"In the summer time, when the weather is hot"

Hi everyone. I'm sorry tht I've been so rubbish at actually posting things here. So here is a HUGE catch up post. I promise that in the future I'll try harder to keep on top of the posting situation.
Ok here goes...
The last thing that i told you about was our awesome trip to Puno. After are awesome weekend away it was back to teaching for a while. The students all came along really well and the improvement in their English is so noticable for us. We finished on the 18th with an amazing final ceremony complete with little presentations from the individual groups. The advanced gave us perfomances of two fairy tales: The three little pigs and Snow white. They were fantastic and sooo funny. Christine did an excellent job starring as snow white herself. The intermediate group did a play as well, they had written it themselves and they visited Denmark ("Let's get out of here, this place stinks like pigs")
and also Italy. My basic group did a song. It was our own version of "Let it Be". Laerke asd i rewrote it during one of my clinic trips.
and here it is

Let it be -Laerke and Henry edit [Short version]

When I find myself in times of trouble,

Laerke and Henry come to me.

Speaking words in English.Let it be.

And in my hour of darkness,

they are standing right in front of me.

Speaking words in English.

Let it be.

Teaching words in English.

Let it be.

And when the broken-hearted students,

Living in Peru agree.

We will get the answers.

Let it be.

For though they may be parted,

There is still a chance that they will see:

Subject, verb then object.

Let it be.

Yeah, there will be answers.

Let it be.

Teaching words in English.

Let it be.

And when the night is cloudy

And the homework’s quite tricky

Hand it in tomorrow.

Let it be.

I wake up to the sounds of voices,

Practicing vocabulary

Speaking words in English.

Let it be.

He He!! After the students had got to do their bit we then did our thing which was a version of Volare in each of our Native languages. Irene started off with the real version in Italian, then came Ashley Christine and Me with a version that we found courtesy of Dean Martin. The danes took the reigns then and took off with their own translation into Danish. Then we all joined in for the final round; a large ammount of the Gipsy Kings version in Spanish. It went down rather well really.
Finally, after the distribution of certificates to all concerned, us included, we headed off to a restaurant nearby to have lunch all together. It was really lovely. They also all bought us presents. Laerke and I each got a new Machu Pichu journal signed by all of them. It was really sweet.
After lunch we went to a cafe which Irene assured us did coffee the italian way. She wasn't wrong and we certainly got good coffee.

The next thing to mention is the build-up to our holiday in the south. The weekend after finishing our project we went into Cusco to get the bus tickets for our big adventure around the rest of Peru. We made our plans and then bought the tickets to Nazca and then back from Arequipa.



Our week away went something like this...

On the Saturday afternoon, we left our dear Cusco bound for Nazca. The trip was fine and we had some great views the next morning when we woke up. We arrived in Nazca in the middle of the day and getting off the bus was an amazing feeling; it was acctually HOT and not raining. It was amazing. When we got to our hostal we found out that it had a pool. We were sooo happy so the very first thing that we did was to all have a dip. It was really cold but it didn't matter because we needed the relax.

Then after lunch we did some more hard core chilling after having booked a sandboarding trip for the next morning. The sandboarding was amazing!!! I have really never had so much fun in all my life. We slid down the dunes and then we used our sandbuggy to get back up the dunes again. The guide who took us Eduardo was really cool. then after the sandboarding, we went down to see some of the archaelogical sites around the place. The aquaducts were especially cool. It was a really awesome morning. In the afternoon we made great use of the pool to soak off some of the sand that had become engrained into our skin. it was a really nice day.

The next day, we did what everyone comes to Nazca for; we flew over the lines. At the suggestion of guidebooks and the hotel, we only had a small breakfast before leaving. It was a very good idea it turned out. The plane swoops over the lines in quite tight circles so that everyone on the plane can get a good view of the figures. I did take lots of photos but they are not very good and you have to zoom right in to be able to see the figures in most of them.

The next stop along our route was the beach town of Camaná. it was quite a sweet little town and the beach was amazing. we had two sessions on the beach in total and we really enjoyed it because it gave us some time to just relax and read and do nothing very slowly. Sara and I made a sculpture in the sand both days; first time round it was a mermaid who we christened Gertrude von Smith Hansen. The next day we made a shark called Bruce. After making him we went into the sea to wash all the sand off us. (The sea was very cold but we didn't care) and when we came back we found that some inconsiderate person had trampled all over our shark. We were gutted but we had managed to get some photos of him before hte murderous person came along and stamped onhis head.

The final stop along our route around the south coast of Peru was Arequipa, Peru's seond largest city and one of its liveliest. It was really cool to see. We went to see the frozen Inca sacrifices from the mountains at one of the museums; although we couldn't see the famed Juanita because she was having her annual holiday in the lab. Then the next day we spent the whole aftenoon wandering around the amazing Santa Catalina monastery. It was really cool and quite surprising at the same time. These nuns lived in remarkable luxury considering that they were nuns. They each had their own little house theing with two floors a little kitchen and a couple of rooms. some of them even had small gardens. I bought myself a little St Christohper medallion so that he can keep me safe when I am travelling. and that was about it for us and our advetures around Peru. We arrived back in Cusco exhausted and very happy just in time to start our next project, teaching in schools... But that is another story for another post.