It’s Saturday! Time to sleep
in! Nope. It’s Saturday so that means we’re getting up super early for our long
4-hour bus ride to the ancient city of Caral. It was only until recently that
Caral was discovered and began making headlines all over the world. Caral is
located about four hours north of Lima in the Supe Valley of Peru. It is considered
to be the oldest civilizations in both Americas! Today Caral is used an
excavation site for archaeologists to study.
We reach what seemed to be the
beginning of the tour. And it wasn’t. This gate was only the walkway to the
entrance of Caral. The ancient city was strategically placed within the valleys
to avoid conflict with other civilizations. So we walked about a mile in until
we arrived at the actual gate of Caral. From there, we made our way around
ancient sites and various pyramids. It’s interesting to see that at the same
time Caral was civilized that the Egyptians were practicing the same type of
infrastructure. However, the main difference between Caral pyramids, as opposed
to the Egyptians, were that Caral used their pyramids as a ritual site rather
than a burial site. The actual tour of Caral only lasted for about an hour and
a half. After a quick stop at Caral, we went to have lunch at a hotel outside
town before making our way back home.
We hadn’t gotten home until
late that afternoon at around 7 pm. Everyone was clearly exhausted but we still
had plans for the night. We were done with tours for the day, so this was a
night of fun and entertainment. Monica had planned to take us out to Barranco,
a district of Lima 15 minutes outside of Miraflores. Barranco is the younger
part of Lima where all the university students live and hang out, so it’s
definitely the place to be to have fun. I have a few friends over my apartment
so that we could taxi over together. Our taxi pulls up in front a crowded
street full of people wandering outside all dressed up and a bunch of taxis and
cars jammed in single file lines. Yeah. This was the place to be for sure. We
arrive at this place, La Peña del Carajo, which so happens to be a traditional
Peruvian dance festival on the inside. The inside was amazing. There were
dancers, singers, performers, and contests happening on the main stage. Our
crew of Americans pulled out seats right front and center of the whole thing.
Bad idea because now we’re vulnerable to be pulled up on stage. And that’s
exactly what happened. Midway through the show, the host pulled different
people from the front row to represent their ethnicity. Ok, that wasn’t so bad,
but I cowered away because I knew it was something more than that. I was right.
By the time, everyone had gotten on stage, the host then announced that
everyone would partake in a dance competition. Holy crap. In front of all these
people? I’ll be honest. This was my calling ad I totally regret not jumping up
on stage. The first was this busty Colombian woman, probably in her mid-20s,
wearing tight white pants and a crop top for all the men to ooh and ah at. She
started twerking the bonkers out of her booty, and you bet all the guys were
hooting and hollering. Then you come to a small section of kids who were
representing Northeastern. Ok, so Lexi totally killed it. She had so much sass
that she could’ve dance for our whole entire group. She was that fierce. Again.
The guys loved it. It was until poor Reesha was forcibly put on stage by the
host that things got out of control. She was a shy little girl who wanted
nothing to do with it, so she buckled herself down in her seat. But that didn’t
stop the host. He ordered two guards to lift her chair and place her on stage.
Talk about embarrassing. It was too late for Reesha she had to perform, but you
could see she was close to shedding tears. So before that happened, a few
students and I jumped on stage to rescue poor Reesha from stage fright. And
when I say rescue, I don’t mean we pulled her back down from stage, but we essentially
voodoo danced around her. And that was our night.
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