My spoken Spanish, unfortunately, is still not perfect. There are moments, anywhere from five seconds to a couple hours, when everything clicks, when I’m not thinking in English and translating it but just talking naturally in my second language. Then I forget how to say something like “carrots” and remember that, even after six weeks here (and nine years of study before that), it’s never going to come as naturally to me as it does to the average Peruvian eight-year-old.

Despite my occasionally Borat-like grasp of Spanish grammatical rules, I do understand native speakers a thousand

times better than I did when I arrived here. This is fortunate, because I’ve learned an incredible amount about this place by observing firsthand, but probably just as much by listening to the people we’ve met here. Our host mother here in Ayacucho, who’s a pastry chef (yes, this is what “living the dream” looks like), has made sure we don’t leave here without trying every classic Andean meal she knows and learning about the background behind it. Her husband has sat at the kitchen table with us for hours, explaining everything from what he saw here during the country’s war against a terrorist group in the 1980s to why some Peruvians holler “gringo!” at all outsiders – white, black, sometimes Asian, doesn’t matter.

Sometimes I’ve gotten my cultural education from unexpected sources, like the 10-year-old girl at the orphanage who asked me if I was going to change my last name when I got married (as if I were getting married next week), then proudly told me that women didn’t do that here. Then there were our classes – especially the course here in Ayacucho, where we covered Latin America’s entire political history, Peru’s economic development and the rise of militant communist groups here, in three weeks. It’s possible that we had to skip some of the finer points, but I now know just enough to want to learn more.

Even though I’ve compared it constantly to Ireland, my only previous experience living abroad, there really was nothing that prepared me completely for life here. As I scroll through the photos I’ve taken, I see the sun setting over the foothills of the Andes and also the shacks climbing up the sides of the mountains, many lacking clean water. I see cathedral altars shining with gold, sunny avocado orchards, and women carrying their babies in brightly colored blankets, tied to their backs. I see these absurd paper cows that shoot out Roman candles, which I had the pleasure of encountering in the street during Independence Day celebrations, and of course, I see llamas. Many, many llamas.

I’ve seen plenty of visually striking things in the last six weeks, and since we’re now bound for Machu Picchu, I expect to see plenty more. But the moment that may have startled me most was when I was explaining a conversation I’d had with a professor to one of my American friends, and as I was summarizing, I couldn’t remember whether the professor and I had been talking in English or Spanish. I had just understood.