hola de peru

Mamà, lo siento, necisto hablar en ingles esta vez. Hablarè en Español en proxima notas.


Hey guys!

After 27 hours of travel (the miami/lima flight was late and therefore i missed my connecting and had to wait 5 hours for an open flight), i´m finally in Cusco! I´m dead tired but i still went out last night. there are 3 groups here and the big one left for another town this morning so i wanted to meet them at least a little bit. although i was the baby of the group (overall the range is something like 18-24 or 25), everyone else was too shy or too embarassed to dance. i did everything i could to get them to salsa but to no avail. LAME! however, i danced for perhaps an hour and was exhausted when i finally went to sleep. the altitude is a big deal. we´re at over 10,000 ft so theres a lot less oxygen. they actually have a bunch of oxygen bars and i´m thinking they´re useful in a place like this. this all meansafter walking up 3 flights of stairs you´re completely out of breath. but i was having too much fun dancing to care. man, these guys are good. i mean of course its their dance and they grow up doing it, but SHEESH! a couple of the girls i danced with were miles ahead of me. i guess i´ll learn.

this morning we got up and said goodbye to the group that was leaving and then we had 2 hours to explore. I haven´t mentioned it, but i´m the ONLY GUY! right now there are 6 girls but they say 3 more are coming. so... our exploring turned into shopping and i can expect more of the same.
we got really lucky this morning. we got outside and heard music and we went to check it out. it turned out to be a huge marching band and trailing behind was various units of i guess the cusco armed forces. we followed them into the central plaza and there were other units from different branches coming from all corners of the square. my best guess, from the bits and peices i could pick out was that it was a memorial service for servicemen from cusco who had died. they had a flag ceremony and all the soldiers were holding bayonettes and some had rpgs (these thankfully were unloaded ). O and there were women units! in both of the 2 branches on our side of the square they had a women unit. one of them was holding purses and guns. crazy!

anyways, i´m off to meet my host family and tomorrow we start school. the word is that we should be checking email every couple of days, so feel free to send me stuff, questions, you know, whatever you would send someone in a southern hemispherical country :)

choa,
Darren