m being squashed wherever I am.

  
  

  All of which, of course, mean that I'm ecstatic to be home, while at the same time missing Ecuador quite a lot. 

Home

Home.

It’s a funny word, made up of less than five letters but encompassing so much. 

It means family, hugs, and kisses. It means a balloon that says “WELCOME HOME!” (which was supposed to make my sister more visible but ended up being the last thing I noticed). 

It means my own bed, and sleeping in all the way until 8 o’clock in the morning.

It means a can of real American spaghetti sauce. It means eating a real apple for the first time since I left this place nine weeks ago.

It means my church family and more minute-long hugs than I’ve ever had there before in my life. It means people who have followed my journey on Facebook because it was practically the only way to.

It also means 19° Fahrenheit, but I don’t care because my family is here.

It’s not my comfort zone anymore, but it’s comforting. It’s somewhere where I can make my own fun without having to spontaneously plan it ahead of time. A place where I can play my own piano (finally!) and squeak out a couple melodies on my own violin. (Squeak is the right word.)

A place where I am finally needed.

Home. It’s a wonderful place.

95 Things

Disclaimer: The problems that this post is about have all been resolved (more or less) satisfactorily.

I have been in Peru for only a week, and I’ve learned and experienced a crazy amount of things, in this order:

1. It is possible to get off one plane, go through security, retrieve your bag, leave and re-enter the airport, re-check your bag, go through security (and forget that you have a bottle of Gatorade, but they let you keep it), go upstairs, find a gate, and get on your next plane in less than an hour.
2. My big green suitcase now has only one wheel.
3. Gringos can be really, really annoying. This is even though I myself am a gringa here. But gringos, especially retired ones, tend to complain for hours about everything, including not having real milk to put in their tea ON THE AIRPLANE.
4. The Cusco airport has no security. Literally none.
5. The bathroom has water only in the toilets. There is no soap. Hand sanitizer is a wonderful thing.
6. There is a really cute kid at the airport. Cute enough so that you want to adopt him and keep him in your carry-on. And you privately name him Pepito.
7. Every flight at the Cusco airport is announced over the loudspeaker. That’s how small it is.
8. Dried strawberries are wonderful.
9. Do not assume that a tour guide that gets in the van from the airport is legit. He could be trying to scam you.
10. Just because said tour guide has a bazillion brochures and fold-outs, it does not mean that he’s 100% real.
11. Sometimes offers too good to be real are too good to be real.
12. It’s always a good idea to ask for time to think it over.
13. Sometimes you don’t realize the wisdom of that until after you’ve made a down payment of $100. Or until after you put the disclaimer into Google Translate and it says, “This document is not for accounting use, and must be exchanged for a bill of sale and/or invoice at the time of payment. It is worthless without an authorized signature and seal.”
14. It is physically possible to feel your stomach drop when you realize you’ve been hoodwinked.
15. Hey…every picture on the walls of our hostel room is crooked.
16. The Tourist Police of Cusco are in the Plaza of Túpac Amaru.
17. Guys like John Villafuerte Huanca (the guy who was trying to get us to use his tourist company) are described online as “slippery merchants.”
18. We can shake visibly from nerves and stress just as much as if we were freezing.
19. Down the street from the hostel, there’s a bronze fountain of a naked woman pouring water out of a pitcher. She’s lit with strobe lights.
    
20. Fireworks can go off at any time of day or night. Sometimes it sounds like someone dropped a match into a box of them.
21. Sometimes it’s easier to understand people about important things in Spanish than in English.  Case in point: “the other way is to go to the TURISM POLICE, they know very well how are do this king the falls contrat with the visitors so they have to lost time with the POLICE and to do the gestion with the denuncia” Whatever that means. What has a king got to do with anything?
22. The top bunk is really squeaky.
23. There are only 80 liters of hot water to divide among three showers. When the last person gets in, she will scream since the water is so cold.
24. You can’t beat a free breakfast with three courses.
25. Machu Picchu tickets cost $23, not $70.
26. There are fake guinea pigs made from alpaca fur at the market. They’re the cutest things since bunny slippers.
27. We’re too poor to buy Ramen noodles. So, buying the ingredients to cook a meal that costs, total, $4, will yield a lunch that tastes like it cost $4.
    

28. I can use Spanish subjunctive mindlessly only when I’m angry, and on the phone with John the Con. And even then I completely missed it because I realized too late I had used the informal “you” form, which simply isn’t done with people you don’t really know.
29. It is, regrettably, completely possible to feel exactly like the toilet on this sign:
    
30. The Tourist Police person is really nice to us, and gets things done very efficiently. He’s not so nice to sketchy tour guides: he threatens them with tickets.
31. John’s promise that we’ll get our money back (not including the bus ticket, guide, and transportation to the station), gives us enough of an adrenaline rush that we’re perfectly happy for a good hour.
32. There is a supermarket next to the tourist police.
33. Eggs don’t have to be refrigerated here, either.
34. There are booths upon booths of dog sweaters at the market.
35. Taxis are perfectly safe, even when they’re flagged off the street. They may have uncomfortably small back seats, but they’re safe.
36. Every single taxi driver is an unofficial representative of his own unofficial tourist company.
37. “Ya la tenemos” or “Ya lo tengo” (We/I already have it) works wonders with getting people to stop trying to sell you things.
38. Alpaca tastes like very tough steak.
    

39. Given the opportunity, Natalie can spit lemonade all the way across the table.
40. There are two Asian girls sharing our hostel room for the night. They really do bow when they leave the room.
41. It is always a good thing when John the Arrogant Blatherskite comes calling early, so that you’re just underprepared enough to not be really nervous.
42. It is possible for four college girls to make a grown man shake from fear.
43. Being sadistically ruthless in getting your money back feels entirely too good.
44. Taking pictures of a shyster when you’re pretending to calculate expenses is probably illegal. We did it anyway.
45. The Western Union at the Plaza de Armas has a better exchange rate than most places.
46. Jailli, pachakutik, llakta, and taki are all common things. (Yay for Francisco’s class…ish.)
    

47. Carnaval did not end here until Sunday night. We learned that when we had everyone throwing water balloons at us, and tons of carnaval foam sprayed at us.
48. There is no Daylight Savings Time in Peru, so I won’t have a smidgen of jet lag when I get back.
49. Taking a picture with an alpaca costs money.
    

50. There are really neat ruins in and around Cusco. A city tour consists in seeing the majority of them.
51. Beware of cute kids selling llama keychains. They will do anything to get you to buy them. (I was strong, and didn’t buy anything. I felt like scum, though.)
    

52. Real alpaca is cold to the touch. Fake alpaca might look cool, but it’s not cold.
    

53. White rice is not the best when it’s the consistency of tacky glue that’s been sitting on the shelf for a year.
54. The Hunger Games 2 movie is really exciting. So exciting, in fact, that Alex and Natalie went to bed about a quarter of the way in. (Liesel and I stayed up until a little before midnight.)
55. Waking up to an alarm for the first time in three days makes us all fairly grumpy, even if it is for 6 o’clock.
56. It’s best to put water in the coffee so you don’t use up all the milk and have to ask for more.
57. People love us on our tours because, though we’re the youngest tourists and are from the States, we still speak Spanish and are genuinely interested.
58. We are nerdy enough to feel like we’ve died and gone to heaven when we see old stones just sitting there doing nothing.
    

59. We may talk in English amongst ourselves, but we switch to Spanish immediately when talking to anyone else. Sometimes this is a bad thing. Case in point: Alex walks into someone’s picture. “Oh,¡perdón!” she says. He looks confused, and says, “Oh, uh. Sí, sí. Grahsiahs. Um, I’m done.”
60. Francisco’s class ONLY comes in handy on tours of Peruvian ruins.
61. The Incan drainage system was fantastic.
62. The history we learned in Ecuador is enough to make us able to give educated guesses on tours.
63. Alex calls the Pachamama the “Papamancha.”
64. Cute kids in the background can take all the attention away from the presentation of how thread is made and dyed. As in, people sit there and take pictures of him.
65. The Peruvian government is trying to build an airport on top of part of the Sacred Valley. Apparently that is how dumb governments can be.
66. Cornflakes and strawberry yogurt for dinner is the best meal we’ve made here so far.
67. The internet in the hostel has ceased to work for me.
68. A German is rooming with us. She was in Ecuador for a while, hiked the Inca trail with her boyfriend (who then went back to Switzerland), and she’s leaving for New Zealand in the morning. Talk about a world traveler!
69. Waking up at 4 AM makes us even grumpier than when we had to get up at 6.
70. Scrambled eggs in Styrofoam cups, alongside cornflakes and yogurt (also in Styrofoam cups), are a perfect complement to cheap bread smeared with weird strawberry marmalade.
71. We have John scared enough that he comes to drop off the taxi and our bus tickets exactly 6 minutes after the agreed-upon half-hour time frame begins.
72. The exchange rate is 2.8 soles per dollar. John owes us $2. (He paid the rest earlier.) He pays us with 6 soles. That means we get more out of him than he told us originally. AND we didn’t have to exchange it ourselves.
73. The station for the train to Machu Picchu is in Cusco, but, due to flooding during the rainy season, we have to take a bus to another train station. The taxi to the station takes about 15 minutes. The bus ride is 1 hour and 45 minutes long. The train is another hour and 50 minutes long. The bus ride up from Aguas Calientes to Machu Picchu proper is yet another half hour. All told, we travel four hours and 20 minutes to get to Machu Picchu, arriving at 11 o’clock AM.
    

74. Liesel sits next to a kid named Mauricio on the train, and gets hit on for the full two hours. She’s 19; he’s 16. He doesn’t even have decent pick-up lines. And his uncle “sneaks” a picture of her, which she definitely sees.
75. We look at the bus prices and realize we’ve been royally ripped off by The Jerk.
76. The guy from John’s company doesn’t know who John is. (Always a good sign.) We get the tour guide anyway without having to pay more.
77. What we paid in terms of “bus tickets,” “guide,” and “taxi,” comes to about what we thought we would spend on just Machu Picchu originally. So it’s not SO bad.
78. 60° F is now considered very cold. I have no clue how I am going to survive in Chicago.
79. What I always thought was Machu Picchu is not, in fact, Machu Picchu. That’s the name of the complex, sure, but the mountain in the back is Huayna Picchu, not Machu Picchu. Machu Picchu is a squat little mountain behind the ruins.
    

80. About 20% of what’s Machu Picchu today was restored before UNESCO declared it a world heritage site.
81. The first guide in Machu Picchu was a 10-year-old kid.
82. The water in the Incan channels feels slimy.
83. It is so much better to go on Spanish-speaking tours. The guides’ English is almost unintelligible.
84.  People here are RICH. They can pay to go to Aguas Calientes to get lunch, where the cheapest sandwich is 16 soles and a drink costs a lot.
85. The bus gets really close to the edge on corners. It also slides in the dust.
86. I get to sit across from Mauricio (see #74) on the two-hour train ride back. I’m antisocial enough that he and his cousin both fall asleep.
87. John came through with the taxi to pick us up (he wasn’t there, but there was a taxi waiting), so we’re permanently done with him. 
88. People throw up in the street in Cusco. And it is possible to walk past and dry-heave on an empty stomach.
89. Nearly all restaurants close at 9, regardless of if their signs say they close at 10. If you get to the cheap one at around 9:05, you will be politely thrown out and have to go to the more expensive Inca-Azteca spaghetti/pizza place. (That doesn’t sound like a pizza restaurant, does it?) 
90. I can get "deals" in the markets because I'm a student and speak Spanish. Whether the deals are deals or not, I do not know.
91. We can get take-home boxes from the cheap place, and reheat noodles in margarine on the stove in the hostel for dinner.
92. Every bit of stuff I have fits comfortably into my two suitcases and my backpack, provided I leave my too-big pajamas and my split tennis shoes. 
93. The Western Union will take damaged American bills, to trade them out for soles.
94. The fruit salad topping we have every morning has been described by the Brits staying with us as looking "like dog sick." Descriptive, at the very least.
95. After seeing Machu Picchu, I feel like I can go home having done everything I wanted to. 

So, that's what I've learned and experienced since coming to Peru all of five and a half days ago. It's been what we call a "learning experience" at my house. Regardless of its challenges, Peru has been worth the effort and frustration.