Climbing Hills and Eating Raw Fish...

So today is one of our precious few off days, and I wanted to take advantage of it by sleeping in. There was a quincinera last night, but it didn't kick off until midnight, and it was also a b-day party for a 15 year old girl, so I passed on that. Got to bed relatively early and tried to sleep in but that was foiled by the synergy of the chapel bells next door and Mario, my 8 year old brother, banging stuff outside my door. Had breakfast of onions, tuna, and bread for breakfast (not as bad as it sounds), and was going to tidy up my room when my host mother came in and told me to head downstairs and watch her dad make cerviche. Peru has what many consider a national drink and a national dish. The drink is called a pisco sour, it tastes somewhat like a margarita with too much ?????, but is quite delicious. The dish is called cerviche, it's raw fish and shrimp with lemon juice served on a bed of onions with seaweed on top. It's actually pretty good, my only complaint is that the seaweed is supposed to be rinsed thoroughly, I don't think it was, and at times it tasted a lil' too much like the sea. A lil' too quickly after downing a large plate of raw fish, we left on a trip to climb the hill behind our neighborhood. The group consisted of myself, another volunteer named Brad, and the family of the neighboorhood party animal Chi-chi. This is a fella that the PC has warned us about hanging out with and is personally responsible for the current number of volunteers in the barrio being 5, it used to be 12 but there were too many parties and what not at this guys house that the PC was worried about the bad influence. In my opinion he's a friendly guy that likes to have gringo friends, but he was a great tour guide and we hiked for just over an hour to get to the top of the hill near our neighborhood. Within 5 minutes of being on the trail we already found many ceramic pieces that were once part of incan pottery over 1,000 years ago. There were stones stacked to form walls and it was very obvious where rooms once stood. The way of living has somewhat changed since then. At the top of the hill we were able to see into the exclusive club that is situated just above our barrio, where almost every house has a pool and I believe I was able to see 5-6 red clay courts. So I'm gonna have to see if I can find a way to sweet talk my way in there to play....after I find some shoes....racquets...and someone else to play with, should be easy.

Things have been going well since the last post. Got bumped up in my language level to "intermediate medium", which is the minimum level that a trainee must achieve before being allowed to exit training. So that's good and all but tricks on them....I still don't know spanish well, so I'll see what I can scramble and pick up in the 6 weeks of training we have left. We just passed the 5 week mark and the time has been flying by already, I can't believe it is half way through october already.

Oooh....big news I almost forgot about. We've got this thing called Field Based Training (FBT), where we split off into smaller groups and go out into the Field and do some...Training. We'll be shadowing some volunteers at their sites, giving informational sessions, building latrines and stoves. I'm in a group with 3 other trainees and we're heading the Cajamarca, it's a department in the sierra (the region of the country in the Andes). So that should be a great change of pace and a chance to see in person what we're doing all this training for. I promise to have my camera going and should have some pictures that are a bit more exciting than the ones I have up at the moment.

Alright, I'm off to learn me some spanish, hope everyone is doing well back in the states.