Week 5-6?

Hey everyone!

In case you’re wondering: we’re still very much alive and kickin’ in Peru! It’s been a week or two since our last entry, because really there wasn’t that much to tell :)

There have been some minor changes in our apartment: seeing that we are going to stay here longer than all the other volunteers, we got to move into a room with its own bathroom. Kind of nice to have a bathroom you can keep clean… Also, two newcomers have arrived: Alexandra and Vicky. They will only be working in Urpi Sonqocha for two weeks. After this week, they are going to explore the rest of Peru for two more weeks before returning home. 

In the project everything is still going fine. The kids can be really loud and energetic, but that’s probably not any different from back home :) Last week, we started separate ‘reading classes’ with a first group of children. This is a continuation of a project two volunteers started a month or two ago, as an internship for their studies. We worked around the story of ‘Pinocchio’. We did some reading, showed parts of the Disney movie and played some games. The purpose is to stimulate the kids to read more on their own. Actually pretty fun to do!

On Sunday, a circus group (‘Circusco’) came to the project to perform for the kids. They were friends of Ellen’s (one of the project’s coordinators), so they did the show for free. The kids loved it (and so did we, of course)!  

The same day, we also had another cooking class. This time we made ‘causa’, which looks like a big pie filled with mashed potatoes, chicken, egg, mayonnaise, avocado… Yummy!

Last weekend, we put our salsa-knowledge to the test for the first time in Cuzco’s nightlife, accompanied by some other volunteers and our salsa teacher. Among other places, we went to a club with live salsa music. Despite the large amount of decibels, we had a lot of fun. A strange thing to see was that a lot of guys danced with each other. A bit weird at first, but they seemed to have a lot of fun, so why not? :) 

On Wednesday, we went to a very nice Couchsurf-meeting in the centre of Cuzco. Apparently, each Wednesday evening, both couchsurfing travelers and Cuzco residents get together in the same bar (with very cozy seats, an open fire place and rock music), to meet new people and exchange experiences. We’re definitely going back some time!

A couple of days ago, we both had our hair cut. At first we were a bit scared, but it turned out we picked a good hairdresser :) In total, we paid about €7 for both haircuts. Amazingly cheap!

Finally some statistics of our blog:

- we’ve had about 1700 pageviews, which is a lot, thanks

- most pageviews are done on the internet browser ‘Safari’ (34%), followed by ‘Internet Explorer’ (26%), ‘Firefox’ (23%) and ‘Google Chrome’ (13%)

- most pageviews are from Belgium, but also from the US, Luxemburg, Germany, France, the UK, Russia, Denmark, India and Ecuador (which is a bit puzzling, because in some of these countries we don’t know anyone at all).

That’s all folks! A lot of love from Peru!

Tía Verónica y tío Jasper

P.S. Maybe good to know: Peru doesn’t have a summer time/winter time, so instead of 7 hours, the time difference with Belgium is now reduced to 6 hours. P.P.S. Next Wednesday evening, we’re leaving for Arequipa and the Colca Canyon (a 3 day/2 night tour), so you can expect a lot of pictures when we return!