Dia del Padre - Father's Day

Father’s Day wasn’t as big as Mother’s Day here, but it was still more of an event than in the UK. The shops didn’t make so much of it, but many schools did shows again and our church did another special service.

Sammy’s pre-school did a little show on Saturday morning, the day before Father’s Day. The smallest ones did a song about being builders, all dressed up in shirts and jeans with little tools. They are only about 18 months old so most of them just sat there staring at the audience of parents, but one or two managed actions! The other classes did various action songs and dances including one with them all dressed up as chicks, another with them dressed up as dads going to work, another did a traditional local dance, and another class all wore pyjamas.

Sammy’s class did a version of ‘Rock around the Clock’. They did very well considering they are all only 3 years old! Sammy seemed to enjoy it – he and his friend Diego had cardboard guitars to play which they were very happy about. All the children had made presents and cards for their dads.

Sammy had made a big table mat with his hand prints on. He had also made a lovely card with a picture of Daddy that he had drawn inside, plus the following questions (in Spanish) and answers (in English):
What’s your daddy called? Daddy.

What’s your daddy like? Happy and tall.

What does your daddy do? He has breakfast with yoghurt.

What do you want to say to your daddy on his special day? I like my school.

What will you give him? A present.

On Father’s Day itself we took a trip on the bus to a small town called Chinchero. There is a craft market there, a pretty church and an impressive hillside of Inca terraces and walls. It is higher than Cusco and you can see amazing views of snow capped mountains in the distance. We had hoped to find a café or restaurant for lunch but could only find food cooked on the streets which we tend to avoid on the whole. We did buy some tasty hot choclo (corn-on-the-cob) for lunch though and then went back to Cusco for our main meal which we ate at about 4pm.

In the evening our church did a special service starting with the normal worship time and then going on to various poems, songs and dances, some of which had some relevance to Father’s Day, others we weren’t too sure! They finished by presenting all the dads with a gift. Roland was given a pair or warm gloves which are just what’s needed once the sun has gone down here.

Church - Children's club in Lamay

Last week we visited a small town in the mountains about an hour from Cusco called Lamay. One of the leaders in our church has started a church plant there and on Saturdays he runs a children's club. Devin, our friend from America, took us out to visit.


The plaza at Lamay. Sammy quickly started to make friends in the street outside the room where the club meets.



The day we visited, the kids were going on an outing.
They played games and had a picnic.
One of the girls brought her baby sister along.

Shopping in Cusco

Quite a few people have been asking what shopping is like here, so here is a description.

Food

Today, Monday, I went to the little supermarket near our house. It’s one of the few in Cusco, although there is a bigger one opening soon, also nearby. It has about 8 short aisles and 5 checkouts. I normally go there on Mondays to do the main shopping for the week and if I take Benjamin in the double buggy I can put a basket in the back seat and fit everything in. I make the list and then check with Dina, my ‘empleada’ (lady who helps me at home) if there’s anything else we need, since she chooses the lunches 2 days per week and does most of the cleaning.

This is my list for today, which is fairly typical:
Breakfast cereal
Rice
Pasta
Raisins
Toilet roll
Disinfectant
Gloves for cleaning
Raisins
Eggs
Margarine
Worstershire sauce
Chicken and mince (fresh – little frozen food available)
Water (we boil some and get some in bottles)
Juice (Dina makes fresh juice mainly but Sammy often has a little carton when he comes out of school – this started as his treat for going to school on his own and now he gets very disappointed if we forget it!)
Leek and pineapple (most of our fruit and veg comes from the market but sometimes there is something extra we need)

Tuesday I normally go to the ‘milk’ shop. This is a little shop near Sammy’s school which sells mainly dairy products. Everything comes from a farm in the valley near here where they train young ‘campesinos’ (people from the countryside) in organic and ecologically friendly farming methods. I think the farm was started by a monastery. They have several shops in the area and we think these are the only places where you can buy pasteurised milk. We buy milk (in plastic bags), cheese, yogurt and jam there. Tuesday is the best day to go as that is when they bring the fresh produce in.

Thursday Dina normally goes to the market for me. There are lots of markets in Cusco, some under cover and some outdoors, with different sections selling everything under the sun! There are normally areas for fruit and veg, meat (not too keen to buy meat here as nothing is refridgerated) and clothes, and then, depending on the market, a whole mixture of tiny stalls with toys, kitchen things, tools, TVs and electrical goods, DVDs, etc. Dina normally buys things like potatoes, broccoli, peas, beans, carrots, pumpkin, cucumber, tomatoes, choclo (sweetcorn – yellow as a vegetable and purple to make into ‘chicha’, a drink), bananas, apples, mangoes, kiwi fruit and plums (when available). Very similar to the things we would buy at home really, but much cheaper! A lot of what is grown here is the same as in Britain. There is a lot more grown in the jungle areas but we don’t see that very often as it’s a long way from here. Although we don’t have seasons in the same way, the weather here is similar to Britain in some ways (see the ‘weather’ blog entry!) so I presume that’s why many of the crops are similar.

Clothes

As I’ve said, clothes can be bought in the market, although there’s nowhere to try them on of course. There are also lots of little shops in the town centre, plus a few bigger ones, where clothes of better quality can be bought. There are two shops which resemble somewhere like a small ‘NEXT’ (well, not really, but they’re the nearest thing!). There are no department stores here, although there are some in Lima which are just like anything you’d find in Britain. We’ll only visit Lima once or twice a year though as it’s an hour’s flight away so we certainly won’t be going for shopping trips!
We’ve not needed to buy much here so far. I bought Sammy some new pyjamas the other week as he was starting to grow out of his. There wasn’t much choice but I found some fleecy ones, blue and white with little aeroplanes, which don’t look too bad. I had a look for myself as I wear both my pyjama tops at once to keep warm, but I couldn’t see anything I could bear to wear!
Roland and I have both just bought a warm jacket each – indoors it is cold both during the day and in the evening and people often wear coats indoors. Jackets with a fleece lining seem a popular idea and it saves wearing actual coats indoors!

Furniture

When we buy furniture (ongoing – it’s a long process!) we normally either go to a furniture market (the side of the road or a plaza, set up temporarily at weekends), or go to the big ‘shops’ beside the main road, or get a carpenter to make things. We bought a little kitchen table, bedside table and a desk from one of the shops, lounge furniture from a side-of-the road market and had the dining table and chairs made by a carpenter (this took weeks as the first carpenter made the wrong stuff entirely!) The second carpenter was great and he has just made Sammy a special chair (an adapted version of Benjamin’s highchair) as he was fidgeting so much on a normal chair. Mattresses are bought in mattress shops, and then you have to try and find a bed base of the right size to match. We are still just on mattresses at the moment but we are buying a base for Sammy soon from a family just returning to Switzerland who live near to us.

We bought our rabbit cage from a market that was partially on the railway track! Trains only go a couple of times early in the morning and a couple of times late at night (it’s the train to Mach Picchu). This market had hundreds of chickens and ducks in little cages, plus the odd cockerel tied by one foot to a post and a few cages of guinea pigs and rabbits.

Kitchen items

There is a big kitchen shop where you can buy almost anything, so we got most things there. Plastic items can be bought in special plastics shops – there is a street full of them. The best one can take a long time to shop in though. As in many shops here, you have to choose your items from those on display and then get an assistant to write them down for you. You take this list to a desk where they copy it onto a receipt. You take the receipt to another desk where you pay. You then go to a third desk where you can collect your items (once they have been found from the store). It’s a bit like Argos I suppose! I seem to have spent a lot of time in this shop buying things like waste bins, kids beakers, jugs, a washing up bowl, a laundry basket and storage boxes for the boys’ toys. The funniest occasion was when I went to get a draining rack – I wanted orange to match the worktop(!) but they couldn’t find one, despite there being one on display, so I said I’d have green instead, but they brought out blue saying it was green. Then they brought me a small orange one, but it really was far too small. In the end I gave up and went to another shop. They also had an orange one on display but for some reason the girl had to run up the road somewhere to find me one. Then she brought it with the underneath tray missing so off she went again. The only tray she could find had the corner broken off! By this time I was so fed up I bought it anyway, as I really didn’t need the tray part!

So, with perseverance, and good friends like Geoff and Rachel to tell you where to look, you can buy almost anything here. The choice and the quality may be limited, but at least the prices are cheap. However, if you want to buy an Alpaca jumper in a smart tourist shop in the main plaza, that’s another matter!

Weather!!

The weather in Cusco

This week the tree in our little garden is looking very confused! Thinking it is autumn it has been shedding its leaves, but due to the warm days it is also thinking it could be spring so has started to grow new leaves and produce white blossom! In fact, it is supposed to be winter here as we are approaching the shortest day (corresponding to the longest day in the northern hemisphere).

Seasons

We have decided that the four seasons don’t exist here – there is a wet season and a dry season. At this time of year (June) it gets dark a bit earlier (about 6pm) and light a bit later (about 6am) and it is colder at nights (below freezing at times, although we have only seen a tiny bit of frost in our area of town). However, in the daytime it gets really hot by late morning if it is sunny (it usually is) and we try to walk in the shade on the way home from school. Sammy wears a woolly hat and gloves to go to school at 8:15 and needs sun cream and a sun hat to come home at 12:30! We are forever adding or taking off layers of clothes! I saw a notice advertising a clothing collection yesterday – the idea is to take warm clothes up to the higher areas where many small children and older people die in the cold weather. Up in the mountains it is colder at night and the houses are very poor. In Cusco no one seems to have central heating but most people have glass in the windows and many have electricity so it is possible to get an electric fire (for those that can afford it).

A sunny day during the dry season near Cusco.

When we arrived here in March it was the end of the rainy season. On the whole it was dry in the mornings and then we had thunderstorms in the afternoon. I think it rains more than that from December to February but we’ll have to wait and see. Climate change is possibly having an effect as we did get some rain in May which is apparently very unusual. It is lighter for longer in the wet season – from about 5am until 7pm in December. The temperature is less variable – not quite so cold by night and not quite so hot by day.

Corpus Christi

A couple of weekends ago we went to watch the Corpus Christi parade in the Plaza de Armas (main plaza in town). This lasts several hours and we were fortunate to find a café with a balcony overlooking the plaza where we could have lunch at the same time, and also get out of the sun! Here follow pictures and an explanation:

The parade involves a procession of ‘Saints and Virgins’ which have been carried on platforms by colourfully dressed parishioners a few days previously from various churches in Cusco and the surrounding area. (They spend a week in the cathedral before returning.)

The procession originates from Inca times when the ruling Inca paraded in the main square accompanied by his ancestors - the mummies of the previous Inca rulers. The Spanish missionaries, after colonisation, obviously did not want this procession to continue – they thought it a good idea to replace the Inca mummies with figures of saints.

In the 13^th Century in Europe the Catholic Church felt there was a need to enthuse people about their faith and instituted a new festival. In 1247 ‘Corpus Christi’ was first celebrated. This involved a special mass honouring the ‘body of Christ’ in the form of the sacred bread.

In Peru, the idea was to replace the Inca procession with a ‘Corpus Christi’ festival. In practice, the festival has become a celebration of the Sacred Eucharist mixed with gratitude to the Pachamama (the mother earth divinity), the Tayta Inti (sun father) and other Andean divinities.

At the head of the procession is the huge, ornate, silver ‘Carroza’ (pictured). This contains the sacred bread and replaced the ruling Inca. Before the procession starts, various masses are said inside the cathedral. Then, after the ‘Carroza’ has been carried round the plaza, the Bishop prays in front of the cathedral.

After this, the saints and virgins are carried in the following order: (links contain pictures from the web)

1.- Saint Anthony from the San Cristobal parish. He carries a book and a staff and is accompanied by a small model of a pig, being the patron saint of swineherds. He was a monk in the Egyptian desert in the 3^rd-4^th centuries and is known as ‘The father of all monks’.
2.- Saint Jerome from the parish in the village of San Jeronimo. He carries a quill pen and a book with a model of a chapel in silver. He translated the Bible into Latin in the 4^th century.
3.- Saint Christopher from the San Cristobal parish. He carries the Christ child. There is a legend that he carried Christ across a stream in the 3^rd`century.
4.- Saint Sebastian from the parish in the district of the same name. Survived being shot with arrows for being a Christian in the 3^rd century.
5.- Saint Barbara from the Poroy village parish. Killed for being a Christian by her father who was then struck by lightening, or ‘fire from heaven’. Patron of firefighters, among others.
6.- Saint Anne from the parish of Santa Ana. Mother of the Virgin Mary. She carries a baby girl.
7.- Saint James the Greater from the parish of Santiago. He was one of Jesus’ disciples and later preached in Spain. He became patron saint of Spain and for centuries the Spanish army rode into battle with the cry "Santiago!" ("Saint James!") He rides a white horse and is dressed as a Spanish soldier.
8.- Saint Blaise from the San Blas parish. A bishop in Armenia and healer of men and animals in the 4^th century.
9.- Saint Peter from the San Pedro parish. He carries the ‘keys of heaven’. He was one of Jesus’ disciples and is known as the founder of the church and the first Pope.
10.- San Joseph from the Belen parish. Husband of Mary, mother of Jesus. Patron saint of married couples and carpenters. He leads the child Jesus by the hand.
11.- Nativity Virgin from the Almudena parish. She carries the baby Jesus in her arms and is protected from the sun by a parasol. The mother of Jesus.
12.- Remedies Virgin from the Santa Catalina church. This statue is the smallest – just one metre high. I found the following story behind the origin of this virgin:
Cortés (who conquered Mexico) and his men pillaged the great 40-acre Aztec temple to the great feathered serpent god, Quetzalcoatl, and placed a doll-sized wooden statuette of the Virgin Mary on the altar. Naturally enraged, on the night of July 1^st 1520 the Aztecs, drove Cortés and his men from the town, and this night was henceforth called by the conquistadores ‘La Noche Triste’, The Sad Night. The conquistadors attributed their good fortune in escaping to this little Virgin de los remedios.
13.- Purified Virgin from the San Pedro parish. An explanation from the web: ‘Virgin Purificada’ is a representation in which the Virgin carries both the Christ Child and a large candle and offering. The iconography commemorates Mary’s presentation of the baby Jesus in the temple at Jerusalem and her rite of purification forty days after the birth. Penitential processions with blessed candles came to mark commemorations of the Purification or Candlemas, hence the Virgin’s candlestick in representations.

14.- Bethlehem Virgin (or Virgin of Belen) from the Belen parish. Another image of the Virgin Mary. This is all I’ve found on the web so far:

‘The story of this church is very unusual. First, it was called "Los Santos Reyes" ("The Holy Monarchs"), but the name was changed when it received the Virgin of Belen. The image appeared one day floating over the Peruvian coast, near the port of San Miguel in Piura. According to the legend, the Virgin carried a note in which she requested to be taken to Cusco. In the cathedral there is a painting that represents this story.’

15.- The Immaculate Conception Virgin also called "The Pretty" from the Cathedral. Again, an image of the Virgin Mary.

After the procession around the plaza (it takes several hours) during which the saints and virgins are carried on platforms accompanied by traditional dances and marching bands, they re-enter the cathedral. They process back to their churches several days later.

There is a traditional food associated with this festival – chiri uchu – which includes maize, potato, cuy (guinea pig) and bread, plus ‘chicha’, the local drink. The plaza a couple of blocks away from the Plaza de Armas (main plaza) is packed with stalls selling food, and the market near the station has many additional stalls with fruit and vegetables brought from all over Peru.

Sources:

Historia de los Santos Corpus Christi (tourist leaflet)

http://www.catholic-forum.com/saints - for an index of over 5000 saints

www.cusco-peru.org/cultural-cusco-churches-cusco-parish-indios-church.shtml (for info on Indian churches of Cusco and their saints and virgins)

www.qosqo.com/qosqo/festivit.htm

www.wilsonsalmanac.com/guadalup.html (Remedies Virgin)

Colonial Latin America: A Documentary History Ed. Kenneth Mills et al. (Purified Virgin)