peru

hmmm. no idea where to begin. saturday was spent traveling. all day. left at 6:30am on a 3-4 bus ride to mexico city, then a four hour flight to bogota, colombia, 2hr layover, then a 2-3hr flight to lima. ending up getting to my new house around 2am. long long day. my family is pretty cool and i have a nice house, except my bed is way to small (will post photo later). I live with a mother (i'd say in her 60's), two of her adult children (man and woman) and a 20yr nursing student who works as their housekeeper. cool family but it is really hard getting used to the accent. spanish is way different here, lot of new sayings, new slang, new pronunciation. its tough, but will be an adventure. also, different food. so far i'm still in love with mexican food, but really haven't tried a wide variety of peruvian food yet. classes start tomorrow. yeah! not. oh yeah, i live about 20 minutes from the beach. heard the water is really cold but used to that being from central california. going to try and head over there as soon as i can.

guanajuato was a beautiful city that was pretty small and I was able to find my way around after a day or two. lima is huge. definitely a big city. it seems to be pretty dirty and a lot of pollution, but the people seem pretty nice and open to gringos. yesterday (sunday), my roomate (who is from southern california and goes to UCLA), my family and I had an afternoon tour of the city. we went to the main square where the arquitecture has a strong european influence (again, more photos later). today, the group and I had a pretty long orientation on the school, the city, etc. and we also went to the dance/singing performance which had a lot of tradational peruvian songs and dress. definitely had a good time.

so, i've got classes the rest of this week and a few cultural activities planned. I think this saturday we have a volunteer opportunity to work with kids in the morning, and then a salsa class with peruvian students. yeah. then next week (i think friday-sunday) i'm off to iquitos, which is the jungle in northern peru. a trip í'm really looking forward too.

well, there are two computers in the house with internet, so i should be able to update this pretty regularly and add some photos soon. well, i'm out for now.