Wednesday was my day off, so I slept in until eight o'clock. Which for here, is incredibly long. My host mum wakes up my host brothers at seven if they're not up yet. Even on the weekend. I skyped mum in the morning. It was really nice to see a familiar face. DJ and Sally came to say hi too, so it was really good to see them all. When I was walking home I stopped to buy water. That's when I noticed the shop sold tea. Which in itself is nothing strange. Except they sold tea by the bag. Then I started thinking and there are actually quite a few things that they tend to sell individually here that we would just buy in a larger packet in the supermarkt. Things like candy, packets of cookies, chocolate bars, packets of crackers, little packets of sunscreen instead of just a bottle. Funny Peruvian people.
Wednesdays are our social days, so we went up to Cusco for a drink. There were two volunteers whose birthdays were coming up, there were a few of us leaving this weekend, and we had a few extra volunteers coming in. So plenty of reasons for drinks and cake. So that's what we did.

Thursday was a good day. It was really busy. First, we tried out my memory game with the second grade kids. They loved it. They had a blast and it was so fun to see them realising they got the pairing right when we turned the cards around. You would see them reading for a minute and puzzling it together. Then one of them would get it and their face would light up and they would start saying 'si, si' with a big smile. Then the rest would catch on and it'd be a party. They're adorable. Some of the kids at school are so open and spontaneous. During the break, one of them came up to me and starting asking me a million questions about the Netherlands, in Spanish. I tried to answer as best as I could but with my Spanish I'm pretty sure she now thinks we all live on farms in cities and own all kinds of animals.
When I got home that afternoon my host mum had gone all out with cooking for lunch because it was my host brothers birthday. We had cuy (guinea pig), stuffed peppers and noodles with tomatoes. Cuy is made in the oven and takes quite a while to make. The taste is a little gamey. Think rabbit, but a little less strong. It's quite good, it just has these little bones in it that you have to take out while you're chewing, which can get annoying. Altogether not bad for a guinea pig though. The stuffed pepper was really good too. It was stuffed with rice, peas, carrots, beef, and a whole bunch of spices. Chief among them coriander, since I really like coriander that worked out really well for me. Then it was topped with a kind of dough with lots of egg and cheese in it. I'm pretty sure the cuy came from the shed upstairs. I thought my host father said something like that during breakfast, but at first I thought I had misunderstood him. However, the squeeking is gone from the shed upstairs ...
After lunch I had to run down to the office because we were leaving to have an english competition between the eight schools in the Urubamba region. On the way to the office I had a conversation with one of the PA employees in Spanish! I mean, it wasn't a highly intellectual debate or anything, but it was a conversation. I was pretty proud of myself. So for the competition we had two short slideshows, one about Italy and one about Switzerland. We presented the slideshows and then asked the kids questions about the information in the slideshows. They could get points for every correct answer. Guess what, MY KIDS WON!! (Well at least the kids from my school, but I teach them so they're a little my kids). The difference in level of English is quite noticeable. My school has a very high level of English, and the kids can pronounce the language quite well too, but that is not the case everywhere. Even within the classes at my school there can be quite the difference in proficiency. Some of them I can follow really well and we can almost have conversations in English, but for others I really have to try to understand what they want to say.

So now it's weekend, I worked yesterday, but I haven't been writing very much. I'll update again at the start of next week.

The reason this chapter is called Party week is because it was a party in Cusco on Wednesday, it was my host brothers party on Thursday, so that was a party, and this weekend was halloween and the day of the living, and tomorrow the day of the dead, which are both big parties here.