Mi vida cusqueña

I've now been in Cusco for a little over a week. I feel like I haven't really done anything exciting because its normal day to day stuff that I would do back in Canada. Last week was lots of school in the mornings, home for a giant lunch and then volunteering at the cafe for the afternoon and seeing friends in the evening. Lunch always consists of a soup and then segunda. The soup almost always full of pasta or rice or some grain and its not a small portion. Then with segunda you get a giant pile of rice and generally potatoes and some meat. It's usually overly filling and you don't want dinner. This is typical all vet Peru. They seem to love their rice and potatoes here.

The school was useful and I think I can speak a little more Spanish, but it's still pretty rusty. There's a lot of German and Swiss students at the school right now. There is one guy from France who doesn't really speak English, so we try to communicate in broken French/English/Spanish because I don't remember enough French to properly pen sentences so it usually comes out half in French and half in Spanish with a few English words. It's pretty entertaining and takes a while to get a point across. 

One of the teachers at the school organizes football (soccer) on Thursdays, so a bunch of us went. There was a fair amount of people there that we had a bit more than 5 teams worth, there were a lot of locals too. The field is concrete and they play 6x6. I didn't play the rest couple games as I watched all the non-Peruvians gasping for air after 2 minutes of running. While we were watching some guys on the other court said they needed 2 more people to play 4x4, so an American guy and I went over, I was only girl. Everyone else on the other side was switching out and the teams changed every 10 min or so. But our side, since there were no subs and no one else came over, ended up playing almost straight the through or at least an hour and a half, with about a 5 minute break I took at one point. I have no idea how I managed to run for that long in the altitude. I thought my lungs might burst. I haven't really played soccer in a few years, so it was a lot of fun, especially being able to keep up with the locals, I think they were really surprised (well I was). Man, did my legs hurt the next day! I think I might have stressed my lungs, because now I have a pretty bad cough.

I started working a bit last week at Let's Go Banana's and all day starting yesterday. There's not a ton of people who come in here at the moment, but I hang out all day with William, Camilo and Martin, so it's fun. The street is super narrow and has a lot of cars rushing by. The sidewalks have just enough space for one person to walk. We're trying to figure out ways to get people into the cafe more.