More Peru Excitement...

What an amazing country Peru is....who knew! I feel like I have a lot to catch you up on since our last post.

We spent a few days in a cute little town of 150,000 people called Puno, which is near Lake Titicaca. The elevation is over 12,000 feet there, so a lot of people in our group felt the altitude to some extent at least at the beginning. The first night I carried my suitcase up just one small flight of stairs to my room and I had to stop and sit on my bed because I felt as though I had just ran 5 miles…I’m not kidding. I was getting some pressure headaches here and there, but I adjusted pretty well within a few days to the altitude. It’s funny because they’re big cure for the altitude here is their famous coca tea….maybe it’s the placebo effect or maybe it actually works, but it seemed to help many people in our group.

While we were in Puno we visited Lake Titicaca with our tour guide José for a whole day. We stopped to see the Uro people on their floating reed island which they make themselves out of just dirt and reeds-amazing! Then we went to the Island of Taquille where we ate lunch and went hiking and saw some amazingly beautiful scenery.

After a few days in Puno, we took a bus to Cusco, and stopped at some cool places on the way. We arrived in Cusco about a week ago, where we met and started living with our host families. Mine is working out really well! We are all paired up, so it is my friend Kelsey and I living with our new “mom” Maria Elena. She is extremely nice and has had lots of students in the past so she is a great help to us and very understanding of everything-including our dislike of papaya…lol. I’m starting to pick up more and more Spanish, it really helps that we get so much practice talking with our host-mom. Though, it is a slow process and sometimes I end a conversation feeling like I understood 90% of what when on, and other times only about 50%. But, practice makes perfect! We also have a new host-sister as of last Thursday who will be living in our house with us and volunteering here in Cusco for 2 months. Her name is Megan and she is from Virginia and an extremely nice and sweet girl.

In the mornings Kelsey and I walk to school which takes us about 20 or 25 minutes, not a bad walk though. I’m hoping this speed walking in the altitude will help keep me in shape. We have classes 8:30-10:30 and 11-1pm and then we walk home for lunch. Here, lunch is the biggest meal of the day and so we’ve been trying to make it home so that we can enjoy the absolute delicious meals that our host-mom prepares for us. Then, most afternoons, we meet up about 4 with our group again either at the school or some other location around town for activities, which have ranged from classes on how to play the zampoña instrument, volleyball and soccer games, ceramics classes, salsa lessons, and a tour of some ruins near the city. A few nights we have stuck around the downtown Plaza area and had dinner or shopped with some of our group.

I’m really starting to love Cusco. It is a town of about 400,000 people but it has been pretty easy to navigate around. Even when we take a taxi somewhere, I have pretty good feeling about which direction my house is, and which direction the Plaza is. It is a good sized town for me: Lima was a little too much of a big city feel with insane traffic, though it’s still fairly crazy here. But there are always interesting things and people to look around at and learn about here. Cusco is fairly touristy though, which at times drives me crazy, such as going to the Plaza and getting asked 12 times as I pass beauty shops if I want a massage on the way there, then getting asked by 26 people within 5 minutes as we wait to meet up with our friends at the Plaza if I want to buy a hat, jewelry, postcards, socks, pictures of the city, sunglasses. Sometimes, I wish I could blend in better here, but being a fair-skinned blonde I have little to no chance.

Nevertheless, I am thoroughly enjoying my experience so far. It is flying by! I’ve been here 2 weeks and only have 3 more to go. I am just trying to do and see as many things as I can while I am here, as well as absorb as much new Spanish as possible so that I can become bilingual for my job and for life in general.

This weekend our group visited to Macchu Pichu and the town nearby, Aguas Calientes, for a weekend excursion. Macchu Pichu was breathtaking! It is so unbelievable to me that it was only discovered 100 years ago! We were there from 6am-4pm, first looking around at the ruins and then hiking the nearby mountains. I really love hiking but don’t get a chance to do it often, so it was a great weekend overall. I have SO many amazing pictures to show. I will try to upload them soon, but my internet is pretty slow so I cannot tonight.

More pictures and information to come soon!