spanish culture lessons and the jungle!

i went over to oliver´s on saturday night to hang out with him and his friends and ended up with an educational evening on spanish culture - i.e. food, drink and games.

• the only proper way to eat bread is to rub a sliced tomato on it so that there is some tomato juice soaked onto it and then pour olive oil on top
• spanish omelettes (a.k.a. tortilla omelettes) - there was GREAT dismay from the three spanish boys when i looked VERY confused when they told me they were going to make tortilla omelettes. who puts tortilla chips or tortilla shells in omelettes?!? i don´t. but it´s not tortilla chips or shells that they were refering to but the final shape of the omelette. apparently this is a popular dish in spain that is made of potatoes, onions and eggs. basically, you fry the potatoes and onions until they´re cooked, put them in a bowl and add enough beaten eggs in until all the potatoes and onions are covered and then you put it into a pan to cook and then flip it so that the completed product is like a cake. it´s quite thick and heavy. they made a salad on the side, too. both were tasty but it was REALLY heavy. my stomach didn´t feel too good after eating it...or maybe it was the calimocho (see next point)...
• calimocho (or kalimotxo) - apparently a popular drink in spain consisting of a one to one ratio of red wine and coca-cola. apparently the cheaper the red wine, the better - but i think it´s just so that it makes it somewhat palatable. i drank some that night but i don´t know if i´d have it again.
• spain has a completely different set of playing cards. the suites are clubs (as in the type that bam-bam from the flinstones uses), swords, gold, and cups. there are no queens, just jacks and kings. most card games use a deck of forty cards so i think all the eights and nines were taken out.
• chúpate un par (literal translation they told me: lick a pair) - spanish version of uno with more complicated rules. 2´s you pick up 2 or add on if you have a 2, as well. 10´s can change suits. 2´s and 10´s can be played whenever regardless of what suite is in play. 7´s are change direction. 11´s are skip the next person. and you pick someone to drink when you play a 12. basically if a special card is ever played, someone has to drink. when you are down to your last card, you have to say ¨ultima carta¨ (last card). and after you have played your last card, you have to say ¨acabé¨. first person to play their last card wins.
• pedro almodóvar - again, all three spanish boys were aghast that i had no idea who this man is. apparently he´s a very well known spanish director who has been nominated for a handful of oscars. i had to promise that i would at least watch ¨talk to her¨ when i got back to canada. am i the only one who hasn´t heard of him?
• qunito - spanish game of bluff involving two die rolled in a covered container. ¨quinito¨ is when you roll either a six and a five or a two and one - this is the highest roll you can get. from highest to lowest rolls after quinito are: double sixes, double fives, double fours, double threes, double twos, double ones and then sum of ten, nine, eight and seven. the worst roll you can get is a three and one. so the point of the game is to roll, you have the option to look or not, and then pass the covered die to the next player and call it any of the above rolls listed. you can either say it is one of them or ¨one of them or more¨ - meaning that you could be calling it less than it actually is. it´s up to the next player to call your bluff and reveal the roll or believe you. if they reveal the roll and you were right, they drink. if they revela the roll and you were bluffing, you drink. if they believe you, they can either re-roll or pass on the roll but they need to call a higher roll than you had called. i know, it´s all quite confusing. and that´s not even including what happens when someone rolls quinito. if you roll quinito, you can either reveal it right away and challenge someone to roll another quinito in three tries. if they succeed, you can either drink or try to roll another quinito and make them drink. there was other stuff going on during quinito that i didn´t quite understand but that´s the gist of quinito.
  

my teachers of spanish culture, two locals and myself with our meal of spanish omelettes, salad and calimocho




stories and lessons learned from the manu rainforest/jungle:

• the jungle is far away and therefore involves a LOT of traveling via bus, boat and walking.
• there are 1000 known bird species and 200 known mammal species and who knows how many insect species in manu. so the likelihood of seeing different birds and insects are MUCH greater than seeing other animals. if you don´t like birds or insects, probably not the most exciting trip for you.
• as long as the guide is excited about his job and showing and teaching me things, i can get excited about what he´s showing and teaching me - even if it is birds. seriously, i showed up for a 0530 walk only to find our guide and another guide giddy as kids on christmas morning looking at birds through binoculars and flipping through their bird books. i want to find a job that gets me THAT excited!
• sleeping in on a jungle tour means waking up at 0630 for breakfast at 0700
• the soundtrack to my four days in the jungle all came from disney´s ¨tarzan¨ - i know, it´s kind of sad.
• ALWAYS apply insect repellent before going to bed. the one night i didn´t, i woke up with half a dozen bites.
• i took a shower with a frog in the corner. it didn´t jump into sight until i had just started my shower and showed no signs of moving, so i just kept an eye on it the entire time and carried on. i was close to freaking out (i don´t like slimey things touching me unless it´s sushi that i´m about to eat. or certain fruits) but am proud of myself for not freaking out.
• first near major injury/death experience - we walked out onto a platform to look at some birds. i walked off the platform to try to take some pictures by the railing but my foot slipped and i was hanging off the railing with my left hand, camera in my right hand, feet dangling over maybe a ten meter drop. didn´t really know what had happened or what to do from there but thank goodness a lady from my group helped pull me up.
• if you ever go visit the jungle, bring binoculars. it´s grand that we can see animals close up in zoos where there are barriers between the animals and you, but there are no barriers in the jungle so you don´t actually get all that close to the animals - which, in my opinion, is a good thing.
• white-water rafting in peru is sketchy - we were given old, water-logged lifejackets that are probably less helpful than you would like to think and the only instructions given were what to do when the guide said forward, back or stop. no instructions on what to do if you fall out of the boat. no instructions on how to pull someone back into the boat. no query of how comfortable everyone was in water or how well everyone could swim. just forward, back and stop.
• second near major injury/death experience - our rafting guide asked who wanted to jump of a rock into the river. it was maybe a 15-20 foot jump. i´m not sure why but i said i would - i hate heights and i hate the feeling of falling so i REALLY don´t know why i said i would. so the guide brings the raft over to the rock, ties it up and bring myself and another lady (the lady who pulled me up from my first incident) up to the top of the rock. the instructions given: jump, swim back to the boat and don´t go too far down the river. now, i had gone cliff jumping into a lake in jasper with friends before and i would say that i´m a decent and confident swimmer so perhaps i got a little too confident and figured this´ll be fine, i´ve done it before. the other lady goes first because it takes me a couple minutes to work up the guts to jump off this rock. so off i go, screaming the entire way down until i hit the water and i feel like i´ve gone down pretty deep. i start swimming up, not thinking that i am being pushed by a pretty strong current and so i´m going up at an angle - not straight up - so i run out of air sooner than expected and still haven´t broken the surface. and then panic sets in. and then FINALLY i get air but have NO idea where i am. my contacts are blurry, all i hear is water rushing by me, i´m trying to find the boat and finally see that it´s behind me so i start swimming toward it. AGAINST the current. my GOSH i have never been so tired in my life nor have i ever felt my efforts so futile. then lifeguarding training that i had never had to use in the eight years that i´ve lifeguarded kicks in and i swim with the current at an angle towards the shore and wait on the side with the other lady. SO tired and feeling rather stupid for not thinking the whole thing through before jumping. ok, so maybe not near major injury or death, but i felt like i was going to die for a while there. anyways, get picked up by the boat and off we went. now that i think about it, i don´t remember there being a rescue rope in the boat or anything else that could be thrown out to anyone who might need it. oh, gotta love peru.
• zip-lining in the jungle - um. just glad no one got hurt. no rescue bags, old ropes, ropes that looked like they were bought from canadian tire, carribeaners that weren´t locked... i didn´t do much work on the high ropes course at the camp i worked at the summer of 2005, but i think i picked up enough to know that things definitely weren´t up to canadian standards. however, i did feel safer on the zip lines than when i was rafting...
• i was chatting with our guide on the bus ride back and he asked me what spanish words i knew. so i started throwing them out there and he got a few good chuckles out of it. apparently whenever i´ve been asking for a drink, i´ve been asking for babies. and whenever i´ve ordered trout, i´ve actually been asking for ¨a female´s intimate parts¨ - as he so delicately put it. i am SO taking spanish lessons when i get back...
  

so there are SO many more stories i could tell - a yellow flower the guide told me to eat that made my tongue go numb; monkeys; more card games (asshole/president); good food; our bus getting stuck on a bridge and blocking the ambulance; a parade to promote aid for disabled people in this small jungle town where most of the women are still in traditional dress (it was SO weird to see such a progressive event in a poor town); passing other vehicles on sketchy roads (mountain on one side, cliff on the other) that are the size of one-lane in alberta; fun people... i could go on but i´m hungry and need to try out this restaurant that my guide recommended.

three weeks and still no injuries nor have i lost anything! i´m off on two 4-day treks to machupicchu back to back and then on a bus back to arequipa so no updates until november!