I have so much to write ... my diary is slowly filling up and there's just not enough time to type everything out. So this'll be a long one. So on Friday last week I had my first day of teaching. I got to know the teacher I'm working with. She's really cool. She is one hell of a woman. She has thyroid cancer and started radiation therapy three years ago. After three years her immune system got too weak and she was not allowed to continue with the therapy. In May this year the doctors gave her two months to live. She's still teaching now. The kids love her. She jokes with them, but at the same time sees everything that is going on in the classroom and manages to teach them something without them being the wiser. She's also really open to having me be creative and coming up with ways to teach the kids with games and stuff.

After class I packed up my things and made my way to Cusco for the weekend, to hang out with the other volunteers. I was staying in a hostel called the Wild Rover, which is an Irish bar and hostel in one. It is really cool. Except for one thing, they messed up a little and gave my bed away. So when someone came up to dump their stuff I was in their bed XD. We fixed it though and I got to keep my bed, but that must have been a funny experience for the person who was supposed to get my bed, come upstairs to find someone in your bed.
In Cusco you can clearly see how the Spaniards built their constructions on top of the Inca buildings. The bottom floor of most buildings in the main square are clearly Inca (they don't have any mortar), while the top floors are clearly Spanish. Cusco is beautiful, especially at night, when you look up from the Plaza del Armas and you see all the lights going up to mountain. It has a ton of small squares, connected to each other by little streets full of tiny shops. I swear everyone is a small business owner here. There are hunderds of little grocery shops, hundreds of little farmacies, a bunch of laundry places, as well as restaurants and cafes. Big stores virtually don't exist anywhere. At least not in Urubamba, but also very little in Cusco.

On Sunday we went to Pisac, one of the little towns here in the Sacred Valley. Pisac has the most adorable little market full of things made from alpaca wool. I bought a sweater, a scarf, and a bag. They're all so soft, and the sweater is not scratchy and so nice and warm. With this sweater I am no longer scared of Dutch winters. We had lunch on the rooftop of a cute little cafe in Pisac, the walls were painted bright purple and green and yellow. When I first got here I thought everything was generally a shade of reddish brown. The longer I'm here though, the more colour I'm starting to see, and not just in the houses. The more you look at the mountains the more shades of green, yellow, brown, and red you can find. In Pisac there are old Inca ruins, but we did not go up to see them. You had to buy a combination ticket for some other ruins as well and we didn't have time to go see those too. I'll have plenty of time during a weekend at some point to go up and see them.

I did my laundry on Monday, on the roof, in a stone basin, by hand. I felt pretty badass when I was done, though I'm pretty sure I just moved the dirt around a little bit. Then I managed to forget that my laundry was drying up there when I went to sleep. Then it rained all night ... So on Tuesday every inch of my room was covered in slowly drying clothes. Also I found the kittens. WE HAVE KITTENS. They live upstairs and they're adorable, if a little dirty. I didn't realise, but we own quite a lot of animals. Nothing on the ground floor, that is where the humans, the flies, and the shop are. On the first floor we have birds, parakeets I think. This is also where my room is, and the bathroom. Upstairs on the second floor are the kittens (and their mother) and more bedrooms for the rest of the family. Then there is the roof, where we have two dogs, and a shed. I heard some squeeking coming from there. There might be mice or chickens or something living there as well.

When it rains here there rivulets of muddy brown water running down from the hill, and the more it rains, the more those rivulets become a torrent of water. Sometimes there is no sidewalk, and you just have to find a way to jump over or around the torrent of water coming down the mountain.

On Tuesday I taught third grade classes all day. The kids in my school are great kids. They're very well behaved for teenagers. They are disciplined and well-mannered. They funny thing I noticed today was that their level of English when making their own sentences doesn't really seem to be going up. I got mostly the same story from everyone in all the classes I've taught until now. We did this little exercise where I introduced myself to them in English, and they introduced themselves to me in English as well. I suppose that's just the way secondary school is though. You learn something because your teacher tells you too and because you'll be tested, and then as soon as your test is over you forget all about it again. They only have English class for an hour and a half a week, which is not very much when you want to learn a new language (as I noticed when trying to learn Spanish). My teacher Rosie has recently gotten a set of flash cards with verbs on them. They show a little drawing of a person performing an action. She loves them and uses them as much as she possibly can. I'm designing a memory game around them. We will assign numbers to the back of the cards, and then have another set of cards with sentences written on them and then they have to match the verb to the sentence.

I also tried Inca Kola for the first time on Tuesday. Sorry Cris, you can disown me now, but I wasn't that impressed. It was sort of like Irn Bru, but less strong in the chemical taste of bubblegum.

So now you're caught up to where I left off on Tuesday. Everything I wrote today I'll hopefully be able to upload tomorrow.