Viva La Vida: Intro

There is a pulse-raising art to traveling. With every train or bus or plane, my mind and heart start racing, competing with the wheels that carry us off to somewhere new. The adventure can be a bit wearing, actually. There are too many sites to see and cultures to experience to sleep in a bed that isn't yours. You wake up with the sun to work out a mode of transportation to your travel book's next suggestion. Sunlight ticks away with the clicks of your camera and lost steps of your feet. Curiosity makes you read the little signs on benches or under random artifacts --signs that, at home, you might never read. It's guaranteed that something will happen in this new place that will make you remember that you are off to somewhere else tomorrow, and you wish you had one more day here, in this place you could easily never return to.

 

But, then you spin the globe and smack your finger down on a city, and let traveling get mixed up with a bit of life, and you are somewhere completely foreign but get to live there, an unbelievable opportunity. You get to have a bed and closet and street that you always tell the taxi drivers to bring you home to. You are traveling but, within a few weeks, don't feel like a traveler. We have to take a break from our tourist mindset and explore the hypothesis, "if I lived here in Cuzco, I would...."

Hopefully this will be the first of many reenactments on living a life here in Cuzco, because it seems impossible to live everyday like a tourist trying to breathe a city in in 24 hours. We have work to do here, need things we are used to in our lives and need time to just be. When a new city, especially one of such history and beauty, seems to knock on your window with promises of adventure and new culture, it can be hard to close the curtains and stay in for dinner or a DVD. But how amazing is it that the city will be there tomorrow and the next day, never taking back its invitation? You live here now. Take it all in with a refined balance.

Our day's events unfold, and I feel molded into its schedule--nothing like a tourist. But there are surprises. This morning I woke up to a note from our wonderful roommate, Julia, saying she had made us pancakes with fresh fruit for breakfast. Later, the girls on staff were going out to lunch and, on the way, in Jane's newly acquired old-school Volkswagon, the car stopped in the middle of the road at a stoplight. I got out to direct the crazy traffic around the car, shielding my eyes from the sun in the middle of a street where basic instinct rules the road over any law. Standing there with my arms waving and my non-Peruvian features, I was dealt a dose of humility in the forms of water balloons (a direct hit), through-the-window high-fives, Spanish curses, Spanish cat-calls and men leaning out their windows to give me and my still mostly-English-understanding ears instructions on how to start the car. To most of these, I just smiled and nodded and motioned to please keep moving around. A turkey walked by on the sidewalk.

Going out to lunch to plan Jane's wedding was a girls date that had us gushing about wedding plans to the point that the sweet waiter brought us complimentary truffles to have with the lemonades and fresh juices we hadn't even finished because there was too much to talk about. We do our work and try to finish before our daily step/aerobics class that has us laughing at the amount of leg lifts our energetic teacher can do as she smiles and encourages us to her Elvis and salsa music. We cook dinner. We dance with soapy hands and dirty dishes. We watch Friends episodes. We play cards. I'm on my fourth novel. We need that. We need that because our lives are here in Cuzco and that doesn't change the fact we enjoy exercise or need rest after a day's work or want to take time to cook a family-style dinner. 

It all makes me love living in Cuzco even more; I can tour ruins, pet alpacas, shop the markets, get lost going up cobblestone hills, practice Spanish with the girl behind the counter where I buy apples, spend time with kids anxious for our love and, at the end of the day, come back "home," ready to work hard and explore more cracks and crannies of the Andes the next day. More on living the life of an average day later.