An Alpaca Sweater

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Another volunteer for the same program I will be working on arrived today. She is staying in the same homestay as I am which will be good so we can do stuff together. Her name is Vivika and she is from Germany and very nice. I also met Joao Bravo, the volunteer coordinator for my project, who will be the person who actually goes with us to our volunteer places and who also personally works with the orphanages in the program. He seems confident, full of energy, and very passionate about his job so I am very excited to work with him. Neither Vivika nor I really know what our project actually is yet but we have a orientation meeting tomorrow morning where we will learn all we need to know about our time here. This afternoon Vivika and I went with the other girl who is lving at the house to a market down the street from the house. It is a local one that only happens on the weekends with lots of little stands selling handmade crafts and such. We tried some ´Queso Helado´(cheese ice cream) which I was sceptical about at first but it turned out to be delicious and didn´t even taste like cheese, it was just like homemade vanilla ice cream. I will definitely be returning there again for some more of that before my 6 weeks here are up. Lunch here is actually the biggest meal of the day. People claim that it is because of the altitude and you can´t digest as well or something so locals don´t eat a heavy meal in the evening, but I think it is just tradition. So breakfast and dinner are just break rolls with jam and tea and the real meal is for lunch. At our homestay all the food is included and the lunch today was delicious. I think it is also part of the culture here that if you can afford it you hire someone to help out in the house, so there is a really nice woman who will cook all our meals and such while we are here. For the rest of the afternoon I went into town to say goodbye to my two friends that we leaving today and then I hung out with a girl I met last night. We went to one of the indoor markets, which is made up of a whole bunch of little stands basically all selling the same thing, and i bought my first peruvian alpaca sweater! But i think it might be a mix of cotton and alpaca... oh well. Tomorrow we have orientation and then volunteering, I am excited!

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