Yay For Coffee and Exercise

Yet another fabulous picture from my reconnect trip. As Peace Corps volunteers we have a lot of time on our hands, so we have to find new and creative ways to entertain ourselves. Here we are playing the game 3 flies up with an inflatable doll. Her name was Judy.

Meanwhile back at site, life has resumed to it's slow pace where daily events that are normally insignificant are the high lights of weeks sometimes even months. I had two of these seemingly mundane occurrences this week. The first is that I bought a french press. No more instant coffee for me! This morning was the first morning I brewed up a cup, and it was amazing. I bought the coffee from a volunteer in the north part of the country. His tiny village is in a coffee growing region and even though he is a youth development volunteers he's trying to help out the coffee growers as well and sold a few kilos of coffee to us at reconnect. So not only does drinking the coffee rouse my senses, awaken my taste buds and put a smile on my face, but it also makes me feel like I'm doing a good thing by supporting the local farmers in a fellow volunteers site. The reason it took me 3 months to buy a french press in the first place is because the only ones I'd seen were at Starbucks and were being sold for 90 soles. I found at my last trip to the super market, one for 15 soles. It was in a box and the picture on it looked like it could be pretty crappy but I was fed up with instant coffee and decided to take the chance. It's actually a pretty nice french press, no worse the ones they were charging an arm and a leg for at Starbucks. So HA! who needs you, expensive corporate conglomerate? I am a peace corps volunteer and am getting more frugal and more creative by the day.

My second exciting thing from this week is that my gym got two new bikes. At almost any other gym this may not be that big a deal. But at my gym there had previously only been 4 cardio machines, 3 of which were broken and the other was so old and beat up it was hardly worth the effort. These two new bikes are actually decent machines and I can finally supplement the exercise classes with my own cardio. So I tried out the bike for the first time last night and now I can add it to places in Peru I've been hit on. I don't really consider the gym too strange a place to get hit on, but I hate having to take the headphones out of my ears to listen to some idiot hit on me. But I'll take getting hit on every now and then if it means getting a workout like I did last night. Between the coffee and the exercise I will hopefully be more awake, more fit and happier.