Birthday weekend

Catherine and I both had our birthdays last weekend, and we enjoyed two great celebrations. On my birthday, the 18th, we invited the sisters from the Tupac house to come over for dinner, cake, and dancing. Sister Iris took charge of the cooking and asked us to "order" our dinner of choice from her a week in advance. We chose papa a la huancaína, a typical Peruvian appetizer; baked chicken with rice and vegetables; pisco sour and chicha morada to drink; and chocolate cake. The cake was ordered "delivery" (i.e. Denise made a trip to Metro) and was utterly delicious and so huge that the last remnants are still lingering in the refrigerator. Iris even brought in the help of the señora who cooks for the school kiosk in making the huancaína sauce and of a former student, also named Iris, who came over to do the pisco sours. For our presents, Catherine and I got cute little cactus plants in pots from the sisters in Tupac, a fabulous meal, and lots of fun dancing. I also got a birthday box in the mail from my wonderful parents, which included such delicious treats as chocolates, a sweater, and books by Jane Austen and Virginia Woolf. The glittery wrapping paper made me sparkly--always fun on one's birthday.

Then on Saturday, Catherine's birthday, we invited every young person we are friends with in Peru to come over for dinner. It ended up being about fifteen people that came. We made them an American meal of homemade pizza, fruit salad, and apple pie, and those who came "early" (less than an hour after the time we'd told everyone to arrive) got to learn how to put the sauce and cheese and toppings on the pizza dough and bake it. The apple pie was a huge hit. Iris and Teresa had fun with everyone too, because several of our friends from the church choir are their former students from Fe y Alegría. Afterwards we all left the sisters in peace and went out dancing in Barranco, Lima's bohemian/backpacker/nightlife area, which has a whole street made up entirely of clubs and bustles until 4 or 5 am, with groups of young people wandering around between vendors and jaladores that stand outside motioning them in. In oh-so-Peruvian style, we convinced the driver of a 15-passenger combi bus to take us straight there, our private limo as it were, for a flat fee instead of going by his regular route. The club was much more about dancing than drinking; we danced to merengue, salsa, pop, reggaeton, and some more traditional Peruvian festejo music which I'd never heard before but which I fell in love with. It was almost entirely drums, and the pulsing beat was so rich and alive with layers of rhythms that I lost my usual American hesitancy about dancing and just let the music move me. (It helped that I was dancing with my friend Luis Alberto, the church choir director, who has enough energy for two to three people at all times and even more when he's dancing, so I didn't have to worry about looking too crazy as long as he was there going nuts with me.) We finally got back to Delicias at 4 am after wandering around Barranco for a while with our friends Alfredo and Robert, and slept contentedly until 11 in the morning.

It was a great weekend not only because of the good food and the dancing, but also (mainly!)because of the people who were there to share our birthdays with us. The really cool thing was that during all this partying, no one made us feel different because we were the only white girls among all the Peruvians. We laughed and joked at people's efforts to wish us happy birthday in bad English, and made phrases like "muchos thankyous" and "very gracias", but we didn't feel out of place--everyone was there because we were friends, and the Peruvians took us out to their favorite places, and cooked us their foods, and we cooked them ours, and my friends' faces are now familiar enough that I see them as Luis, Sara, Alfredo, Miriam, Consuelo, Robert, Eliana, instead of just Peruvians with black hair and brown eyes and darker skin than mine. And thus a very cheesy saying of my mom's, that there are good people everywhere, has been proven many times over by the amazing sweetness of the people we know here.