1st Week

The first week of classes went really well. My teacher Natalie is fanastic. Definitely feel like I am back in school. I have reading every night and need to do observations of ESL classes in evenings. I taught my first mini-lesson to Peruvian students on Friday. It was a lot of fun. The assignment for the mini-lesson was to teach anything, but English. In other words, teach the class how to do something. So I taught them a basic hip hop dance routine. Hip-Hop music is growing in popularity here, but there are no hip-hop dance classes or anything. It was only a 20 minute lesson. I needed to teach them new vocabulary so I taught them raise the roof, pop the collar, and work it. I put together a very basic dance routine using the hip-hop moves I had learned through my gym classes in Burlingame. The students were really into the dancing and had a great time.

Once Friday was over, I was very excited for the weekend. I went out Friday night with people from my class. We went to see a local Andean rock band play called Pueblo Rebelde. I bought their CD after the show. It is a five man band and one of them plays the traditional Peruvian flute, which sounds beautiful. Then on Saturday I took some Salsa lessons and Sunday I took a trip to a town outside of Cusco called Pisac. I went with some volunteers from my house. Pisac is located on the edge of the Sacred Valley, which is the meandering valley below Manchu Pichu. Rivers run through it and there are Incan ruins there. We went to visit the HUGE outdoor market there. I bought way too many things, including a warm Alpaca sweater. There are llamas just wandering around the town there. I tried to take some pictures with one, but it kept turning toward me and I was afraid it was going to spit on me! Thankfully it didn´t. I did get some awkward pictures with it. :)

Now back to class ahhh!!!