There are a lot of superstitions about food in Peru which I have broken. Since many end in death I thought I would write abut them before I kick the bucket. It started in Lima when I ate my dinner cold one night after returning from playing soccer. My family found out and told me how dangerous it is not to eat something warm before you go to bed. This was later contradicted when my host mom made a bread/cake concoction and we had to wait for it to cool completely because eating it warm in the evening would give you horrible stomach pains while sleeping. Now that I am out of the city and living in my campo-rific site, there are even more things for me to fear. As in all over Peru, cold things make you sick. My host family is fairly educated (father worked at the health post and sister is studying for the university entrance exams) but when my host dad said there are more sicknesses in March and I asked why his response was “because it rains and everyone is eating cold things.” If you cough once after drinking cold water or yogurt (yes, the yogurt is drinkable here) you for sure have come down with the gripe (cold/flu). Ok. My family also believes that milk is only good for you if you drink is by itself, the nutrients completely disappear if you mix it with, for example, oatmeal. Also I’ve been told that cinnamon is a drug so I’m pretty sure that the cinnamon oatmeal with milk that I eat every morning is actually the complete opposite of healthy, as I had previously thought. Much safer to switch over and eat rice an potatoes for breakfast too. Or I could just add some mango to the oatmeal mix and seal my fate, as we all know that eating mango with milk is a sure fire ticket to a pow-wow with Hades. You may think these are cute, quirky differences between our two cultures and, at times, so do I. In the span of two years though, I have a feeling the annoyance factor might rise. I just finished a book called Desert Solitaire(dad, you would like this book) and it had a really good quote to sum up the life of a PCV:
“I’m not sure that I care for the idea of strangers examining my language, inspecting my costume, questioning me about my religion, classifying my artifacts, investigating my sexual rites and evaluating my chances for cultural survival.”
Despite all this I love it here and know I will miss it all when I have to go.
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