Festina Lente

Friday was the ‘Miss Tucume’ competition. My sister Vicky was a contestant:

This year they changed things around a bit and incorporated a lot more prehispanic themes into the event. They called it Miss Inikuk, and the contestants had to give a short speech in Mochik which is an antiquated language of the region. Each girl also danced a short marinara and there was a ‘question and answer’ session which I think was fully pre-scripted. It was really interesting and cool and even though my sister did the best, she did not win, but we all had fun nevertheless.

I had been helping the municipality plan the event and they gave me the job of delivering gifts at the end. Before announcing the winner, each participant was awarded a small gift. I thought I’d just be handing the gifts out to the host from backstage, but 30 seconds before delivering them I was informed, arms full of regalos, that I’d be going up on stage to hand out gifts to each girl. So there I was with a heaping pile of boxes in my arms up on stage in front of hundreds of people. Of course the host takes the opportunity to chit chat with the gringa and my ability to speak spanish (or speak at all, for that matter) ran out of the complex and left me there all alone (well, with the gifts). I finally mustered up something along the lines of: “I’m so happy to be here, it was such a beautiful ceremony, in my country we don’t have such a complex and rich history of culture and traditions, I really enjoyed seeing the dance numbers and hearing the speeches in Muchik”. It probably sounded a lot worse than that though, like “me gringa, you dance pretty.” The host decided to delve into a little spiel about how the English came to America and wiped out the Indians and everything they lived for, while the Espanoles came and took all the gold but left behind a good chunk of culture. Okay, fair enough. I was already feeling pretty awkward and that didn’t help the matter. But, I survived and made it off stage to the sound of cheers which was cool. The next day walking around town I suddenly had doubled my number of friends, and by friends I mean people who yell ‘HELLO DANIELA HELLO HELLO GOOD MORNING GOOD AFTERNOON GOOD NIGHT I LOVE YOU OKAY BYE BYE’.

Such is life in my little town in northern Peru. All in all it was a really great experience. Enclosed is a short video of some sassy children dancing the Marinara. Enjoy and check out my photos on Picasa.

PS today is Alex Friedman’s birthday but I probably won’t post this until tomorrow or Thursday. What can I tell you about Alex Friedman? Sometimes when I say that name, people cannot tell if I’m talking about a girl or a boy. HAPPY BIRTHDAY ALEX FRIEDMAN!!! I hope you always remember the time we got so sunburned in Puerto Rico that little children would run away from us screaming when we passed them in the street.