"almuerzo" means lunch

Good evening viewers,

I am taking a "Travel as a Narrative" English composition class here (I'm sure I've mentioned this before). But I decided that I want to include some of our class writings in the blog so that you can read a little bit of what we students write about this beauty of a place. So the first one is from yours truely and it is my assignment due tonight. Yes, I do have a night class in study abroad. But don't worry because I actually really enjoy it. Plus, we change it up and go to cafés and such to have class sometimes. It's a grand ol' time.

Oh side note- we have had our Peru video ready to post for 3 days now but our internet (the awesome one that you guys get to hear about at least once a week) will not stay connected for long enough to download the sucker. Pero, no preocupadan (Don't worry). Pronto. Pronto y muy pronto.

So here's my essay for the day. Disfrutan! Enjoy!

"I can smell it from all the way up here in the loft. I am in the middle of typing a paper for my English class, but it is now 12:29 and I cannot help but smell the occasion that awaits me in only one minute’s time. We have lunch promptly at 12:30 every weekday and today is my professor Nathan’s birthday. Every birthday boy or girl gets to select his or her very own Happy Birthday lunch, complete with a delectable dessert of choice. Thus far, there has not been one meal served here that I have not wanted to dive into, swim around, and slurp up. And I do not anticipate today as the day for change because Nathan gave me a sneak-peek of his Birthday menu.

I do not how I am going to finish this paper in one minute, though all I lack is a closing sentence. I cannot get my mind or my nose, and not to mention the saliva dripping from my lips, off of the heaven that I smell downstairs. Final sentence, you must await my return. Who says you can’t have your cake and eat it too? I am going to have mine right now and I am certainly not leaving it to be eaten by any of my other voracious classmates.

I turn the corner of the kitchen and who is there to greet me with a “Buen Dia!” and a big smile, but the infamous Raquel and Mariela. They are our cooks here at Casa ACU. Raquel is a head taller than Mariela and both Uruguayan women wear ACU T-shirts hidden by a well-used apron, hair tied back with colorful handkerchiefs. Every weekday they arrive at around 8 in the morning to set out the breakfast food. Immediately thereafter they start cooking lunch and the aromas of oregano and garlic often fill the house, making it near impossible to focus during Spanish class. They use oregano in Uruguay like we black pepper in America.

Today the table is filled with toppings for the chivitos, which are Uruguayan oversized sandwiches with everything a creative mind can come up with piled on top. Nathan requested grilled chicken chivitos. Good thing grilled chicken is healthy because I certainly make up the calories and fat with the olives, bacon, cheese, ham, French fries and mayonnaise stacking up to the apex of my sandwich. My chivito is officially un-bite sizeable. Lucky for my mouth and belly, I have encountered this “problem” too many times before. I simply practice the squashing technique and voila! A Panini!

I better not eat the whole thing because Nathan told me what he requested Raquel for dessert—“anything with a whole lot of chocolate.” He might as well have told them, “just go ahead and make me some heaven.” Raquel and Mariela make the best desserts I have had in my young adult life. Even foods I do not think I like turn into love at first bite when consumed from the hands of Raquel and Mariela. They have had years of experience. I cannot wait to sink my teeth into the “anything with a whole lot of chocolate” dessert because I know Mariela worked in a chocolate factory for seventeen years before she got this job.

Both of these women have been cooking their entire lives and they both have big families to feed every night when they leave the Casa. They have worked here for about nine years now and only started taking cooking classes when they got the job. They cooked and cleaned the Casa for the ACU students and took cooking classes in the evenings. Raquel told me that in even during her childhood she made little foods for her baby dolls and all through school she always molded cooking equipment, the majority of which were broken by her brothers’ roughhousing. I know how she feels. I find it odd that Mariela does not like cooking much because since I arrived here just three months ago, her food has found plenty of ways to make it’s claim on my body. Raquel, on the other hand, is so passionate about cooking that she cannot even name a favorite type of food to cook because they all bring her so much joy. If she could cook one food after another, after another for the rest of her life she would be happy. I once asked her if she had any other favorite hobbies besides cooking and she just laughed and said, “watching cooking shows.”

There it is—the chocolate heaven. If it were a light my pupils would definitely be burned out right now. I make my way through the maze of chairs and up to the kitchen counter, my eyes fixed on the goal. This prize is more like a surprise. Not only does this chocolate cake contain four types the richest, gooiest chocolate ever to set sail on my tongue, but Raquel and Mariela baked dulce de leche into the middle of the cake. Wait- there’s more. Raquel just pulled hot fudge off the stove to pour over my mound of chocolate. Father, forgive me for what I am about to do."

one and one makes two.

MORE ABOUT PERU!

We chose to do the Machu Picchu trip later in the week, so Thursday morning we woke at 5 and went to get our tickets for the bus ride. The woman at the hostel had advised us when we checked in that before we did anything we should go and make reservations to climb Wayna Picchu. Wayna Picchu is the Mountain adjacent to the ruins and only 400 people are allowed to climb it per day. We ended up being numbers 32, 33, 34 onto the mountain. When we signed out, the girl who came in as number 250 signed out before us and person number 300 something followed us out. Needless to say we stayed a long time. Five hours in fact... but it was exactly what we were looking for.


Along with pictures of Machu Picchu you'll find other random pictures from the trip.... enjoy.

-shmessalyn.

Peru

First stop- LIMA
We left the house at 3:30 A.M. to get the airport in Montevideo. We made it to Lima by 9:45 (Peru time) and had a taxi driver and a sign with Kara's name on it waiting to take us to our Lima home. Our first hostel was in Miraflores in Lima. interesting fact about Miraflores- The fog you see in the picture is a regular occurrence and it causes that part of town to be about 20 degrees cooler than the rest of Lima... which is good... cause it was pretty hot.(in Lima)
In the next picture we have Stefanie playing the out-of-tune hostel guitar as we wait for our accommodations. When you only pay 10 dollars a night sometimes you have to be willing to wait on your service. We switched hostels 5 times in the course of our week. They ranged from really COOL to "I should've payed more money so I could've stayed somewhere with better blankets cause I'm freezing COLD."




The first day we hung around Miraflores and at night hung out at the hostel with the people staying in our room. Stefanie had the symptoms of an on coming cold before we left Montevideo and her influenza hit its stride the second morning we were in Lima. She opted to stay in because none of us had much sleep under our belts from the traveling and really the best cure for her was rest. Kara and i went into the world of Lima. We took the map the hostel worker outlined for us and headed by taxi to the Plaza San Martin.

(Kara D. Dubose hangin out in the Plaza San Martin)


(Plaza de Armas, and Cathedral in Lima, Peru)





Let's be honest, shall we?-Kara and I are terrible tourists.
It's painstakingly true. With nary a guide book and very little desire or intention to find the Rick Steve's crowd (no offense) we got out at the Plaza San Martin ready to slowly make our way through downtown. After I made Kara stand with me for a 5 Peruvian Soles polaroid, we turned onto the suggested pedestrian street that took us to the Plaza de Armas. We genuinely enjoyed these main attractions and we even voluntarily opted to enter the Cathedral like a good tourist would. (mom would be so proud.) Admittedly, as we stepped out of the sun and under the high ribbed vaults the cool air of the Cathedral was comforting and reminiscent of our semester in Europe where cathedral visits came with every trip... but by that time the main attractions were seen (and honestly a little mundane, though no less awe inspiring) and we really thought it time to venture in to the part of Lima where a blonde and a dreadie became the strange minority... and my camera was the only one to be found.
(Note: I'm speaking in the past tense, so no amount of cautionary advice or warnings to be heeded will change anything I narrate... we know we stick out. All is well and I got some cool pictures.)

CUSCO
I imagine watching us in as we had our first day in Cusco would've been somewhat like watching the three of us win the Miss America title, except with out the dresses and makeup and more like three messy haired girls wearing the same clothes they wore the day before. (which allowed for more jumping up and down than a prom dress would have... and nobody cried.) Luckily we were very intuitive in our trip planning and assumed based on our personalities that we would much rather spend the majority of our days in Cusco and simply visit Lima. It just so happened we were very right. We stepped of the plane into cool air and a mountain range as a backdrop to the runway. We contained our excitement all the way to our hostel... but as soon as the helpful desk woman left us with our key and our room jubilees, celebratory bed-jumping commenced.



Some of our hostels may have been a little rough (a night with no water, concave beds, smelly mates) the first hostel in Cusco was the best welcoming we could have had. We sipped on Mate de Coca for the altitude and looked at the skyline of downtown Cusco. wicked. We spent a lot of our time in Cusco relaxing and enjoying the place... we didn't shop, ever... at all.






















CUSCO day3

Day three in Cusco we were picked up from our glorious hostel by the adventure agency. We wound through the mountains for 45 minutes to the place we were going to run off the side of the mountain... like dummies.
This is the random and beautiful spot we picked up our instructor.




We spent the day Paragliding and waiting. It's a slow process but it was a beautiful day and what is there to complain about when you're taking naps in the Andes mountains? I went first. Everyone thought it was really funny how hard it was to fit the helmet on my head. I personally wasn't amused as it seems to be a reoccurring theme in my attempts at head wear. I won't hold it against them. We also though it was pretty funny that in his instructions I was told to "don't sit, no jump... run off of mountain. Run off of mountain." All I want to know is, what idiot discovered how to do this? As it were, my super wonderful parents bought me a new telephoto lens for Christmas. We used it to take pictures while we were in the air. You can't tell but in this picture that Kara took, I have on awesome socks.



If you think thats all we have. It's not. In fact we're not even halfway through, but for both of our sakes I'm going to let this story be continued. I'm going to get one of Raquel's cookies.

chau.
jessalyn

regresamos a la Casa

¡Amigos! ¡Familia! ¡Hombres! ¡Mujeres! ¡Y niños que tienen todos los años! We have just arrived back to the Casa ACU at 5 a.m. this mañana! We have a countless number of pictures and videos we took while on our travel break to peru. Between the both of us I think we have something like 2000 photos and and an hour of video. We paraglided over the Sacred Valley in the Andes Mountains, hiked up Waynapichu in Machu Picchu...TWICE! (stay tuned for the full story a little later this week), and successfully navigated around Peru, serving as our own travel agents. We met people from Australia, the Netherlands, Germany, and Israel (to name a few), and stayed in a total of five different hostels.

We even met a young lad from the good ol' state of Texas who just might be a future Wildcat. We'll just go ahead and give you the story. So the Hadas del Aire (our team name, if you will remember) were chillin' in the Plaza de Armas in Cusco one night. We were about to retire for the eve because we needed to wake up at 4:30 the next morning for our train ride to Aguas Calientes (the town below Machu Picchu). Then, lo and behold! Kara's purple and white radar started beeping at an incredible fast pace. There right in front of us stood a blond young lad wearing black basketball shorts and a purple ACU Wildcats T-shirt. Kara whispered to Jessalyn and Stef with astounding excitement, "Dude! That guy's wearing an ACU shirt!" To which they responded, "nooOOoooOOOoo waAAaaaaAaaY!" So...long story short...well, really it's not a long story at all- the guy ends up having a brother that is a Freshman at ACU right now. We talked to him and his dad for a few minutes, told them to say a sweet hello to Texas for us, and carried on with our travels through this small little world. We were so pumped about the encounter that we stood in a little cirlce and began to sing "Oh dear Christian College, we loooove you-our dear Alma Mater today..." Ok, so we didn't actually sing it. But, you can imagine how cool it would have been if we did. ACU is legit.

We've been talking a lot about how little time we have left- 6 weeks, we calculated. This has FLOWN by and we're sure it will only get faster from here on out. AHHHHHhhhhhhhHHHHHHhhhhh. Crazy.

Anyway, this blog post is mainly to tell you to brace yourselves for some rockin' pictures and videos that we both will be working on so that you can pretend you were an Hada del Aire too.

So...we are excited to be home, but LOVED Peru.

More to come. VERY soon.

Con amor,

Los Dos
(the both of us)

las hadas del aire

I feel like it has been ages since I have actually talked in depth on this blog about what is going on in our crazy study abroad lives. I'll tell you one thing- no two days are ever alike. One thing you learn, whether by will or by force, is the lesson of a little thing I like to call flexibility. Ah mi amor! Flexibility! It is something that I am very much accustomed to, having grown up with the Grizzwalls for a family. And how I loved every moment of it. But I get the feeling that on our travel break this week, my previous lessons in flexibility are going to have ample opportunity to be excersized

Team Hadas del Aire (Stefanie L, Jessalyn, and yours truely) will be making our way to the country of Peru for our 10 day free travel break. And yes, of course, we have a team name. Hadas del Aire. Fairies of the Air. Jealous? Should be.

If we so choose to change our team name at any point we have reserved the liberty to do so. But I feel the name is sufficient considering we plan to do quite a good bit of "following the wind" in Peru. Did you know that the Greek word for "wind" is the same word used for "spirit? Nooma. SO I guess if we wanted to have a trilingual name we could be "Las Hadas of the Nooma," but it just doesn't have the same ring to it.

We depart tomorrow morning at 4 a.m. for Lima, Peru where we'll stay for a few days before heading to Cusco. We have a few things planned but we decided to leave our days open so we can pick and choose what we want to do when we get there. We are changing hostels almost every two nights so I am sure we will get to meet a lot of interesting people in the hostels during our journey. Who knows? We may make friends and go white-water rafting with them. We also want to go bungee jumping or even try this human slingshot thing we saw videos for online. Cusco is our oyster and we plan to milk it for all it's worth. We will be ending the trip with a "tranquilo" trip to the ancient Inca ruins of Machu Picchu. If you haven't seen or heard of Machu Picchu, I suggest you go ahead and open a new tab right now and pull up a pic of this beauty. Or I guess you can just wait till we get back and Jessalyn posts thousands of AMAZING photographs. You know, on second thought you should just wait for her pictures because hers will contain something that the pics on the web will not contain...ME, of course!

There is another group here who is really following the wind. Carolyn, Benjamin, Dorothy, Zanessa, and Sarita Peters are going camping in Cordoba, Argentina and they planned to have an UNplanned trip. We are all excited to hear about the people they encounter and the things they end up doing. They want the focus of this trip to be learning how to trust God to lead them where they need to go and to the people he wants them to encounter. Don't worry- they have their tickets and the campsite organized, but they have left from for some direction along the way. Flexibility, my friends.

Everyone else is going to Peru as well, but we are all going different ways once we get there. A large group is going to LAS AMAZONAS! They are going on a four day boat trip through the Amazon river basin on the border of Peru and and Brazil. They are also going to Machu Picchu and I think they are going to Machu Picchu the same day as us! woot woot! The other group going to Peru had everything organized by a travel agent here in Montevideo that has worked with ACU students for years. Maybe we will get to hang out with them in Cusco a little bit. Who knows in which direction the wind will blow these fairies.

On a completely unrelated note, the past few weeks have been more than a little hectic, yet I have thoroughly enjoyed myself. I think we mentioned something about having a Ministry in Latin America class last week. Our professor, Bio Nascimento, flew in from Brazil on a Sunday night and left this past Sunday. We had 40 hours of class last week. 40 hours of Ministry class. Some of the other classes were canceled for the week, but I still had Spanish and my composition class. It sounds like a brutal schedule, and had it been any other class it might have been just that. Last week, however, was far from brutal or boring. This class was so stimulating for all of us. I have some video footage from the class to show you a piece of our discussion and I am going to put up a video after our travel break. Having Bio in the house was like a breath of fresh air. He brought thought provoking concepts to the table and showed a genuine interest in all of us- even those who were not in the class. I am confident I speak for the whole class when I say I was sad to see him go. I will take you folks deeper into the class when I return from Peru.

Remember friends, we will be blogless for 11 days. I know you'll miss us (well, me at least). Fear ye not, I will take video footage with you in mind. Voy a extrañarles. I am going to miss you all! Please keep us in your prayers. We want to be salt and light!

Con mucho amor y mucho alegria,

Kara AKA Face

CANTA CANCIÓN

SingSong LatinAmerica from Kara DuBose on Vimeo.

For those of you who don't habla español "canta canción" is spanish for SING SONG. Some of our faithful followers and not-so faithful followers have requested that we upload our sing song video here for todo el mundo to see... asi que your wish is my command...

Also- if you click on the vimeo link on the video it will take you to my account and you should be able to view my instructional how-to video. Being the thoughtful girl I am, I tried to make everyone's lives a bit easier by teaching them the words and songs for our act video style. This way they could listen to it and we wouldn't have to take as much time to learn it altogether. It might help to understand the lyrics if you watch this. And I will have you know that the whole process (from the start of choreography to the final filming of the act) took a little over an hour and a half. Heh! Suckers back home don't even realize it takes them weeks of intense labor and all we needed was a chunk of time before dinner. And what have we created? An act that will go down in history. First Sing Song act from Latin America. Don't worry about it. It's not a big deal or anything.

I would like to give a shout out to Rachel Jinkerson for some krunk choreography. And to Jessalyn Massingill for having the most Sing Song spirit of anyone I have ever known. Jess, it was really a pleasure to work with you. You inspire me.

Thanks and Scratch em Cats.

~Kara Dawn

ready, ready.

The Rosary I bought on our first trip to Rome last spring hangs over an antique tambourine on my wall. At this time of night it casts a long shadow of a cross on the schedule of the semester I tacked to my wall the day we got to Montevideo. There's an assortment of things tacked there... pictures of the Wiggins girls and a thank you note, an earring without a match and a few random spanish notes. I'm sitting here checking out the semester in a glance... it's going by fast.
I don't even know the date... the 5th?
Maybe the source of my nostalgia tonight is a result of the dim lighting, or the feel of the cool air in the night here. Really I think it's the Queen song that just came on my itunes. It reminds me of train rides to the airport and the air guitarist that always sat with me through rough airplane landings all over Europe... whatever it is, I'm reminiscing.


This time last year, at about half past midnight, we were waiting on the steps of house 9 for Jeremy Varner to finish packing his bag so that we could get some food at Ali's burger stand on the way to the Oxford bus station to catch the 1 A.M. bus to London. Five of us ended up running through the empty back streets of Oxford in the freezing cold with all of our things, one broken flip flop, and some choice words for Jeremy... because we were on our way to Morocco and it was 12:55.











p.s. We made it to Morocco

-Jessalyn

Meu nome é.. ?

Ta, escucha. OK, listen.
It's been a good week since we've posted. Oops, but not really oops because we knew it would be a while. We told you we were going to be out of town. There may be other times of copious space between posts in the future... because life is about to pick up even more.
I remember last spring how the first month felt so long (yet short) but we had no idea that at the end of the first month...our semester was about to begin.
It felt like that's where it really started... knowing that changes my perspective about a lot of things here.

Like for instance, if I finish this blog I can eat some peanut butter toast. The future is very clear.

We went to the state of Rocha over the weekend. It was wicked cool. (use some inflection, wi-iicked cool. ) It was beautiful and rural... and everyone here is needing some time outside of the city. It was a full weekend and you can have no qualms knowing that we, of course, got home late Sunday night and woke up to class Monday morning... but the balance of work and play equalled out this week.

[ok, I give in. I am going to get my peanut butter toast.]
Heh, I found chocolate to go on my toast too...

Some of us at the casa are in a one week Missions class (I think about 8 of us). I would say that it is rough, solely based on the fact that we are in class for many hours this one week, but after having sat through two days of class I can't even go so far as to say that it's rough because it's THAT good. We have an awesome teacher from Brazil. His name is Bio and it has been an awesome thing to be a part of so far. (not that I forsee a change.) It's long and I'm tired but its worth it. Also, interesting information, I made the suggestion at the beginning of a session yesterday that I thought Bio should teach us some Portuguese at the beginning of each class. I didn't think he would buy it but he really jumped on board and it's been really helpful... or confusing. Depends on how you look at it.

Well, my month at the gym has officially expired cause I don't want to pay for another month when I'm not going to be here enough to go (climbing is only on mon, tues, and thurs nights) and I'm not about to get the medical examen necessary to continue going... we can talk about it later. We are still friends with some brohas from the gym though but my climbing during gym hours are over. the good news is, Mauro has a key to the gym. heheheheh.

Also, on another random and unnecessary note, I got a serious tan this weekend. It surprised me because usually... I dont burn, which is good, but I don't tan either. I have this really nice yellow skin tone.. usually after a few hours in the sun I just look like I have Jaundice and need a shower. Did you know there is a hole is the Ozone over Uruguay? Does anyone know if that's true? I believe it. The sun does some weird things here... you should look at the pictures of Kortney's legs. I am NOT laughing at her, but it was funny.

Fact- in Uruguay it is an old wives tale to rub tomatoes on a bad sunburn as relief... (says Dani the bus driver)
Also Fact- Kortney's legs looked like Lobster leg's with the chicken pox... BUT she didn't hurt anymore. uh huh.

ok now I'm going to enjoy my peanut butter-chocolate toast. whoop.


Sara Morris and Benjamín Palabra (ben word.) I'm going to go ahead and just say that riding in a hot bus makes people give looks like that... it has nothing to do with me.


Crab.


Zanessa, Carolina, Morgan and Sarah pretend to like each other.










What? STUDDDY ABROOAD.. on a boat.

more pictures (that are copyright) later.
jessalyn