It´s funny to think that I only planned on staying in Cusco for two weeks, and it´s been over a month now. Normal, really, for me.

Of course, life here continues to be interesting. The little things, really, make Cusco so interesting. Just take, for example, the customs in a restaurant or cafe. Say I show up to eat lunch and all the tables are occupied. Rather than stand and wait for a table, you just sit in an empty seat at someone else´s table. Right away you meet someone new and strike up a conversation. Sometimes, you keep running into that person in the same restaurant and you sit together a couple days a week. It sounds like such a simple thing, but it´s something that never happens in the States, or maybe I just go to the wrong restaurants. It´s a beautiful thing though.

With the orchestra, we took a trip to Quillabamba, a town eight hours away on the ´´brow´´ of the jungle (in other words, it´s the jungle and the mountains together) to play a concert for the town´s birthday. We took two buses and the orchestra sponsors put us up in a nice hotel and took us out for all of our meals. The afternoon after our concert, we went to a place alongside the river that has several pools and small restaurants in the forest. A beautiful place to relax and enjoy the warm weather after several weeks of cold in Cusco. I was also able to get to know better some of the people in the orchestra. On the way back to Cusco, the percussionists took a LOT of beer on our bus and created a big orchestra party. It was pretty comical. Since then, we played a big concert here in Cusco in the Municipal Theater. The concert was for the Peruvian Independence Day, and so we played music that represented many different parts of Peru. There were two songs with very good soloists (singers) and one song that featured four dancers (dancing the ´´marinera,´´ the official dance of Peru). The costumes and dances were beautiful! After that, several of the string players, including myself, got contracted to play in the back-up orchestra for a well known group. It was interesting, to say the least... disorganized, bad arrangements of the music, and the guy who was supposed to ´´conduct´´ us had no idea what he was doing. We are still laughing about the experience.

I´ve also been running a small theater for the past two weeks. My neighbor at the house, Fernando, has been running the theater since February and recently took a trip to Argentina, so I offered to fill in for him. This month has a theme of Spanish movies, so I showed two movies that had to do with the Spanish Civil War. Before the movies, I added my own touch by putting on DVDs of jazz concerts.

There is an ongoing joke in my band that I am from Cajamarca, a city in the north of Peru where there are more light-skinned people. The immigration police have been going after foreign musicians who are playing in bars and making money. They deported a band of Mexicans as well as a couple of Argentinians. So when the guitar player in my band presents everyone, he always presents me as the girl from Cajamarca. So far, thankfully, the immigration police haven´t come after me! I did manage to celebrate Peruvian Independence Day. I went to my favorite restaurant/bar where some friends were playing music. I sat in with them on a few songs and drank some pisco sours (pisco is like a vodka made from grapes, which they blend with lime, ice and an egg). It was funny for me to realize that in the past ten years, I haven´t been in the states for a single July4th, but I have been in Peru during four Peruvian Independence Days!

The past two nights, I have been fortunate enough to see a REALLY good band play. They are a sextet that plays Afro-Peruvian Jazz, lead by a trumpet player named Gabriel Alegria who teaches somewhere in the states. Both shows were phenomenal, all of the musicians are unreal, and one of the percussionists even took tap-dancing solos which were incredible. I recommend that everyone look up this group and listen to their music to get an idea of what Afro-Peruvian music entails...

Within the next ten days or so, I will be leaving towards Brasil. Now I must decide which route to take and pack up somehow the things I have acquired here to leave with a friend until I return.