Cabybara Cuteness

Behold the beauty of the capybara, supposedly the worlds largest rodent weighing up to 150 pounds, rivaling New York`s subway rats for size. However if rats were this cute we'd probably keep them as pets. Our guides one useful piece of information on this trip was that the capybara is almost as tasty as the guinea pig, it's distant cousin. Imagine these guys roasting on a spit.

Contest!

A prize of a smashingly fantastic Peruvian gift will be awarded to the first person to correctly identify what is occuring in this photo. Good luck.

It`s a Mullet

You know your Spanish is poor when you can´t explain that you don´t want a 6-inch difference in your front and back hair lengths. Ack.

Cuy!

We tried cuy... and it´s really not that bad. I think I preferred it over the chicha we had to accompany the cuy.

For the uninitiated, chicha is a fermented drink made of corn and drank throughout the Andes. To begin the fermentation process, the corn is first chewed and moistened in the chicha maker's mouth. Wikipedia explains the process, "Naturally occurring diastase enzymes in the maker's saliva catalyses the breakdown of starch in the maize into maltose. (This process of chewing grains or other starches was used in the production of alcoholic beverages in pre-modern cultures around the world including for example sake in Japan.)" Good to know, eh?

Matt Says...

I´ve given Mary a hard time in the past on this blog, which led to her Aunt Alice and grandma getting her a shirt that says ¨Very High Maintenance," (great gift, btw) but I believe I owe her an apology.

In the past week and a half, I have seen her spend three days shoveling rubble in a dusty earthquake destroyed city, spend two nights on overnight buses with cockroaches (one of which got so lost that it had to make two 19-point turns with its back end hanging over a 30 foot cliff), and do a three day hiking trip through the second deepest canyon in the world which included over a vertical mile of ascents (with a particularly brutal 3600 foot climb at the end of it).

So I apologize. I was wrong. It was completely unfair to suggest that Mary is anything but the lowest of maintenance. Mea culpa.

Of course if she´d gotten the mule she´d wanted to carry her out of the canyon, I´d probably be forced to write about the facial she´s getting as I write this post.