Observations

Last post I (Kate here) mentioned a few random facts about dogs and other things we had noticed. I´ll add more observations today.
80's music is alive and well in Peru. You haven't heard Queen until you've heard "It's a Kind of Magic" played as muzak with a pan-pipe accompaniment in a grocery store. This morning at breakfast I even got to hear Martika, who will be playing somewhere near here in the next month!
On gods and worship:
When we made our trip to Pachacamac we learned (ok, I learned this in High School) that the Incas worship a sun god. Having spent so many days in the haze and cloud cover that is Lima, I am quite ready to worship the sun each time I walk out of my door in Cuzco.
On earning money:
There are any number of vendors here in Cuzco who will sell you glasses, woven belts, postcards, and plethera of textiles woven, knit, and crochet. There are also many people in native dress who are carrying cute babies, sometimes human, sometimes lambs or goats who will let you pose for a picture if you're willing to pay. There are also many children not yet up to my waist, and that's saying something who will sell you a doll or not, for a bit of change.
Communicating:
During a phone call with Jeremy today he asked how our communication skills were working out. It's a shame that scheduling required us to make our school visits prior to our Spanish classes. I definitely need to sit down and write more in depth about our tours at the schools, which were both in Spanish, but they provide two ends of the spectrum of Spanish communication experiences we have experienced. At CPAL the director of the school was warm, inviting, and spoke to us as fellow educators. Melva (pardon if I have to correct this later, I don´t have her card with me now) had an aura of one who can convey information in a variety of ways. She explained that she only had a bit of English and spoke Spanish the entire time, but was patient and never condescending when we didn't understand and always found a way of conveying what she needed to say. Melva spoke of her month-long stay in the United States and how she felt it reinforced that the ideas expressed by people with limited skills in a particular language, in her case English, should never be the sole indicator of intelligence. Just as with Deaf children in English or Spanish. Or in our case, Spanish. We felt welcome, respected and not at all overwhelmed.
At the second school the experience was quite different. The experience was wonderful, but we left feeling much more overwhelmed. More on this later as my time online is slipping away.
In general our experiences have varied depending on the situation. Here in Cuzco most of the haggling we've done over various wares has been in Spanish. A vendor may pull out a few words of English to try and sway us. When we meet up with a more complex situation while asking for information or help we have used as much Spanish as possible, throwing in a few words of English when we are stuck; the person with whom we are communicating will do the same. At the yarn shop "safety pin" required a picture and then we both exchanged the words to file away for later.
Tomorrow starts our first day of Spanish classes so there will be lots more to say after that. Actually, there's always lots more to say, we just can't get it all down when we sit to write. If you have any questions about what we're doing or have requests for more (or less) information on a particular topic, please let us know.
Also, many thanks to our readers and to those commenting. It's the taste of home we need to keep from feeling too homesick.
Adios for now!