freezing in peru

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I MISS SUMMER WEATHER. i´m actually wearing a turtle neck right now. yeah.
anyways...¡enjoy!

So a few friends and I were going to take the 8 hour overnight bus ride to Arequipa on wednesday in order to spend a few days in the town then hike in the huge and famous canyon there. We are signing up for a trip where you spend a day hiking into the canyon, sleep at the bottom, then hike out the of the canyon the following mornig. Arequipa is supposed to be super cool (the deepest canyon in the world), but i think we are holding off for another week so we can go with a few other friends that are going to machu pichu this weekend. apparently at the bottom of the canyon are little cabins to sleep in and even a pool to swim in, so i´m not worried that i won´t get enough sleep in order to hike the next day. i´m a little worried about the difficulty of the hike but i am in good enough shape that it is mostly a mental battle.


i was going to go to pisac yesterday but i decided to stay in all day and rest. i feel a lot better today because of all the sleep and thankfully my spanish lessons are moving from 8 am to 10 am starting on wednesday so i´ll have more time to sleep in at home. spanish is great. today i happened to be the only one in my class and actually had a 2 hour one on one lesson. we literally just spoke for the first hour. i sounded like an idiot but it was great practice. there is a huge young israeli population and we started talking about that and judiasm and everything. my teacher jorge used to work at this dance club that is known to be the israeli hot spot and he knew some hebrew which was pretty cool.



on saturday i went to my first salsa lesson. that dance is complicated! oh man i did not know what i was getting into. but it was SO fun and i learned the basics. we first started by just dancing with one partner, but then we started dancing in a circle and you continue to move and switch partners and they would yell out steps to you and it was fast and difficult and awesome. i´m planning on going as many saturdays as i can because i want to get better and eventually be able to dance salsa outside of the máximo nivel class room.



the kids are ridiculous. they don´t know my name and just call me ¨mi amiga!¨ and hold my hand. it is super cute. i help the kids with their homework and try to make them actually focus, do their work, and not copy other kids. i accidentally did one girl´s homework for her because i didn´t realize the reason that she wanted me to recreate a picture in her work book was an assignment. woops. the kids are adorable but i still have to be careful with my things because most of them do steal when in the streets. we also give the kids bread and hot chocolate and little gifts because they literally have nothing. on friday, an american named eliot came to Coli Bri (the after school program´s name) and put on a magic show. also, this organization from the usa had visited the kids before i arrived and given them disposable cameras to take pictures with in the plaza de armas. they came on friday too and put together a slide show so the kids could see the ones they took and also take a copy home. the kids went wild and absolutely loved it. i´m working there with other american volunteers, one from rhode island actually. there is a girl named meghan who i´m good friends with and she asked if i wanted to go to the galapagos islands with her in the middle of july... it was so incredibly tempting... but i unfortunately declined.

¡te estraño mucho!
con una besa,
emily

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