June 30 & July 1: cooking class and cooking out

Thursday morning two of the Spanish classes joined together to have a cooking class at my house. So Kelsey, Faith, Jeff, Matt and I met up with Brice, Sabrina, Kimberly and Britt in Chosica to buy ingredients for Aji de Gallina and brownies. We went shopping at the market instead of a grocery store, so we actually went from stall to stall to buy veggies, meats, nuts, spices and whatever else. It was a fun learning experience. The teachers said we got totally hosed on prices though. Apparently we don’t know how to haggle yet :-P Anyway, cooking was fun and I’m pretty sure aji de gallina is my absolute favorite Peruvian dish I’ve had so far. The recipe is coming home with me, so everyone will get to try ☺ We brought out my itunes while were cooking, so there was also a little bit of singing. And of course by a little bit, I mean a lot.

Friday morning the incomparable Jorge came back for another one of his medical charlas. The topic for this one was STDs - complete with photos. The word horrific comes to mind. Honestly, I applaud Jorge and the other PCMOs for the humorous and relaxed way they present all the different medical chats we receive, but even with the fun delivery sometimes I feel like I can understand how some people become hypochondriacs :-P yikes! Don’t worry; we get training on how to teach health promoter classes to our youth groups. So every Peruvian youth I have the chance to work with is going to find out about everything from the common cold to malaria to AIDS. Just remember kids; cleanliness, bug spray and condoms are cool…..because diseases are not.

After our classes on Friday we all went to Lucia’s house for a cook out. I actually ate a hotdog….i’m not sure that I’ll go so far as to say that I liked it, but it wasn’t bad :-P They made a huge bowl of guac though and you’d think none of us had eaten in days by the way we swarmed it. After dinner we played some games and then sat around inside for ice cream and M&Ms. I also got the chance to lay on the deck chairs in the back yard for a little while. There isn’t really a safe place for me to go to get away from the lights at night, so it was wonderful to lie in the backyard and look at the stars. The buses took us back into town and a few of us hung out in Ricardo Palma for a while before heading home.