New Home

I am mostly settled in my apartment in Cusco. I’m living with another Fulbright scholar, Carrie in an apartment close to the center of the neighborhood named San Blas.

Below are pictures of our place!

Bedroom-Yes that's my sleeping bag. It's so cold at night I
often end up sleeping inside my sleeping bag and three
wool blankets.

Living room

Kitchen

Dinning room/Living room

Within the first few days of staying in the apartment there was a big storm, as there often are these days. This one included lots of thunder and lighting and heavy hail. Luckily we were bundled in blankets with hot wine and dinner for comfort. Once the stormed passed I jokingly wondered what the damage was to our top floor apartment. I walked in to the kitchen to find a large puddle of water. We proceeded to find water dripping in from the ceiling in two spots in my room and one large leak in Carries. After a quick attempted to mop up the water we went downstairs to tell our landlady to find a half an inch of hail on the ground. Her response to our concern about water in the house was “Oh, it’s in mine too. Do you want buckets?” Luckily this scene hasn’t repeated it’s self in the following rainstorms. Apparently it is common when it hails, because the hail prevents the water from draining off the roofs. Adventures of renting an apartment in Peru!

I would also like to introduce Mikey! He is an friendly little dog that live in the apartment next door. His real owner leaves hime in the courtyard during the day when she is at work. So we let him in to hang out with us when we are home. He love to cuddle and curl up under blankets. It's perfect. All the benefits of having a dog, but none of the responsibilities.

I love finally having my own kitchen. It is really nice to be able to cook. My proudest accomplishment is these cookies from last weekend. High altitude baking is not joke and to make it even trickier our oven has three temperatures, high medium and low (non of which are very hot), we only could find baking powder and not baking soda, and we had no measuring cups or spoons. Quartering a high altitude cookie recipe and eye balling measurements ended in a delicious success!