Wednesday was the first day of my
first vacation as a PCV. I absolutely love my site, but oh man was I ready for
a trip to the beach :-). Wednesday Ali, Keren and I spent the afternoon working
in a café in Huaraz. The plan was to finish up some writing before we caught
the bus to Trujillo, but truth be told, we were all so excited to get on the
road that we got very little done. Oh well. Wednesday night we took the
overnight bus to Trujillo- 10 hours; 8 of which are spent just crossing the
mountains. It’s really only two hours from Chimbote, the coastal city of
Ancash, to Trujillo. However, the Andes Mountains are in between Huaraz and
Chimbote and it turns out they are kind of tall…..who knew?
We
spent Thursday in Trujillo. Almost all of Peru 17-YD came for the holidays, as
well as a bunch of Peru 15 & 16 who were on the way to their own
Thanksgiving events. We went to the mall, ate a ton of pizza, window shopped
around the city and generally enjoyed hanging out with our training group
again. That night we all went out to a salsa bar and danced the night away.
Friday morning the 17ers started cabbing it over to Huanchaco, the beach town
about 25 minutes out of Trujillo. Ali and I decided to go to an artisan market
in Trujillo before we left so we didn’t get to the beach until that afternoon.
The PC hostel in Huanchaco is amazing; there is a huge patio and the beach is
exactly across the street. After getting ceviche with Ali, I immediately
changed into my swimsuit and began two days of lying on the beach and wandering
around looking at all the little beach shops.
Saturday was our Thanksgiving celebration and
it was an impressive feat if I do say so myself. We got permission to use the
hostel restaurant kitchen, but we could only use it from 3-5; which is their
break between lunch and dinner. So we
prepped a thanksgiving dinner for thirty-five on patio tables; used a camp
stove to boil potatoes; then we cooked everything AND cleaned the kitchen in
two hours. We had pollo a la brasa instead of turkey, three types of mashed
potatoes, stuffing, sweet potato gratin green bean casserole, baked mac and
cheese, sautéed veggies, fruits salads, veggie salad, baked apple crisp and no
bake cookies. It was D-elicious.
I was one of the kitchen crew and have now
earned a totally undeserved reputation as a great cook. I just got lucky :-P My
plan was to cook Mom’s baked Mac and Cheese (it’s the best in the world), but
it’s not always easy to find the same ingredients down here. Basically sharp cheddar cheese is more
expensive than meat here, so Kat (la captain of our Thanksgiving adventure)
just bought tons of different cheeses and told me to make something up. The
final result was a cheddar, mozzarella, edam, cream cheese, queso fresco mixed
with garlic, parmesan cheese madness…..and that madness tasted good :-). I
also made the no bake cookies. You just melt everything together, stir in the
oatmeal and form the cookies. It is SO easy and all of us have the same recipe
because it came out of a PC cook book, but I made them for the host family
party at the end of training and now everyone thinks I’m the only one who can.
They actually bought the ingredients without telling me, because someone else
in the group had asked for the cookies :-P So there we are 30 minutes before
we’re supposed to be out of the kitchen and I’m just throwing things in the
pot. Luckily the recipe is pretty hard to mess up. We didn’t have time to form
all the cookies so we just poured it onto sheet pans and had cookie
cake/pudding because it didn’t have time to set either. Would you believe the pans
were still basically licked cleaned? Guess it just goes to show that rarely
will mixing peanut butter and chocolate go wrong.
All the food
was amazing and there was more than enough for everyone. In the end we started
inviting the other guests at the hostel to eat with us. I know we all missed
our families in the States, but the truth is that this Thanksgiving was spent
with family, a new one.
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