Apparently I missed an earthquake on Tuesday. We were sitting at Antojitos when it happened. I thought our bench was just wobbly, because it kept moving even though neither Alex nor me were doing anything to make it move. Earthquakes are not in my frame of reference, so it didn't even come to mind. That's the story of how I missed the very first earthquake I've ever experienced. Apparently in Cusco it was lot worse, and they evacuated the mall that some of the volunteers were hanging out in. As far as severity of the tremors it wasn't so bad, but it went on for about 20 minutes (it was a very wobbly bench).

On Wednesday I made apple pie for my host family. That turned out quite differently from at home. First, all the butter here is salted. That makes it taste different already, but I compensated by adding a bit more sugar and leaving out the pinch of salt the recipe called for. Next, my apples were all brown. We got them at the market in the morning, but I just picked the wrong ones (apparently). Third thing was that my host family doesn't own a scale, so I had to guestimate the amount I needed of each ingredient. My dough turned out way too sticky, and I couldn't roll it out, so I had to break it into bits and spread it over the baking pan that way. Then they don't have refined sugar here. It's either white sugar or raw cane sugar nothing else. Cinnamon tastes different here too. Not entirely sure why or how but it does. You can imagine that the pie came out quite differently from the way it does in the Netherlands. Another curious thing is that my host family owns two ovens, but use those as cupboards, for towels mostly. If they need to bake anything they go to the oven around the corner. All around town there are signs saying 'horno caliente', which means that there is a woodfire oven being kept lit that you can come use. So I could not control the temperature of the oven. Closer to the open flame was hotter, and further away was colder. It was an experience and luckily the pie still turned out really well.

After lunch and apple pie I went to Cusco for the Projects Abroad Social. We went to the choco museo this time, to do a workshop on making chocolate. That was a lot of fun. We had a crazy teacher who, for some reason, kept saying 'Miercoles' whenever he was pleased or (pretended to be) displeased with anything. Miercoles means Wednesday. We had to dry the beans, peel them, pulverise them, and then we got two different kinds of hot chocolate, after which we got to make our own chocolates. While drying the beans we each got to come up to the pan to give the beans a stir. While stirring the beans you had to tell the beans you loved them (in Quechua), and give them a kiss, and you had to keep smiling, otherwise the chocolate would not be good. Then we had a competition to see who could get the most cocoa butter out of their beans. This was a matter of squash and pulverise as if your life depended on it, using a pestle and mortar. Mine was still way too dry to win. Then we had Mayan hot chocolate. Which is made with pulverised cocoa beans, chili, honey, water, and human blood. Well, not really with human blood, but the guy did a convincing job pretending to go to slice open Puck's wrist. He cleaned everything with alcohol and even made a little indentation in her wrist with his knife when he was pretending to go for it. Tasty hot chocolate though. The there was 'conquistador' hot chocolate, made with milk, sugar, honey, cinnamon, cloves, and pulverised cocoa beans. The teacher didn't like the word 'conquistador' so he changed it to 'cuyquistador' and had us all making guinea pig sounds. While mixing the second kind of hot chocolate we had to sing to it in pairs. I was paired with Puck, so we sang 'het is een nacht', people stared. After all that, we picked our molds (mine looked like roses) and made a filling for our chocolates. Mine has coffee, almonds, m&ms, and sprinkles. Then we all got melted chocolate and set to work. An hour later we could pick up our finished chocolates. Only one has survived this far, but luckily I took pictures :). It was all great fun, but I was home incredibly late. Luckily I was forgiven, fed, and then I went off to sleep.