The soundtrack of my mind

10 days of meditating. No enlightenment yet, but I did discover what is apparently the soundtrack of my brain:

• All of Flight of the Conchords
• The freakin' Reading Rainbow theme song- Lord knows why, but this was stuck in my head about half the time.
• What's the Bizness- Tune Yards
• Roses- Outkast- It's always nice to try to find inner peace with a song that features "poo poo" blaring through your head.
• I'm Not Your Toy- La Roux
• Christmas Card from a hooker in Minneapolis- Tom Waits- Must've been a bit homesick.
• Follow the Leader- Sloan- I think I was still a little worried it would end up being a cult
• A little lost- Nat Baldwin (from Dirty Projectors)- This one has the deadly lyrics "I keep thinking about..." which would pop up constantly while trying to focus.
• Emotion- Samantha Sang- Tim J, you know the siren song of Samantha.
• The hokey pokey- I sang this a bunch for the kids and its omnipresence may be the only thing that violates the universal law of impermanence.

But yes. 10 days perched above Pablo Escobar's old hangout in Medellin, giving up everything from coffee to talking, meditating for 12 hours a day. I still feel a bit disoriented (one of the men giving me a stone with a crocheted hat and a note that said "stones say what words quiet" did not help), but overall I'm incredibly grateful to have done it. Now on to figuring out where to meander next.

Oh my lord. Well, way too much has happened. And now it seems too overwhelming to sum it all up. So. I´m skipping most of it. Here´s just a couple random moments from Peru:

• Sitting next to an adorable old man in a baby blue alpaca hat, racing through the starkly gorgeous Andes on a cross country bus. He struggles to open the window, and I help him with a generous smile. Then I watch as he proceeds to casually chuck AN ENTIRE BAG of plastic bottles out the window. I feel the wind on my shocked and open mouth.
• On a hot, sweaty day, running after what I´m certain is an ice cream truck, only to find that here, it´s the garbage trucks play that song. Oh the disappointment.
• Striking up a conversation about literature with a guide at an Arequipan museum (who I did not hire) and before I know it, touring the city on his motorbike and ending up chowing down on homemade chile rellenos with his entire, charming family.
• Watching condors swoop overhead as I trek the deepest canyon in the world.
• Dancing on the beach for 5 nights in a row to impromptu concerts. Musicians make great friends.

Anyways, now Peru is far away and I spend my days teaching Ecuadorian Andean kindergarteners how to not stick crayons in their mouths. The town is gorgeous and secluded and full of ladies carrying huge loads of sticks while spinning wool. Last week we took the kids to the zoo and I´m still grinning from all the cries of ¨Mira! MIRA!¨(look! Look!) But soon I´ll be off to Columbia. Keep you guys posted.

Oh traveling.

Crazy crystal dude found me again in a square in Cuzco! I lied and said I had been looking for amethyst to wear, we went to grab Chicha (a traditional fermented corn drink) in what was essentially someone's backyard, got into a very confusing conversation with an old native woman wearing a large hat and then I begged off to sleep for my bus ride to Arequipa at 4 in the morning. I repeat: oh traveling.

La gringa idiota

Oof! Well, I have just been TERRIBLE keeping up with this blog. No excuses, I've just been lazy and distracted. In apology, here is a list of ridiculous things that have happened to me so far:

1. Drinking pisco sours with Belgiums my second night at altitude. Cocky from living in Colorado, I ordered a second drink. Altitude of course hits, and when I get up to leave at the end of the night, I straight up FALL OFF MY CHAIR INTO THE BAR. 2 drinks! Only 2 drinks and I wake up hungover with a welt the size of a credit card on my face. I've been telling people it's from getting whacked by a branch in the jungle, but you know the awful truth: Belgiums.

2. Making friends with a bunch of Peruvian hippy musicians in Pisac. By the end of my stay, I somehow ended up on the top of a mountain with a guy whose name translates as "Sunrise" waving crystals over my head and desperately trying not to giggle. Sunrise tells me that I should wear amethyst and that my journey will hold "many great discoveries." Thanks dude.

3. Taking a very poorly thoughtout "shortcut" path from the Ollantaytambo ruins to my hostel. I ended up on the wall of someone's backyard pigsty (complete with fuzzy black pigs) with 2 terriers and a puppy barking at me, nettles EVERYWHERE and a bunch of neighbors laughing their asses off. To get out, I had to inch bit by bit along the 5 foot stone wall to the road. I practically fell into a canal trying to get down. Though honestly, I'm just glad no one was home to ask me what the heck I was doing in their backyard. Anyways, no more shortcuts.

4. Wandering into what I thought was a fancy Ollantaytambo restaurant, complete with traditional weavings and a wine list, and hearing the Glee soundtrack blasting. So I ate guinea pig to the strains of Leah Michelle blasting out Journey. That one's not so much humbling as just completely surreal.

So. There you have it. The foreign idiot moments. Overall, though, it's been gorgeous. I headed out for Machu Picchu two days ago, and it was, of course, striking and overwhelming. Though I was more struck by the precarious, stunning mountain perch than the (admittedly fabulous) ruins. It's hard to strike the right cord here - all the tourist hype and guides trying to sell "the perfect Machu Picchu experience" gets me rebelliously thinking "I ain't payin' that to see a pile of rocks in the jungle." But if you don't approach it with an attitude of some wonder, it's not nearly as striking.

Aguas Calientes, the BIZARRE hellhole of a tourist town right below the ruins, did not help with this dileman. To bring up an obscure reference, it is like the spitting image of the surreal 80s commercialist hellhole town in Fellini's Ginger and Fred (best clip I could find was here, but if you've seen it, I stayed in a hotel that was pretty much the exact same as the one where Amelia does those weird mouth exercises). But waking up early to watch the thick fog slowly reveal the the stones of Machu Picchy was nothing short of old school magic. So: a mix.

Anyways, it's been lovely, interesting and an odd mashup of tourist, backwater and ancient. But I running away from these mountains to the colonial valley. Next stop, Arequipas. And don't worry, I'll stay away from pigs.

Jungle spotting

I have returned, smelly and bitten, from the jungle. Sorry for the lack of updates, the internet there was slower than a drugged-up turtle.

There's so much I planned on writing about, from the Old West-style mining towns, to monkey twins and the vagaries of third world research. But I just got off of an awful 10 hour night bus ride where, at one point, I attempted to discretely puke in my purse. So instead of detailed analysis of the rainforest ecology, y'all are just getting pictures of stuff I saw. Heck, I didn't even take half of these (wildlife photography is HARD, yo). But I saw all of these little creatures at some point, and stealing pictures from these guys is about all I'm up to at this point. So. Pictures.

Monk Sakis, my personal favorite. They're hard to see, but they look like huge fluffy dust mops.	A poison dart frog seen on a night walk.
These brilliant blue butterflies were EVERYWHERE. I think this was the only pattern I saw on a butterfly twice.	The saddleback tamarin monkeys we spent most of our time tracking. There's also several other species, including the emperor tamarins with the big mustaches.
Tree fungi that pops up everywhere when it rains	Giant anteater, who are notoriously hard to spot. We saw one destroying the homes of some leaf-cutter ants.

In the jungle

After a ten hour journey up Madre de Dios river in a tiny wooden canoe , I am AT the research station. With a journey that long, I had plenty of time to observe the surroundings, and It's strange- for some reason, I expected the quality of light here to be substantially different. I'm not sure what I thought it would be. Maybe thicker and more vivid, like the super saturated pictures in a coffee table book. Distinctly different. But in reality, the broad strokes of the area feels very familiar. The whole ride, I kept almost thinking that I was just on wider version of the St. Croix. It's only close up that I see the exoticness: the shape of the tree leaves are enormous and sustain themselves in radial bursts instead of hanging loosely, the water underneath me is murky like potter's clay instead of murky with mud and the shape I just saw disappearing into the woods is not a deer, but a capibara. I'm constantly whipping my head around for second looks.

The research station itself is a collection of large thatched structures perched high above the river, and is only reachable by nearly three stories of old wooden stairs. One of the monkey researchers told me that it was originally an old logging camp and all the foundations are from that time. Now it's run by the Peruvian side of the Amazon Conservation Association (ACCA- the acronym is from the Spanish name). Now it hosts researchers from all over the world. With the cut grass, volleyball net and lunchroom style dinning, it reminds me as nothing so much as thatched roof summer camp

So far, being here has been an odd mix. Civilization and jungle, peruvian and american, boredom and fascination. Even as I write this, there's a gigantic and vividly blue butterfly batting itself like a common moth against the lightbulb above my table. There's just so much to learn- how to avoid ants that feel like a bullet when they bite, what you need to keep for genetic research, how on EARTH to get the primitive shower working. I'm also a bit of the odd man out here, since the friend I was going to come help with her research got sick at the last minute. So I oscillate between lingering rests with eyes peeled for someone willing to let me tag along and bursts of work and adventures into the jungle whenever someone says okay. So far, I've followed birdwatching expeditions, helped collect tamarin traps (they are quickly released), tried to construct a skeleton of some kind of marsupial and caught the tail end of a class on medicinal herbs. As I learn more, I'm starting to have more independent work, but for now I feel exactly like someone's clingy little sister. Except this time, instead of a big brother, I'm tagging along with Ph.D. candidates.

Anyways, that's the news from the jungle. Now I've got to to go google what the heck those brilliant orange bugs in my room are before the internet goes down again.

This is Lucha and he is my friend

Well! A full day of traveling and some very strange dreams on airport benches later, I am in Puerto Maldonado.

After the interminable plane rides, Peru hit quick. Within 5 minutes of disembarking, a toothless man wielding clipboard with my name had grabbed my hand, grabbed my bag and hoisted us both onto a mototaxi. 3 minutes later, we were jolting and honking along a rocky dirt road and 2 minutes after that, I was plopped in the middle of palm fronds, bungalow key in hand and spidermonkey around my neck. Hello to you too, Peru?

The lodge I'm staying at is called the Anaconda, and consists of about 12 VERY rustic bungalows plunked down in the middle of what is basically a lush botanical garden. There are huge palm trees, gorgeous flowers and monkeys EVERYWHERE. Lucha, the one on my neck, is a pet rescued after his parents were killed by hunters. But Donald and Wadi, the Swiss/Thai couple who run the place, leave bananas out for wild monkeys as well. This morning, I saw a family of tamarinds, spidermonkeys and even a couple howlers. Donald also has a constant companion in Bob (named because he cries like Bob Marley), a very young howler monkey that's rarely seen anywhere but Donald's shoulder. In fact, when Donald decides he´s done and unceremoniously dispatches him by his tail, the thing hisses like a mix between a kitten and an old man clearing his throat. Considering that his little face already looks like a VFW regular, I find this hilarious.

Anyways, the lodge is lovely, (Authentic home cooked Thai food! My own little bungalow with a porch and a hammock! Monkeys!) I'm safe and sound, and I even managed to find the office that's going to take me to the research lodge. So far, so good. Thanks for reading, I'll check in again soon.