thank you all so much for the bbirthday wishes!! sorry its taken so long to get back to you all its been a crazy last few weeks :) i went paragliding on my birthday which was absolutly amazing! ill post some photos soon

tonight im catching a night bus to bolivia, staying for one night at lake titikaka in copacabana then onto la paz for a few nights then down to tupiza for a tour of the salt flats and maybe a tour of the mines in potosi. veryyy excited!

as requested heres a blog about my typical day in cusco...

in the morning i wake up at about 7:30 and stumble upstairs to breakfast - the host fmailies kitchen is ont the top floor and everymorning i get to enjoy a beautiful view of the hills surrounding cusco. if im lucky we get porridge usually made from quinua which fills you right up... every morning we get a piece of fruit and a glass of freshly squeezed juice and some bread- which is sooo delicious.

After breakfast we head off to school on the local bus. the buses here are completly different to melbourne, firstly there usually combi style buses that they try to squeeze as many people as possible on and secondly the different bus routes dont have a confusing set of numbers but have names such as Satelite or el mirador or rapido. it takes a bout 45 min to get from my house to the main bus terminal where we change buses for one headed to pisac in the sacred valley. every morning we walk pass a police station with many neatly pressed officers in uniform. there very into there uniforms haha

The bus to ccorao takes about one hour and we go past the inkan ruins of saqsaywaman along the way as well as a couple of small villages. recently weve started arriving at school alot earlier to do some construction work before teaching. the wall is coming along really well, but we still have a bout 20m to go, hopefully we will have enough time to finish the water resevoir as well. we arrive at school and hang out in our own room that doubles up as storage for the kids lunches. we usually spend a bout half an hour either playing with the kids or planing a lesson if were a bit unorganised.

lessons go for about 45 min each and we teach two a day. the other day in art class we got the kids to make a monsters out of plastacine which they absolutly loved. most of their lessons are wrote learning, where the teacher writes on the board and they copy it down. it was amazing to see that these kids knew very little about creativity and whenevere we do something in art that is thier own idea they keep asking for assurance that its ok. on friday i went on my first house visit, which involves going to some of the more impovished families in ccorao and going to see if we can help out. we went to the house of a boy in the other year 5 class. there are 9 people in his familiy and they live in a house with two rooms about the size of my kitchen living room back home. the walls are mud and there is only a mud floor. they have 3 beds for all of them. the government said they would give them a concrete floor but they have to ompletly knock down there house and build another one, which they can afford so with the fundraising money we will be helping them with that. one of the children has an illness and looks about 3 years old but is actaully 8. the family cant afford to give him the hospital help he needs which can easily make him better so we will also be helping with that.

we leave school at about 1pm and head home for lunch. its an hour in a packed bus and most of the time we dont get a seat. we arrive home about 2:30ish and have lunch waiting most days. my host dad cooks during the week because my host mum doesnt come home during the day from her work. lunch is massive. we have a soup plus a plate of meat and rice and some vegtables on the side usually. after lunch on monday nad wednesday i have spanish class for two hours. on the otherdays we usually head into town and hang out in a cafe or head to el molino markets... which is basically the equivelent of wetfield shopping centre in melbourne... peruvian market style. its where we buy all these cheap dvds, clothes, lolies ect ect ect

dinner is usually around 7:30pm and is just a smaller portion of what we ate fro lunch. after dinner we either watch a movie or head into to town for a night out.

theres hardly ever a boring moment in cusco and theres always something to see or do. ill be in bolivia for about 2 weeks so ill be out of touch, but ill update you all hwen i get back.