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I have had a very cute and smell-filled week. My walking around spanish teacher took me to the zoo at the local university which was much nicer and more spacious than I would have imagined. Also the pens are less secure and there arent that many zookeepers around so it was easy to poke our fingers through and stroke an ocelot (like a small jaguar - very pretty and very very smelly) and touch monkeys´ hands. This one monkey kept pushing a banana through the mesh at me which was sweet. I got the shock of my life though coz I bent down to get something and it shot its arm through the mesh and grabbed my glasses off my face!! Fortunatly it dropped them again but I am now suspicious of monkeys. There was the cutest puppy I have ever seen outside the zoo aswell which licked my hand and was so sweet I wanted to cry. I forgot to mention there are dogs absolutely everywhere here - in all the shops and in the streets and on the pavements (mostly sleeping) They are mostly owned by people I think and almost without exception seem in very good condition. I want all of them.
We have now visited all the places where we could volunteer. At the moment I have chosen the women´s safe house and the boys´orphanage and a little school in the mountains called Chincheros (I´ll tell you about that in a bit). Anyway the boys orphanage, which we visited on I think monday (I´ve got really confused already), was hilarious. It has these enormous solid metal doors and looks realy scary from the outside but inside is this big grassy courtyard with the building all round it and they learn all sorts of skills like carpentry and suit making there. Edurne, our contact here who knows everything that´s going on and is really nice brought her massive (Neopolitan mastiff!!!) dog Sammy with. (Sammy has possibly the least spacial awareness of anything I have ever seen and when she walks down the road EVERY person and animal stares at her in complete fear for about a second. She takes up as much pavement space as a large man and while all four of us girls walking together in the main square disrupt a couple of pigeons, Sammy, walking slowly, causes every single pigeon to fly away immediately in a huge flock). Anyway, I digress. Most of the boys at the orphanage were completely taken with Sammy and spent the two hours we were there running around after her going ´SAMMYSANNYSUNNYSURRYSALLY!´ (because most of them got her name wrong). The minute we first walked in though, there was this little boy of maybe 6 or 7 - one of the youngest - waiting just inside. He immediately stared at me very suspiciously and said very slowly ´Wat iz your name?´I was really surprised that he was speaking English but managed to answer eventually. He told me his name (which I think is Anthony : S) and immediately appointed himself our tourguide. It turns out this small boy is almost completely incharge. We passed a couple of words with a few of the boys (the ones around when we went were about 5 - 12 but there are some older ones aswell who were at school) and this really cute little boy who makes no sense. He talks loads but no one can understand a word and if he is asked a question his answer is irrelevant to the question. We were all sad that there were no funds to find out what is wrong with him and he gave us all hugs when we left. I have been generally impressed with all the places we have visited. Before I came I was sort of imagining a concrete prison with hundreds of miserable children in rags but everywhere has been pretty nice. The boys all have to wash their own clothes and do their own washing up and some of them really need shoelaces but otherwise they seem happy and pretty well looked after. Anyway that´s the boys orphanage and I love them all already and cant wait to start in a couple of days.
Chincheros, the place we visited yesterday, is in this town way up in the mountains that takes nearly an hour to get to by bus (slightly bigger and less mad than the buses around town). It is so cold there at night and you can see mountains with snow on in the distance and it is unbelievably pretty. The school and the kids were nice but it was an absolute mission to get back! The police were stopping some traffic up the road so no buses or taxis were getting through. Eventually though a taxi came and we crammed nine of us into it (this was a pretty regular sized car - one of those slightly longer hatchbacks) with 3 of us sat in the boot. It was pretty cool to be sitting backwards looking out of the back window and I pulled some faces at other drivers because I am a mature young lady. I am going back to Chincheros next friday (its only on fridays) but might not volunteer there after after that because it is so long to get to and back from.
Oh we have also had to change hostels because the one we were in had a horrid new manager who was trying to charge us far too much for our own rooms. We moved a couple of days ago. Sammy came and ´helped´(i.e. walked into us a lot when we were carrying all our heavy bags). The new place is quite nice but very freezing and was designed by retards. Rachels shower has no curtain and the window is right next to it, almost none of the rooms have wardrobes and my bathroom has a massive hole at the top of the wall so everyone in the corridor can hear me pee.
On that note, I shall leave you and try to upload some photos. lots of love xxxxxxxx
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