Wednesday, September 30, 2009

The pacific

En el parque de amor

The mariachi band that came for Travis´s Bday. A little over the top, a lot awesome.

One of the many old VW´s here...awesome

A pictorial from our lecture on H1N1

En Lima, está nublado siempre

Pete

Andrea y Yo, we are almost too cool for school

Fiesta for the Virgen Mary

La Banda

Jason, Ruby y Yo with weird stuff floating in the air apparently

Pat: plays a mean uke, likes whisky, is Irish or Scottish, not sure

Lexie and our tech trainer Josh

A chart that we have all become familiar with.

Pete, some more composting

My host parents

Win, from Chicago, we found his twin at the market

My host mom, Gloria

Composting like nobodies business

In Washington, meeting everyone for the first time.

Lexie on the plane.


Finally in Peru!

First llama seen in Peru...it was mean

Tuesday, September 29, 2009

Cross Culture partying

hey guys,

Peru rocks...being a foreigner here is a pretty sweet deal. All of the Peruvian girls dig you, and you are more or less a celebrity.

Beer is super cheap, it only costs me about $2-3 dollars to get buzzed. Bad news is that I only make about $2.33 per day.

Now I need to learn how to cumbia...

Peru! First few weeks...

Hi all!

I am sure you are all very curious as to how my time in Peru has been going. In short, awesome.

So a day in the life of a peace corps trainee.

Wake up about 7 ish, have breakfast, usually a roll, juice, possibly eggs or something. Make it to my language class about 8 wearing my warm blue hoody. After 4 hours of mind numbing spanish class, it is time for lunch.

My lunch:

Usually some sort of chicken soup, or a delicious avocado salad to start.
Rice with spices and a few peas and green beans chopped up. Probably some potatoes in there also.
A cut of chicken or beef. For dessert I get a fruit salad.

Luckily my mom is a great cook and everything she makes is delicious. Some other volunteers aren't so lucky.

After lunch, we have about a half hour to kill. We usually spend the time playing frisbee, hacky sack, toca la guitar or just chatting about how our crap cycle is so messed up. Right now, the record is 12 days and counting for not taking a crap... I personally got up to seven or eight and that was terrible.

After our lunch hour we usually go to our technical classes. For me, Water and Sanitation, but there are two other programs here also, environment and health. But wat/san is by far the best. We do some cool stuff, but so far most of the time has been spent trying to ingrain in our skulls the need to integrate with the community and some tools as to accomplish that. On saturdays, we usually have class or go somewhere. Went to Lima this past friday...Lima sucks during the winter, the sun never actually shows itself. It is cloudy all day but never rains.

Here in Chaclacayo it is a ton nicer, it is cloudy in the morning and very cool, but after a few hours, the clouds burn off and it warms up becoming very nice out.

Alrighty.

My host family is amazing. My sister Ruby is the best. She is 25, cute, speaks english pretty decently, and has taken me under her wing: helping me out with homework, going to parties, cooking, whatever. She just recently bought me the last harry potter book in Spanish. She is awesome!

Some interesting things:

Everyone is short.

Inca cola tastes exactly like bubble gum.

70% of PCV's crap their pants during service

Talking about poop has become normal

Most people drink instant coffee

For some reason, chinese food is huge here. But it isn't very good as far as I know.

I have taken up yoga. Do it twice a week. Have a dance class once a week.