Fiestas Patrias

This weekend was the big independence day weekend which was hyped up a lot, but I was slightly let down by it all. Friday I went out to Chosica with a bunch of the volunteers and we watched a bit of traditional peruvian music sung by a woman who had the craziest Camel toe I´ve ever seen. I usually don´t use the word Camel toe, I think it´s a bit crude. But here in Peru women wear pants that are so tight it´s hard not to be taken aback by it some times. Really, it´s bad. I don´t even know how they get into them they´re so tight. So after getting home really late on friday night I woke up to a pretty rocky saturday morning. Around 7:30 in the morning I woke up cause I had to go to pee really bad. So I got up and realized I had a pounding head ache from the lack of sleep I had gotten all week combined with the lack of water and the 3 beers I had the night before. Oh well I thought, I´ll just go back to bed and I´ll feel better when I wake up. A half hour later, I woke up with the all too familiar intestinal pain. Back to the bathroom, still have a pounding head ache. I crawled back into bed ready to get at least another hour of undisturbed sleep/recovery. Not in Peru. A half an hour later I got woken up by an earth quake. Seriously? can´t you just let a girl sleep? After I decided that the second story hadn´t fallen down on me and I was still alive, I made one last attempt at sleeping in. Nope. Jake called me and told me if I wanted to go into Lima with them that day, I was gonna have to meet them in 20 minuets. Fine I´m up! So I raced around as fast as I could getting ready, still with a headache.

We got to Lima and found out the big independence day parade was actually on sunday and the natural history museum we wanted to go to was on the other side of Lima. So we wondered around the very trendy Mira Flores part of Lima all day. We really did nothing all. By far the most productive thing I did all day was get a latte at starbucks. Even though we didn´t do anything at all, it was still a really nice day. I was the only girl so it was nice to hang out with just the guys. That night we met up at Danielle´s house to preparty before the big party in yanacoto. Only, I never made it past the preparty. I think most of us went home around midnight and missed the whole reason we had come. But again, it was very fun non the less.

On sunday, I had a barbecue type of get together with my family and jamar and heathers family. It was really great cause my two host brothers were there. I thought one of them had been staying somewhere else for the past month because I hadn´t seen him once, but I guess he had been there the whole time I just never saw him. So I finally felt like I bonded with my host brothers. It could have been a bit more fun but heather was really hung over and jamar seemed like he wanted to be anywhere but there so I had to represent for the gringos. After my brothers had drank a whole bunch of beer, they decided they were going to church and invited me along. I thought it was a bit strange to get waisted and then go to church, but who am I to judge? On the way there, I had the darnedest time trying to explain to my drunk host brother what it meant to believe in god but not have a religion. I asked my 5 times why I didn´t cross myself with holy water and kneel and all that stuff that catholics do. Apparently "I´m not catholic" is not a good enough reason. So them after church, they went to a bar and drank more. I eventually had to leave them cause it seemed like they weren´t leaving for a while and I had to get home to make my sunday phone calls back home. It was a pretty interesting experience. I spent one day with americans and one day with peruvians so I feel the weekend was successful.

Today in training we had a lesson on how to teach english classes. I´ve already taught a few basic english classes in my neighborhood, but to I don´t think I´m qualified to teach classroom formal english. I really don´t know the first thing about gramar. Even in English, it´s so freacking confusing. I learned that the structure of questions are hard for spanish speakers to understand. What DOES she DO? Where DOES he work. I guess the verb to do is an auxiliary verb. I have no idea what this means. How am I supposed to teach it. At least we don´t have the subjunctive!