Abrir la Ventana

Well it seems I have a little catching up to do, so here goes...

So thursday we hd Spanish in the morning, and that night was the Peruvian dance show. We got to the restaurant esque-place at around 9:30, and it was set up kind of like a dinner theatre, but bigger... there was a stage in front with the band on it, and then a lower stage for the dancers, and tables were set up all around. We had fairly good seats, and soon after we got there our waiter brought out a little Canadian flag and put it on our table.
The show consisted of a cast of about 25, who performed various traditional Peruvian dances in some pretty intense costumes, I´m talking full body gorilla suit, golden masks, and alpaca outfits. It was pretty crazy! And after every song, the band would play a song that the audience was to dance to, so that was pretty fun. The thing about Peru is that everyone here can dance. Whether they be 5 or 95, those Peruvians know all of the moves and can shake it to any song. It´s nuts! Anyways, about 3/4 the way through the show, they started calling names of people who were VIP so they were allowed to come up on stage and dance with/meet the cast, and much to our surprise they called us! Kent and Anna Maria must have organized it, but we were pretty pumped and ran up on stage and danced and danced with all of these people in crazy costumes, it was so fun! But we were NOT allowed to play their instruments haha unfortunately.

The show didn´t end until 4:00am apparently, but we left around 1:30 because friday morning we had more Spanish. At 1:00pm on friday, our first week of lessons was done! So Kent and Anna Maria took our group, along with Lupe (for mother´s day!) out to a traditional Peruvin lunch. The restaurant was enormous, and it was buffet so we tried everything. And I mean EVERYTHING. I ate a mini octupus, and potentially some cow stomach (both of which I did not love!) ... but there were some really good things too. We tried their fmous juice, Chicha morado, which is purple and made with corn... it was so sweet, and tasted a little like pepper and grape licorice... very weird.

After lunch we all said good-bye to Jo, because she was leaving for her placement on Saturday but we would not see her becuase Kelsey, Jessica, Celine and I were heading away for the weekend. So we said our goodbyes and then the four of up hopped in a cab to the bus stop. There we bought four tickets to Pisco, and hopped aboard. No one told us that we were getting the crazy horn obsessed bus driver, and every ten minutes he would start honking his screechingly loud horn like it was his mission... it was sooo annoying! And made sleeping impossible haha. The bus ride was cool though, because we got to see a lot of the countryside... and it was very poor. There were so many little shacks and tiny communities that seemed so disconnected from the rest of the country. You don´t see it in Miraflores, but there really is a lot of poverty here. I think we´ll really see it in Cusco.

So we arrived in Pisco about four hours later, making it 7-8pm. A cab driver asked us if we wanted to go to Paracas, and we said yes... but when he showed us his car we were quite sketched out... worse than the nuge, and it just had a little sticker on the front that said ´Taxi´. Anyways, Jess told him we wanted to see his taxi license, so he got out his drivers license... and we were like NO! TAXI LICENSE! But it turns out he had one, and he had a huge picture of a nun hanging from his rearview mirror, so we hopped in. The drive to Paracas was safe, but we almost broke down like, 5 times. Like I said, worse than the nuge.

Ok, I hate to do a ´to be continued´, but it´s almost 9:00, which means Spanish, so I have to stop although I still have a lot to say! buuut I will try to update again tonight!