And A Sheep Strolls In...

I forgot to mention yesterday that when we got to the part where we were going to start hiking up the mountain towards the glacier.. there was a dog and a young llama cuddling together. Adorable.
Today with the kids was lots of fun. I took the girls group and ended up with eight girls, which was a pretty big group compared to the usual and is especially big when trying to teach them English. They were completely distracted by the boys, who were being really bad, and one of the girls was goofing off like crazy, but finger on your nose along with a sticker rewards system that we are making helps quiet them down a bit. taught them hello, goodbye, and introductions today. we were supposed to get through a lot more but they take quite a while to get it down, especially with prononuciations, they say I like EE, the spanish pronunciation, so everything sounds way off.
So I was in the middle of my lesson, writing on the white board and making the kids repeat things after me, and in walks a sheep. The kids didnt seem to think much of it, I guess its pretty normal around here, but the other volunteers and I had to try sooo hard to not laugh and get the kids all riled up. It´s also hard during the lessons because in the classroom area, there are a bunch of kittens and puppies that live there that the kids want to play with. But for the most part, they are pretty good about paying attention and wanting to learn, because it isn´t a required program, they come there after school on their own.
After an hour of a lesson, we went to play outside for an hour. Red light green light, a game called matagente (meaning kill people - i dont know what it is, the kids play it themselves), and a bit of monkey in the middle, which was hilarious when the tiny kids tried to throw the ball over the heads of the older ones. One of the girls brought snacks for everyone at the end, which was super sweet. The volunteers ate the one chocolate bar cause it was too hard to divide up between the 17 kids we had today :D

Intense Hiking

Argh I´m trying to find flights to Cuzco so that we can go to Macchu Picchu after volunteering, but they are so expensive. The bus ride there would be 14+ hours and is apparently pretty awful and everyone says don´t do it. So that leaves taking the plane, the cheapest of which I can find is over 200 round trip, plus another 100 for while we are there taking the train to Macchu Picchu and actually being there. Gross. I don´t want to do it but I do. We´ll see.
Anyway, yesterday, we went to a glacier in Huaytapallana (meaning where flowers gather, in Quechua), about a two hour bumpy combi ride away from Huancayo. We drove alongside a river, often going over really narrow bridges or even driving through it. I went with the other volunteers and a group of other people who had come up from Lima to hike the mountain. Bundled up with a ton of layers because we were so high up and near the snow. The base of the mountain was at about 15,000 feet and we hiked 8 km total (about 5 miles). The way there was really tough because I got pretty bad altitude sickness combined with the exertion of hiking. Stomach ache, headache, dizziness, all that good stuff. Had to rest a lot and really wasn´t feeling well. Eventually, the guide gave me coca leaves to chew on and those helped a lot - I didnt feel sick for the rest of the day. It´s what everyone here uses for altitude sickness and I was pretty desparate at that point. Yes, coca leaves are the basis of cocaine, but to make a tiny amount of cocaine, they use a tonnnn of coca leaves. Went up one mountain, back down the other side, up and down another, and then arrived at the glacier after a little over three hours of hiking. It was gorgeous, really out in the middle of nowhere, way out in the Andes. As we were hiking, we passed a bunch of lakes and lagoons, some of them an ugly brown and others a beautiful agua-marine color that reminded me of Laguna Quilotoa, the crater lake that I went to in the Ecuadorian Andes. Snow peaked mountains, glaciers in the distance, vast endless brown mountains, green fields everywhere we looked. The path was pretty dangerous, lots of walking on unstable rocks and near cliffs, but luckily no one got hurt. There was a little boy hiking with us who the guide somehow managed to carry on his shoulders and run despite all of the barriers on the path. Eventually after lots of water and chocolate and what seemed like forever, we could see the glacier. From a distance, I could see pèople trekking up the mountain pretty far up, and I thought that was what we were going to do. I was too tired to be able to do that so thought I wasnt going to get to climb the glacier. As it turned out, our group just climbed a little bit up the glacier, pulling ourselves up against a rope that the guide had brought. When we reached a certain point, we sled down the glacier on tarps, which was really fun but pretty scary because it seemed like we wouldn´t ever stop. The guide stopped us by pretty much letting us slam into him. The glacier had icicles hanging down from it and was this enormous mass of ice and snow so huge that I couldn´t even see the top of it from where I stood at the bottom. An intense journey there but definitely worth it. The hike back was really easy in comparison and we walked really fast the whole way back with very few breaks. A little bit of uphill but not too much. A lot of the downhill was steep and I had no idea how we had been able to walk up that on the way there. Arrived back at the bottom and most people had chicken soup because it was so cold, I just had some coffee to warm up - all they have here in instant, thought, not very good but at least it was hot.
After the ride back, I did my spanish homework (just writing a little bit of past tense stuff in Spanish about the day) and then knocked out without dinner by 7:30, we were all so exhausted. Slept a tonnn.
This morning after breakfast, we went to the Sunday market, which is a pretty big thing in Huancayo. Longer walk there than we thought, but not too bad and managed not to get lost. There was a long road with tons of stalls of everything from American clothes and shoes to Peruvian jewlery and traditional clothing and bags and food and artwork and anything you can think of. Pretty similar to the one that I went to in Ecuador, but a bit bigger. Bargained a lot and bought a bunch of stuff. The people were actually less willing to bargain than the people in Ecuador, but I still managed to get some pretty good deals, just walked away from the people who wouldn´t bargain with me. We were the only foreigners at the market, I still haven´t seen a single other foreigner in Huancayo besides the volunteers. I would think there would be at least a few.
I wish I could put pictures up, but my computer is dead and the computers here don´t have slots to put my camera card into and I didnt bring along the cord. So you´ll have to wait for pictures till I can charge my computer again in Nazca or Cuzco in a couple of weeks.
I locked myself out of my room and the house and the volunteer coordinators are out in the mountains until later tonight, so I have to wait to go back to the house until the others are back from buying chicken at the open market. Hopefully they will be back soon, though.

Such Different Systems

Yesterday in the hospital, I shadowed in ob/maternity, which was really interesting. the thing about it is that the people have no privacy whatsoever, and there are multiple patients in the room at the same time. at one point, one of the nurses took out his camera phone and started taking a video while a pregnant woman was on the table. a lot of the women come in to get prescriptions for condoms because its taboo here to use them unless you have an rx from a doctor. there were lots of depo provera shots, some family planning appointments, and pregnancy checkups. There was a 16 year old girl I had seen the previous day in the general consultation who had a severe infection and had refused treatment. We went to see her in the maternity ward - she had had her baby overnight and was really sick and would have died without treatment, but still refused it. she also didnt understand much of what was going on because she only speaks Quechua. The nurses started a fund to chip in for her meds so that they can treat her and her baby.
In the afternoon, we went to the outside market to get produce. I got a bunch of guanadillas, this really yummy fruit with goopy seeds. it´s really hard to eat because its so goopy, you have to kind of suck it out of the peel, but they are really good. weird, they are playing american music at the cafe im at. anyway.. i got 8 of theçose fruits the size of oranges for a dollar, and then a pineapple for 10cents. potatoes and rolls of bread are about 3 cents each, its quite nice. while we were driving to the market, we drove past two of the kids that go to the kids program i work at, which was really random because its completely the other side of town from where they live. the car broke down when we were driving and spit out lots of smog but neto, one of the volunteer coordinators who we live with, used a wrench and managed to fix it pretty quickly.
Today, went to the med center and followed around the psychologist, which was really interesting. completelyyy different system than in the US, as with everything else. people don´t make appts for anything, they just come in whenever they want to. no one came in for her today even though it´s usually busy, but she was giving a lecture on burn out syndrome to the nurses, so i sat in on that and helped her use the computer for her power point because she had no clue how. talked to a bunch of the nurses and had a good spanish speaking day, understood most of what was going on. it all depends on who is talking, i think. i´m going to take spanish lessons a few hours a week to brush up on my conjugations, etc. í´m starting tonight.
Going out to teach the kids in a little bit. I think I´ll take the girls today, they are really stubborn and think English is too hard so don´t make an effort to learn it, so I´ll give that a go and hopefully be able to get somewhere with them. We´re reviewing to be and teaching them family words today.
I just washed Bobby, the dog we live with, who was completely smelly and disgusting. Used my shampoo because of course there isnt any dog shampoo. Not great for him but oh well, its better than nothing. And then as soon as I let him out of the tub, he rolled around in the mud. Lovely. He´s dirty again, but probably a little bit less smelly than he was, at least.
Hmm, I had other things I was going to say, but I dont remember what anymore. So that´s all for now.

It´s Raining

Yesterday for lunch we went to get pachamanga, which is this type of food that is cooked in a kind of underground oven. it´s mostly meat, and the others tried cuy - guinea pig. yuckkk! i just had potatoes, as usual.
This morning at the clinic, I shadowed a doctor who was doing general consultations - basically just physical exams for sick people who came in, children, adults, babies, everyone. She spoke really quickly and so did all the patients, so it was a lottt harder than Monday to understand what was going on. I did a lot of smiling and nodding and pretending I knew what was happening. It was really sad, there were four pregnant women who saw the doctor this morning - ages 15, 16, 20, and 24. So young :(
When the doctor needs to use gloves for the exam, the patient has to go out of the room and buy a pair of gloves for them. I dont know how much it costs, but that seems a bit extreme, when all kids get free vaccinations and such. Oh, instead of using carbon paper, they have this plastic carbon paperish thing that they put between two pieces of paper and when they write on the top paper, it goes through to the bottom paper too. good cheaper way of copying stuff, probably just very old fashion before today´s carbon paper existed.
Saw an ultrasound, an ob exam, a lot of people sick with fevers, bronchitis, etc. They were constantly precribing medicines and from what I could tell, each person got between two and four medicines! Mucho!
Washed my laundry in the sink after lunch and hung them on clotheslines on the roof. then when we were out with the kids, it started raining, so boom, now all my clothes are soaking wet. Lovely.
The kids were a lot of fun as usual. We split up the younger and the older ones and I took the little guys today, two boys, ages 4 and 5, Pedro (who we call Pedrito) and Luis (who we call Lucho). The older kids are working on leaving basic English, but Í just worked with the younger ones on Spanish things (yes, me teaching Spanish doesnt make much sense!)... but I got them to draw pictures of their families and write out everyones names. They werent into it at first but then got super excited and kept asking me, how do you write this, how do you write that? It was pouring so we didnt play outside games the second hour, just kept drawing with the little kids. Lucho got really really excited when I showed him how to do mazes and he kept saying I can do it, I can do it in Spanish, really cute!
There are also puppies that live in the room where we have the class. Well, its not really a room, it´s a covered area that goes out into a courtyard. The courtyard got flooded with water when it was raining so we held the two pups so they didn´t get soaking wet. they are really young, i dont know where their mom is, but they are adorable babies.

Kids Day

I´m at an internet cafe paying 33 cents for an hour of internet cause the plugs dont work in the house in addition to that i dont have the right converter even if the plugs did work. boo. its loud in here and the keyboard is different so its weird to type on. but anyway...
so yesterday the drive up to huancayo was gorgeous. it was so nice to escape from the smog of lima into the beautiful andes. i´m in a fairly large town here, but it´s still really nice with the mountains in the background and kind of has the feel of the wild west in spanish.. plus mountains and altitute (which ive been lucky with so far). though there is a huge mall thats completely out of place in the middle of the town. it has kfc and pizza hut and burger king and all that. boooo. went to the supermarket there to pick up groceries, a bunch of stuff for the week for 9 bucks, yay. decided to cook for myself instead of payin 15 a week for food to be made for me cause ill get more variety and more assurance that its actually vegetarian.
anyway.. today was the first day of work. got up early, took the combi for 30 minutes to the clinic in chupaca (i love the name of the town).. and on the bus they chant chupacachupacachupaca as they drive to see if anyone wants to get on. awesome.
got to the clinic, spent my four hours there shadowing in pediatrics. its completely different than any hospital in the us, in different ways than i expected. the parents take the kids to one room to be weighed and measured and get a nutrition consultation and vitamins. then they wait and theres another room or vaccines, and another yet for physical exam, and then the laboratory for blood tests. weird. i actually didnt see any doctors today, just med students and nurses. in the nutrition consultation room, they also did a developmental measurement thing, which was pretty cool that they do here.. based on their age, they check a couple of things that they can do, not only walking, but also like piling blocks, grabbing onto things, understanding a story, finding a block that is hidden under a blanket, communication level, psych development sort of stuff. so that was really cool. if they werent at the approrpiate level, the nurse would write some prescription for a communication class or give the parents advice, etc. everything there was in spanish and i understood the gist of it, not every word, but i was able to get most of what was going on. also talked to the med students a little bit about how med school works there, very different. there was pretty much no sterility there, but that was expected. i´m not going to get to do mcuh at the hospital, mostly a lot of observing, but it should be interesting. i´ll alternate between different areas, general, dental, ob, maternity, psych, etc.
three afternoons a week, we go out to a tiny rural town that has a really strange name i can´t think of, and work with kids there. there were about a dozen kids today ages 4 to 11, and it was a lot of fun. they are poor kids from a rural area and its a kind of after school learning program that my volunteer program has set up. its pretty disorganized, though, so hopefully ill be able to help a lot with getting it more under control. the kids are the most adorable things ever and come up and kiss you immediately when they meet you and are jut so affectionate and adorable and i am already in loev with them after only two hours of working with them today. we are going to teach them bits of english and play with them, so i´m definitely excited for mwf afternoons.
well, thats about it for now. leave me messages!

In Huancayo

Just a quick one today, we have dinner cooking in the oven back at the volunteer house. Rode on the bus for seven hours today up to huancayo, have been up since 5am since we were told to get to the bus station way earlier than we needed to. won bingo on the bus ride and got a free ticket, but it expires before i´ll be able to use it. there aren´t any plugs here that my computer fits in so i cant charge it, or at least unless i find a converter somewhere, so i dont know how much ill be able to write. boo. so much for bringing my computer. but we´ll see. i´m excited to start at the hospital tomorrow and then working with kids in the afternoon. the family i´m staying with at the volunteer has a dog and an adorableee baby girl, so thats fun, and the other volunteers are the same age and really cool, so it should be fun here. :)

I Flew, I Flew!

At breakfast, we discovered that the “child” that has been making constant annoying screeching noises every morning was actually a parrot named Papi. There was also a giant turtle wandering around outside the hostel restaurant.
Started off the day going to Pachacamac, a set of ruins near Lima. Took a taxi there because the girl at our hostel said the bus took a really long time. Of course, the taxi driver way overcharged us even after bargaining, which we found out from our guide at the ruins after we had already agreed to the price. So it goes being a tourist. We thought that since we were going pretty far away from central Lima, we would get away from the smog, but nope, it was still there as a backing to the ruins. Somehow during the summer, the sun manages to overpower the smog and the sky is blue, but it’s winter now and it’s just grey all day long and then dark grey at night. Yuck.
Our tour guide at the ruins was a really nice 21 year old girl who was interesting to talk to and gave us a pretty good tour of the ruins. She talked about the different cultures that had been there over the times and the different sized adobe bricks they used. In Quechua, Pacha means earth and camac means creator. The site is named after the oracle Pachacamac, who the people believed could see the future. They prayed to his idol, which was made out of wood and had symbols of both a man (serpents) and a woman (corn). In order to make a sacrifice at the main temple there, the Temple of the Sun, people needed to purify themselves for one year – no chili, salt, meat, or sex. It was twenty days of purification for the smaller temple of Pachacamac. We walked up to the top of the temple and actually saw green for the first time in a few days, and had a really good view of the ocean and all around Lima. There were also three pyramids with ramps and storage areas for animals and foods to sacrifice. There was the Acllahuasi, the house of the chosen women, where young women were taught how to care for men and then chosen by the men to be their wives or to be sacrificed to the gods.
We had taken the highway there, but took city roads on the way back and the change between each city was so clear as we drove on. Central Lima is completely dirty and worn down, no high rises, but full of churches and old colonial mansions. The area near Pachacamac was the same. As we entered Barranco, one of the richer areas around Lima, the houses got much nicer and the buildings got taller and shinier. In Miraflores, it practically felt like we were in a city in the US, minus the Spanish. Such a huge difference in two places within 15 minutes of each other. .
We got dropped off by our taxi in Miraflores to go paragliding. We still hadn’t gotten hold of the people by phone so didn’t know if it would work out, but got there to find a bunch of people on the field with their paraglides. Was more expensive than we had thought it would be, but still had to do it. I loved flying, it was such a cool experience. Went over to a lighthouse and back again, really high up over buildings, really low near the ground, over the ocean, around in circles, over a shopping mall. It was only ten minutes long but it was awesome, I loved it. It’s such a cool job to have to take people paragliding all day long, the guy who took me had been doing it for 18 years.
Wandered around Miraflores for a while, looking at the tiled murals in the Parque de Amor. Ended up in this huge high-class shopping mall. Again, felt like America. It was kind of disgusting to see all the ridiculously fancy shops and such a nice mall so close the an area where most people live under the poverty line. We wandered around the mall a bit but I was mostly just annoyed at the concept of it. We ate lunch there, which was much more expensive than the usual – it was just over 3 dollars for a sandwich, which would have in other areas cost about a dollar. Got cheap (compared to the US) mango gelato for dessert, yum. There was a KFC, Chilis, Pizza Hut, Burger King… America taking over the world. I thought, at least there’s no McDonalds or Starbucks, but boom, there were those too. Lovely. Our guide at Pachacamac had told us about a park with fountains that spouted higher than the buildings, so we were considering going there, but asked probably four other people about it and no one gave us much of an answer about whether it was worth going to or not. Since it wasn’t very safe to go there with only two of us, we ended up not going.
Took a taxi instead to Museo de la Nacion in East Lima. Saw Peruvian paintings, ancient ceramics and textiles, photos of the different indigenous cultures. There was one floor about the Inca trail with amusing cartoons of archaeologists all over the wall along with photos of ruins and trails. The top floor was an exhibit about the Peruvian civil war that happened between 1980 and 2000. The captions to the pictures were in Spanish and English, but the main panels were in Spanish and we were rushed so didn’t have time to figure out what they said. So we were completely confused about who was even on which side and what the whole war was about. Have to look that up later.
Now it’s time to go hunt for dinner somewhere near our hostel before it gets too dark. We have to get up really early in the morning to take a 7am bus up to the mountains to Huancayo where we’ll be volunteering. Yay, a seven hour ride where I doubt I’ll be able to sleep. There should be a nice view out of the window, though.

Day One - Central Lima

We were going to go paragliding today, but hadn’t been able to get hold of the company, so ended up switching with our plans for tomorrow and were tourists around central Lima. Began the day getting majorly hit on by our waiter at breakfast, so that was great…Then was hit on by two other guys that I know of during the rest of the day, including one from a taxi who blew us a loud kiss as he drove by. Oh Peru.
Anyway, started off at Monasterio de San Francisco (yes, how appropriate). First were paintings and history about the Franciscans and a lot of religious things, which didn’t interest me too much. Then came the strange and morbid paintings and carvings of each saint and important figure and the way that they died – there was one lovely painting of a saint with his head chopped off kind of lying on his shoulder. Interesting, though. Then we went down to the catacombs in the monastery, the first floor of them, at least… there were countless floors of bodies beneath us that hadn’t been excavated. We walked around under low stone ceilings and looked at piles and piles of mostly femurs, and a few collections of skulls here and there. The architecture in the building was also pretty cool. I’m loving all the buildings around here.
We wandered on and ended up at the president’s palace next to Lima’s main plaza. It was exactly noon, so we arrived to the sound of a band. We watched the changing of the guard ceremony. The palace was a huge, really nice old building, but sadly, to get inside, you need to make reservations two days in advance, so that was that. Continued on, past people trying to force us to eat at their restaurants or buy this or that.
After some searching, asking, misunderstanding confusing Spanish directions, and ending up in the warehouse side of the post office, we eventually found it to buy some stamps – which are ridiculously expensive, btw. Went to the museum of the old post office and saw stamps that they’ve used over the years, back from when they first started using them here, and some stories about Incan forms of sending messages.
Next, on to Parque de la Muralla, where the museum turned out to be open by appointment only, but we saw some excavations of some walls and some views of the city. Well, views of the city… you can’t see much here because it is so polluted. But we saw colored houses off on the hillsides through the smog. You can feel the pollution constantly outside and also because it is winter, but mainly because of the smog, the sky is always that nice smoggy shade of gray. Everything in Lima smells like gasoline, especially near the main streets. It’s hard to see off in the distance because everything is obscured by the smog. Yuck. I wouldn’t be able to stay here for too many days, though I’m sure people just get used to it.
Next was Casa de Oquendo, one of the highlights of the day. It’s an old colonial mansion that’s open to the public. We walked in and were greeted by a really nice guy, Ricardo, who took us on an amazing tour of the house. We saw the library, which had some of the oldest books I’ve ever seen, including a bunch of old medical books with really scary pictures of people tied down for different medical procedures. Went to a room that was used as a classroom. The chairs in there were really old and had cool images on them. One was about a marriage between a Spanish king and an Incan woman, so combined some of the Incan gods with Spanish symbols and linked the images together in a really nice way. Up and up the stairs we went, from the restored part of the house to the upper two floors which were not restored, so were just as they were (minus a bit thanks to the humidity and earthquakes) in the 18th century when the family lived in the house. We went into the tower of the house, the tallest colonial in the area, and could see all over Lima. When it isn’t so smoggy, you can see all the way to the coast. The man who used to live in the house apparently was really rich and owned a lot of boats so would sit in the tower with his binoculars and watch his boats moving out on the water. It’s hard to describe, but everything up there was completely run down in an incredible way, gross and worn out by the pollution, the weather, and time, but almost magical still. We were way up high but when on the edge of the roof, could look down the four stories into the middle of other houses where people lived.
Had lunch at a yummy vegetarian restaurant, where I didn’t know what anything was so just ordered something off the menu and it turned out to be a giant pancake-ish thing that I can’t think of the name of with soy and yummy cheese and lots of vegetables inside. Also a really good juice/smoothie thing with a combination of a bunch of fruits. Mmm.
Then off to the bank museum, where we got another really nice tour. The bottom floor started off with a huge collection of pre-Columbian art, which our tour guide knew a ton about and he spoke English really well, so learned a lot and it was really interesting. He went through all of the different cultures up until the Incan time and the way that the art changed in each one. Some didn’t like using many colors, others focused on animals, some used two pipe things in their pottery while others consistently only used one, etc. One of the cultures, I can’t think of which off the top of my head, had really cool musical instruments in the shape of animals where you either blow air in or put water in and sound comes out through holes in the eyes, ears, and so on. After that collection, we walked through the doors of an old vault (the museum is in an old bank) into the gold collection, where there were tons of awesome gold vases, masks, jewelry, ornaments for the dead, all pure gold and made with so much detail. This mask was use to put over the face of the important dead, and has teardrops symbolizing the people asking for rain. Oh, and gold and silver were really important because gold symbolizes the sweat of the sun and silver, the tears of the moon.
The last place we went was to a Dominican church, which was so amazingly decorated with huge ceilings and really intricate religious scenes and altars. Soon after we got there, a mass started, so we sat through a bit of it listening to the booming voice of the preacher/bishop/someone, but couldn’t understand a thing, so left after a bit.
Boiling hot shower tonight to compare with my freezing cold shower last night. Maybe I’ll get somewhere in between tomorrow night.
Things are so cheap here, I love it. Five mini churros for about 33 cents, dinner for $1.75, museums either free or about a dollar each, 6 bucks a night each for our room. Okay, this is probably long enough for today.

San Salvador Airport

My computer keeps having random things on the internet that are written in Spanish and I don't know what half of them mean. I better get used to it, though! I'm sure I'll catch up on my spanish soon enough once I'm surrounded by it, especially if people stop speaking so fast like they do on the airplane. Combined with the roar of the engine, I couldn't even understand the English they were saying, let alone the Spanish, on my first leg of my trip. I'm in the San Salvador airport now for a seven hour layover. At least we found free wireless and my computer's not acting up. Taking turns sleeping and computering/watching our bags. One hour down, six to go until we're off for a four and a half hour flight to Lima. It's just as much time today waiting at airports as it is flying... a couple months ago, they cancelled the original flight (with less of a layover) and stuck us on the much later flight. Then we get to the airport today and there is a flight leaving in an hour for Lima with space on it (same airline, so I don't get why they didn't switch us to that one instead of the later one)... but we didn't switch to that one because it would have cost a bunch of money and been a pain with luggage and our airport ride and all that. So here I am, wasting time away.
The first leg of the flight was pretty good, uneventful. Slept a bit and talked to the guy who sat in between Abby and I (we didn't sit next to each other because neither of us wanted a middle seat).. He was just a year or two older and was going to Peru too, but had gotten some other flight with a connection through Costa Rica after El Salvador. He had the travel bug also and we were talking about wanting to visit all of the continents and just traveling in general, so that was fun. Just Australia and Antartica left for me and I'll have all the continents down. If Israel counts as being in Asia, that is. He was going to hike to Inca Trail at Macchu Picchu, which I definitely want to do someday but I'm sure it's really intense hiking in that altitude and I just don't have enough time this time, with just a short weekend for there including traveling time. I'm sure it'll be worth going back there sometime in the future and backpacking around more. Maybe after graduation.
Well, not much exciting has happened yet. It's pretty hot in the airport here, jeans definitely aren't the most comfortable thing to be wearing. It's really pretty and green outside, I wish I could go out there and explore, but supposedly it isn't safe near the airport and it also would be complicated with going through customs and all that when we really aren't staying here. Oh well, the time will pass eventually and then I'll finally be in Peru! :)

After spending five hours in the San Salvador airport, I think it's the best airport I've ever been in.
- free wifi
- free computers to use if you don't have one
- 4 free nintendo ds to play with
- free alcohol (sample cups of baileys)
- a store called "tienda libre" (free store)... though that isn't free
-giant boxes of cigarettes saying that smoking kills in HUGE letters
:)

So Ready To Leave

I'm off to Peru on Wednesday night, a red eye flight. All my things are packed and ready to go, I'm just waiting for a few more days of work to pass and then it's time for a long night day of flying, including a long layover in El Salvador because they canceled my original flight. Hopefully I'll get to go outside in El Salvador a bit instead of just being stuck in the airport all day with nothing much to do but look at expensive things. I'll get to Peru Thursday night and spend a couple days touristing around Lima before I head up to Huancayo in the Andes to volunteer at the hospital. Humans, this time, not animals. I'm excited - hurry up, time!