"Somehow you'll escape
all the waiting and staying.
You'll find the bright places
where the Boom Bands are playing."
- Dr. Seuss, Oh, the Places You'll Go!

Wednesday, September 28, 2011

September 16-18: Cowboys and Indians….Sorry, Keren, you can’t take the cat to the bar


           Friday afternoon I headed into Huaraz for the weekend. Our regional meeting was Saturday so we decided to go in the night before. I met Ali for ice cream right when I got into town….healthy lunch, right? After that we mostly just ran errands around town. I looked into getting a hand held voice recorder, but they seem to think a lot of their electronics here in Peru, so I just bought another notebook. As usual we all tried to get on the internet at the hostel at the same time so it stopped working :-P That night we actually went to a brewery just a little ways out of town. Micro-breweries aren’t really the trend in Peru like they are in the states so it was really exciting to find out that we had one nearby. The place is even staffed by gringos :-P I hope, for the owners sake, that it catches on though.
                The next morning was our regional meeting. We all collected up at CA café for breakfast and then hauled ourselves over to the park office for the meeting. We had a local professor come in to talk to us about tutoria in the schools. It’s meant to be a study hall type hour, but unfortunately it’s not generally run very well so it ends up being free hour or not happening at all. The professor was great though and I was reminded about how being excited about your work can get other people excited. Saturday afternoon was spent napping and finding costume stuff for that night’s costume party……cowboys and Indians :-) For some reason I actually packed bandanas with me, so Ali and I went as bandits. Before heading out to the western bar (yeah, we were surprised there was one too) we had a family potluck dinner in the hostel. Yum! We spent the rest of the night dancing and pretending to have fights between the cowboys and Indians. There were even fake guns and bows with suction cup bullets and arrows. Classic! I also might have put on a show by doing the Soulja Boy in the middle of a bar. Coming from the South, where EVERYONE knows that dance, it still amazes me that I can impress people with it :-P The cowboy hat I was wearing at the time might have made it a little bit more amusing too……..
                Sunday was meant to be internet work day, but we woke up to a power outage in Huaraz. Apparently they schedule these from time to time…… we just didn’t get a copy of the schedule :-P So instead of working we decided to make breakfast and hang out on the back porch for a while. Hurray for gas stoves! The power goes out frequently enough around here that people have just learned how to carry on with their daily business. The market was lite by candles and the ATMs were put on generators, so after breakfast we went to do our shopping.  I’m actually pretty sad that I didn’t have my camera with me in the market; all the candles were beautiful. Around mid-afternoon California Café actually turned on their generator just so we could have internet. They PCVs of Ancash are super loyal to this café so they tend to look after us. That night I caught the combi back to site and got myself settled back in. My host dad was home for the day so we all had dinner together. 

No comments:

Post a Comment