hola!!

have arrived safely in the land of the inkas in the most beautiful city in the world!! After a horrible 3 days travel we arrived in our beautiful accomadation in the suburbs of cusco. its so much cleaner here and the views are absolutly stunning. This week has been full of 4 hour spanish lessons, acclimatising and leanring our way around. Cusco is a busy busling city paved with cobble stone streets and colourful people. the children are sooo cute and try to sell you eveything from finger puppets to little trinkets and beyond. ive seen a few llamas yes but im a little afraid to get too close as they apparently spit at you!

This whole week has been about acclimtising and getting used to being in cusco. one of the activities was a treasure hunt around cusco... the idea was to practice our spanish on the locals to get answers to a number of questions ie. what is the colour of the peruvian flag... my group however decided it would be sooo mucg easier to go to the local Irish pub and get one of the english speaking waiters to help us... she was appaled at our complete lack of spanish haha. Also this week one of the boys landed a trip in the clinic already.... the tripple threat of giardia, salmonilla and amebia (sorry i dont know how to spell it... how you understand :) )

Yesterday i moved in with my host family and my new room mate. The mum, yanet picked us up, shes one on the nicest people ive met, so so welcoming and is always saying "mi casa to casa" and "perfecto!" The two children have school monday to friday, split in half because lunch is a big meal of the day and everyone goes home. But on weekends they have english class SATURDAY AND SUNDAY. they were saying that the other night marco, the son stayed up till 4am studying... hes only 16!! The dad is in the military and is also really nice and accomodating we had a lovely english/ spanish chat over breakfast, and today we was in a military parade. All these young men were decked out in full camoflage, apparently it happeneds evey sunday too!

The food here is so unbelievebly good! yesterday we had this peruvian rice casserole dish and just now for lunch we had rice chicken carrots broccoli and this sweet peruvian potato that was purple. breakfast though is slightly less appetizing, the dad served us some sort of porraige gruel is a cup... muy delicioso! they also drink a lot of tea here.

Today i also went to church with my host family... while it was incredibly beautiful.. i had no idea what was going on as it was all in spanish. we caught one of the public buses that look like combi vans and are alsways crowded. They only cost 60 peruvian cents sooo cheap and they have funny names like "batman", "rapitdo" and "satilite" instead of a crazy network of numbers like we do in melb.

tomorrow is the fisrt day at the school ill be teaching at... apprently they have a little surprise welcome fo us which will definetly involve confetti haha i live right near an internet cafe now so contact should be more frequent... skype might be a little more hard as the internet cafe is the size a closet and everyone can hear what your saying haha

ill be in contact soon, miss you all

love cat