El Primer Dia en Amauta

Our first day of school was kind of rough, considering we woke up around 7am and had to shower while the house was practically an ice box. Winter is a lot rougher in Cuzco than it is in Lima and I was freezing when I got out of the shower. We got ready and went downstairs where me met our mom and the maid, Angela, for breakfast. We had bread and butter with this sweet and rich jam made of fruits grown in the desert. The breakfast in Cuzco is a lot different, I heard, because the people in Lima are a little richer and can provide more. I used to have eggs, cereal, and bread for breakfast in Lima which was great whereas here we have bread and tea.

School was freezing, everyone was split into the same groups at El Sol. Our teacher is a woman from Spain whose accent I found terribly hard to understand. She asked “Que hicisite?”and her lisp dominated; I had no idea how to answer the question I could not comprehend for the life of me. The Amauta school seemed a lot stricter with a very set syllabus which was different than what we experienced at El Sol. I started to miss Andres as we went over the past tenses for grammar for the millionth time. 

Culture class wasn’t so hard. We had a different teacher who was more interested in what we wanted to learn about her history, rather than shoving Pre-Incan and Incan traditions down our throat. She told us a few legends about Pachamama (the mother earth) and we played a simple memory game of vocabulary and its opposites. Overall, school wasn’t too hard that day.

When school let out, we went into the plaza to grab lunch. By this time we were starving since back at El Sol, we usually used our 20 minute break to grab food from the convenient store next door. The Amauta school is located on this crazy hill so all of us chose to stay in and just sip on Mate de coca or coca tea, which is supposed to help with the altitude sickness. Anyway, Karlayne, Kim, and I ate at this place called San Andres which gave us a pretty good meal for only 6 soles. Natalie and Rachel went to a vegetarian place down the road since Natalie is a strict vegetarian.

After lunch we went shopping around the plaza, observing the crazy amount of tourists flooding the street. I bought a newspaper announcing Ollanta as the new President of Peru since it was historical times and it was definitely something I wanted to remember. We sat at Mcdonald’s with our laptops trying to steal internet since none of the houses have wifi but 1 or 2. 

That night was our welcome dinner from the Amauta school. We met at some restaurant and we were all exhausted so conversation was kept at a minimum. There were, of course, glasses of pisco sour given to our group and the other Amauta students so that we could all do the Peruvian cheer and properly get welcomed into the Amauta 

After dinner Rachel, Natalie, and I went home and again, passed out on our beds. The altitude is really taking a toll on our bodies; we couldn’t even stay up past 10pm.