Day 7: Dairy Farm Visit and Time with Homestays

Hola! This is Hadley and Katie live from Zurite!!! Today was a rest day after all of our hard work cleaning the reservoir and clearing the trail to the hummingbird terraces yesterday. Despite that, we still woke up bright and early for our usual 7am breakfast. For us this consisted of bread, avocado, corn mate, mint tea, and maize tostado. After that, we all met up at Don Tomas' house for our daily check in and game plan for the day.

Today, we took a short bus ride to the lecheria (dairy cooperative) where we were shown how Don Ramiro and Doña Lydia  make their five different types of cheese from the milk their cows produce. We learned how they pasteurize the milk, add in a mixture of cultures to separate the cheese, then put the cheese into the molds. At the cooperative, they make about 50 rounds of cheese each day which weigh around 1200 grams and sell for 20 soles each. After that, we visited their cows in the pastures and also got to see some baby cows. 


Beautiful view from outside the dairy co-op

Mr. Chang LOVES cheese! (ft. the big machines used to mix the milk and cultures)

Oliver the cow whisperer

Unfortunately, we were unable to make cheese so we went on a beautiful walk to a nearby reservoir. The boys found a tree and suddenly everyone was doing trust falls. 

Would you trust us to catch you?

Peace and Love!

Then we went back to Don Tomas' for lunch where we ate chicken, beans, rice, and salad. We hung out for a little bit and people played card games, spikeball, and made friendship bracelets.

After that, everyone headed back to their homestay to spend the afternoon with their families. Nuria and Keira visited their family's strawberry farm, Matthew and Julian fed their family's cuyes, while others played games and got to know each other better. As for us, we had a very eventful night, which led to this late blog post! We drove 30 minutes out into the countryside to our homestay relative's house where we celebrated the quinceanera of Jazmin. Even though we didn't know many people, everyone was so welcoming and we had such a fun time eating, dancing, and singing. We were even invited to join her court and we each presented her with a rose. The food was sooo good and included things like pork, tamales, cookies, cake, and much more! It was really cool how we were able to bond with people through dancing with them, even though we don't speak the same language.

Thats about it for our day! Sorry for the late post, we hope you didn't miss us too much! See you next time! 

-Hadley and Katie



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