What's it's name? CUZCOOOOO!

I am in Cuzco now, and it is every bit as cool as it's played up to be. But first the last week.
We left Yantalo a week and a half ago, and had a great send off. They had a ceremony and a toast (which they had to bring soda for for us)at the school, a lunch with the teachers, presents from various places... It was definitely hard for me to say goodbye to my jardin kids. Oh I'm going to miss them. It was also hard to say goodbye to our English students. As we packed our stuff into suitcases and prepared to leave some of them came to see us off, and they were pretty emotional about it. Everyone kept asking 'porque se van?' and 'Cuando va a regresar?' My answers: mi familia, because that's the easiest way to explain it to them, and I don't know.
We spent 27 hours on the bus from Moyobamba to Lima, stayed a night there with the family of a friend, then headed out the next night for another 8 hours on the bus to Huancayo. We spent a couple days there with the family Caleb first lived with on his mission, who didn't let us pay for pretty much anything while we were there. They were great. Then it was on the road again to Satipo, where we again stayed a couple days, though this time in a hotel ($6 a night for me and Jenny). We also celebrated Fiestas Patrias, or the Peruvian independence day, by going on an outing with the YSA. We got to ride in the back of a truck again (I managed to get stung on the inside of my lip by a bee), played some volleyball and soccer on top of a mountain, and went to some waterfalls, which were way cool. We actually climbed up the middle of the falls (there were about five) and there was a pool at the top where we could jump in and such. It was way fun. Another day of car travel took us to Huanuco. We actually went through Cerro de Pasco, which claims the highest city in the world. My book described it as cold and unsightly, which pretty much sums it up. We only had one day in Huanuco to do some visiting, then did another 8 hour bus ride (last one!) and were back in Lima by Saturday.
We arrived in Cuzco this morning, and it is definitely one of the coolest places I've ever been, and all we've done is walk around looking for hotels. Here's the view from my room for the night. About $13 a night, if you're willing to walk a bit, uphill, at high alitutude. Definitely worth it though :)
I would write more, and format the pictures... but I'm tired. Home in a week!

Viajes

This week was good. We had Tuesday off of school for teacher day (if there’s one thing they know how to to do here it’s have days off of school). So anyway we joined the teachers and some of the other volunteers here in Yantalo (there are quite a few) for a paseo (outing). First we went to a playground/pool/volleyball place to play some volleyball, a favorite pastime here. Prefoessional soccer might be the most popular sport to watch, but I would bet that volleyball is about as popular if not more so to play, especially for adults. We had a US versus Peru game, and we made our country proud. It helps that Thilan, Viral (two med students from New York here with a big group), and Caleb are taller and can really spike it. After volleyball we went to a different place that is the spring of one of the big rivers here. It was absolutely beautiful—a jungle paradise. We got in and swam (it was pretty cold, even by my standards) but super clear and beautiful. We swam for a bit, then climbed out and, you guessed it, played some volleyball, then got back in an swam for a bit again. It was a fun day. I have also discovered that I’m very fond of roasted bananas stuffed with peanut butter or cheese.

We had a couple days of work, then headed out for a trip of our own. Caleb and Jenny didn’t have school on Thursday, and I didn’t on Friday, so we decided to take off for the weekend. We went to Chachapoyas, about 6 hours from Moyobamba in what is considered the sierra of Peru. We spent Thursday afternoon traveling, and that night I got to take my first hot shower since I arrived in Yantalo May 9. Friday we went to Kuelap, a really cool archeological site that is one of the major attractions near Chachapoyas. It was a fortress on top of a mountain in the Andes, so cool ruins surrounded by panorama views of patchwork fields climbing up and down mountain sides. It was awesome. But I think Saturday was my favorite. After some issues with a bank ATM malfunction that ate Jenny's card (machine malfunction, not theft), we headed out for the Cataratas de Gocta--what the locals claim is the third highest waterfall in the world. The internet only said number five at 771 m. Whether 3rd or 5th, it was absolutely spectacular. We did a horseback ride through Andean jungle type landscape for about an hour and a half, then hiked in to the falls. The whole valley was pretty much falls though. There were 3 other sets of falls you can see from the falls themselves, and the valley overlook you can see six. The falls were incredible. I was expecting a huge torrent of water, but instead the water spreads out so much as it falls that there's only ripples in the pool at the bottom. The fall ends up being tons of spray and really strong wind, which is cool. The fall right next to it never even hits the ground. It just blows away. The whole thing was one of the most incredible things I've ever seen. I'll try to get pictures up... as always.

I'm moving into my last week here in Yantalo. Next Thursday I set out to be a tourist in Peru, and in three weeks I'll be home! I can't wait to see my new neice, who is absolutely adorable by the blog pictures. Have a good week everyone!

El Dia de San Juan

This week has been pretty much all fiesta. They don't do holidays halfway here. On Monday I learned how to make juanes, these rice chicken balls that I cannot make for you at home because I'm pretty much positive I won't be able to find the leaves you wrap them in. They eat them here all the time though, especially to take hiking and such. On Tuesday I went on a field trip with the Jardin kids, and on Wednesday we just ate and played. So no classes this week. Thursday was the big holiday. We spent the night at a friend's house in Moyo so that we could get up at four and join the rest of Moyobamba for the pandilla. To get an idea of a pandilla imagine a line of EFY kids (you know, escorts), then have them do a sort of prancy jog dance thing, then have them do it for seven kilometers through the streets with the rest of their city. And that should give you an idea of what we did for the pandilla. Of course we also stopped periodically to have dance circles in the street. Anyway, it was a lot of fun, but super tiring, so we slept through most of the afternoon. That night they did more pandilla, as well as the jungle form of the pinata. They have palm logs stuck in the street throughout the city, and attached to the top is a big loop with things like toilet paper and soda and baby clothes tied to it. They dance through the city and chop each one down, and people run up to grab the stuff off it. It was pretty fun.
Friday night we decided to go camping. We came to Moyo and got some supplies to make tinfoil dinners, borrowed a couple tarps and a couple machetes, and struck out for Wuilman's chacra. It was me, Jenny, Caleb, and Linea (one of the other volunteers here). With our usual perfect planning, we struck out at sundown for a place we had been to once our first week here. It made finding it a little interesting, but if I ever wanted to feel like a jungle adventurer, climbing through barbed wire fences by the light of a full moon with a machete in my hand got me pretty close :) We camped out in a cornfield and had our fire, tinfoils, and as close as we could get to smores and banana boats without being able to get ahold of marshmallows. It was fun :) The strangest part was waking up in the morning to our fellow villagers, who were at work.
Saturday was quiet, and then Sunday we did some moving. There's another house full of volunteers here in Yantalo, but they had more girls coming, so they wanted to move the two guys to our house and move me and Jenny there. However, we managed to arrange things so that we could stay in our little house with our little family, instead of with 15 other girls in one house. So Jenny and I moved into Caleb's room and he and the two guys, Viral and Tilon, moved into ours, and we are now happily situated. They're cool guys, it's been fun to have them around.
Anyway, there's my life for the last week. Yesterday and today were holidays too, but classes should start back up tomorrow. Things are going well here and I'm still really enjoying it, though I confess myself ready to eat something besides rice and beans. So happy Dias de San Juan, San Pedro, and San Pablo!
P.S. We bought a pet bunny. He is sitting on my lap right now, and we named him Casino (which happens to be our favorite brand of cookie here). He's a little bigger than my two fists and super cute. We're giving him as a present to our hosts, under the condition that they can't eat him until after we leave.
PPS I forgot, the other weekend we performed in a dance festival with the colegio here. Our numbers? Jenny and I acted out Love Story while we sang it, and our whole group of volunteers (about 15) rapped the Fresh Prince of Belair. It was a lot of fun, even if they didn't quite get it. I'll try to put up more pictures next week. I love you all!

Work-A-Lot... and Monkeys :)

So I said last week that I didn't catch a monkey, but I actually ended up getting to hold two that night. Their names were Carlitos and Martin, and they were super cute. I actually caught Martin, if you count him jumping to me and me not dropping him as catching :) We were at a hotel for dinner with the foundation, and they had a couple monkeys in a cage and let me and Jenny go in and help feed them and hold them. I want a pet monkey now. We saw a guy here in Moyo yesterday who had a teeny little pet monkey just hanging out on his shoulder on a little leash... Ashley, can I have a monkey?
Other than that this week has mostly been work here in Peru. I've gotten pretty busy. I got to do a few fun little things like help judge an art contest at the school. We also had a fire in our backyard one night with the other volunteers, which was fun. This week was mostly just quiet and busy though. We did have another couple of roommates (Jenny and I have had five girls in and out of our room since we've been in Peru) who were both native Peruvians, which was fun. One is actually LDS and graduated from BYU, so it was a lot of fun to have her there. We had a hymn singing night to Caleb's guitar one night, which was cool. Anyway, I love Peru and being here and working with the people here. It's a great place, and I'll be sad to go, but happy to come home.

Chocolate and Monkeys

I've been getting busier and busier, so I do fewer interesting things besides work, but this week has been good. Milagros, the new teacher in the Jardin, is here now, so I'm her teaching assistant, which I like better. I like my work here and enjoy doing it, but am officially cured of thinking about majoring in elementary ed (though I'd already decided against it anyway). There's also a new group of volunteers here from Rochester New York doing a health study.
One fun thing we did do was learn how to make hot chocolate from scratch. Literally. We have a cocoa tree in our backyard. You start out by picking the pods and cutting them open (they're kind of like gourds), then you suck on the seeds. They're covered in this kind of slimy white coating that is sweet and tangy and actually pretty good. Don't bit the seeds though--nasty. You spit all the seeds into a bowl and let them ferment for a couple days (it makes them sweeter), then spread them outside to dry in the sun. Ants and things crawl on them, which is disconcerting, but doesn't adctually matter because of the rest of the process. After the seeds are dry you toast them for about 20 minutes (in our case over a wood burning fire, because Flora likes that better even though she has a gas stove too) until they're all black, then take them off the fire and peel them while they're still hot, which gets your hands very sooty. Then Flora has a little hand grinder machine (kind of the the apple spiraler) and we ground up the beans into a powder, put them in hot water with sugar and milk, and had a delicious drink that doesn't taste much at all like hot chocolate in the states. It was fun :)
Today we got to go on a jungle cruise. The real deal :) Canoes on a little branch of the river with native guides who don't speak English showing us the monkeys (yes Brindy, Parker, and Gracie, I have now officially seen monkeys. No, I didn't catch one, because they were up too high). We also got to swing on a giant vine swing they have there and just the jungle. I took lots of pictures, but honestly they just can't capture it. Too many of the cool things are too three dimensional for a camera to capture. I also got to fulfill a dream I didn't know I had of climbing trees in the jungle, though not quite as much as I would have liked to. It was a fun outing :)

Another Week in Peru

So, this week was mostly just busy. I had been teaching in the Jardin with Melissa (here are a couple pictures of the Jardin), but the foundation let her go on Monday, so it’s been just me for the rest of the week. And I’ll admit, the first day was hard. I was fighting tears as I went to the last class. But the rest of the lessons have gone much better, and it’s been great. It is really time consuming because I’ll decide at 7 or 8 at night what I’m doing the next day and proceed to find 20 pictures of families in my Ensigns and make copies to use in teaching Mommy and Daddy, or to draw, cut out, and color a life size preschooler to use to practice body parts. It makes me feel like Mom : ) It’s fun though. I now know the names of almost every child between 3 and 5 in the village (there are 96, I believe), which is fun when I’m walking around. I’ve also been learning a lot about effective ways to maintain discipline. We’ve been teaching night English classes for anyone who wants them, and I’ve started teaching some linguistics classes to the English professors. We also get to teach pretty regularly in the colegio (which is just a school), though mostly on topics that the teachers don’t want to teach on, which makes it interesting for three Mormon volunteers to be doing it. It’s been a good experience though, We learned how to make ceviche this week, which is really good (and very clean and safe at our restaurant for those who know what it is ) We also discovered this week that we have access to a bike through the foundations, so we’ve started going out in the evenings. I usually ride and Caleb and Jenny run, but Caleb found another bike for 90 sols (about $30) that he and I are going to go in on together so we can start going on trips. It’s beautiful to go out in the late afternoon here. The weather has been perfect at that time of day and the sky is beautiful. We follow different roads out of town and go through the countryside. It’s incredible. I’m really falling in love with this place. It’s so beautiful and I really enjoy working with the people. But no worries Mother, I’ll come home : )

Soritor and Waterfalls

You don’t know the meaning of the term “field trip” until you’ve ridden in an open backed truck with 50 students and a couple professors through the Peruvian countryside. We went to another away game on Wednesday , this time to a village called Soritor. The drive was like riding a roller coaster, screaming and laughing and all, only more exciting because in a roller coaster you actually know you’re safe (no worries m Mother, I’m never actually in real danger). But after a while we diecded we wanted it to be even more exciting, so we through in some pouring rain. Fortunately we had some tarps to hold over us so we weren’t completely soaked. Plus, I was the more popular in Soritor than I’ve ever been in my life. It’s the white skin. We were sitting in the bleachers to watch the soccer game, and before long we each had a circle of fascinated teenagers wanting to talk to us. One of their favorite games was “translate this word,” meaning they say a word in Castellano (what they call Spanish here) and you translate it into English. It amuses them for a remarkable amount of time. They also love to hear us talk and sing in English, singing especially. Jenny and I sang “Can You Feel the Love Tonight” and the Titanic song, we all sang the national anthem for them, and they got Caleb going well enough and long enough that if we’d been charging we would have eaten for a week (not that we can complain about how much we pay to eat, since we eat on less than $4 a day with all three meals at a really good restaurant)It was an interesting experience to say the last. We don’t get nearly that reaction in Yantalo, probably because they’re more used to volunteers here. When we got back we realized that we hadn’t told anyone we were going (we were gone all day). When we walked into the restaurant we got the Spanish equivalent of “Where were you, we were worried!” from our happy little restaurant family and the same from our cute little Mama Flora. It’s nice to have a little family here looking out for us. Other than that this week has mostly been teaching classes in the Colegio and our English classes. We did get to learn how to make lomo saltado, one of my favorite dishes here, so I’ll make it for you when I get home, family.
Today was probably one of my favorite days so far. I got to go swimming! We met up with the JAS and hiked to some waterfalls, where we spent a few hours swimming, jumping off rocks, jumping off the falls, building rafts, etc. I did get pretty burned, but it was totally worth it. I wish I could capture how beautiful this place is, in words or with pictures, but I can't. Anyway, it was a blast. Have a good week!