Day 11

25-10-09

Another long lie in today. Then me and Millie met up with Alina and Eke for a 40 minute work out. We did a bit of stretching, running, sit ups etc. We were using the climbing frame in the park to do pull ups, strecthes etc - I felt like Rocky! After that we took Carla to the market where she got more Al Fondo Hoy Sitio stickers and me and Alina got some wool and knitting needles - lots of scarfs are to be made! I am never ever buying food from that market; they had lots of "fresh" fish but even more flies swarming around them. There´s also a few stalls selling chicken just freshly plucked - they still had the legs on them sticking up in the air. They didn´t even look real. It was like looking at a series of stuffed rubber chicken.

When we got back to the house we had a maaaasssive lunch: for starters we had a Peruvian dish which consisted of raw fish with onions and chilis. Really tastey but reallypainful too. At one point I had to run to get some tissue as I was actually crying! It felt like the skin on mytongue had been singed right off, but I managed to finished thatstarted like a crying trooper with a runny nose! Lovely! For our main we had rice, pork, fish, and different types of tatties as Peru seems to have them in abundancy - as in hundreds of different kinds. They even have purple potatoes which are utterly yum! During our meal our family seemed to be really intrigued by Scotland and kept asking me questions about the food and music. Next time I´m in the internet cafe I´ll try to download some Scottish music and burn it onto disc as I don´t think my impression of bagpipes really did Scottish music justice.

After lunch a few of us went to a school for disabled children, where we spent a few hours. They were all lovelyand a joy to be around. In som cases the language barrier wasn´t reallysuch an issue as some couldn´t communicate verbally very well. We could see that there was a lot of support from the community for this particular school and it has been a great highlight of my week. We were outside playing with the kids in the sand where there were stray dogs hanging about covered in fleas and most likely disease infested. We were also sitting amongst broken glass with which some kids were playing with. One child inparticular placed some broken glass over his eye to pretend it was a monocle. To my concern and shock, the parents/teachers were just sitting around not at all alarmed. We stopped the kids from playing with the glass and cleared away as much as we could, but it seemed they didn´t really understand what the big deal was.