My First Full Day in Cusco

I slept rather well considering there is a busy street right outside full of taxi drivers honking their horns for no apparent reason. And a rooster somewhere. Not close. But close enough that I could hear him and be slightly annoyed once I woke up. Breakfast was eggs however you like them, pancakes, cereal, yogurt, fresh fruit and freshly squeezed juice of some sort.

Audrey and I took a taxi to Maximo Nivel for our orientation. Maximo is a very busy place. They have something like 1400 Peruvian students coming in for English classes every day. During orientation we just went over rules and were told where exactly we’d be working. I was signed up for the childcare program and I knew I wouldn’t know if I was working at an orphanage or center or school until today. But I figured kids would be pretty much the same any of those places and wasn’t too worried about it. Well, I found out today that I’ll be working in a shelter for girls who have been physically and/or sexually abused. Bit more intense than I bargained for. I was kinda looking forward to kids. They’re easy to talk to and they laugh at you but its not a big deal. Anyway. I’ll live.

Then I had a Spanish placement test. There was a written part and an oral part. I thought I did fairly well with the written part but I was a bit apprehensive about the oral part. The man said “Tell me about yourself in Spanish.” I don’t know what I was expecting, but “Tell me about yourself” was not it. So anyway I stumbled through some sentences while he very briskly graded the written part of the test. He said my grammar was not bad, but he was still going to put me in basic level 1 class. I have class from 4-6 Monday-Friday. I went today. We learned how to say “Hola” and “Como te llamas?” and “De donde eres?” as well as the proper responses. And the alphabet. Fun fun fun.

Lunch was vile. Really no other way to put it. I typed “interesting” first, but no, really, it was awful. I can’t even describe it.

They made up for it though. We had pizza tonight. It was very good. I don’t usually do pizza with everything on it, but I ate it tonight and it was good. Probably helped that I was very hungry.

Oh, and I found out today that February is some sort of holiday/festival thing where kids throw water balloons at each other … and the tourists. Yes, I found out the hard way.