Last post from Peru!

I swear it was a few weeks ago that I wrote the "First post from Peru" blog post, yet here I am just one day from heading back to the US. On Sunday, December 12 at 8:15 pm, I will arrive in Phoenix.

The last couple of weeks have been incredibly busy. The two other teachers left on November 30th, so the other two volunteers and I have been covering all of LLI's classes. And besides that, I had to write exams and review sheets for all of my classes (18 documents in total), create a curriculum for a new class next year, and more. I feel like I've been working from 8 am to 9 or 10 pm each day for the past couple of weeks, but it's completely worth it.

I haven't posted in forever, so I figured I'd write a quick wrap up post before getting home. Once I get home and sort through my photos, I'll put up a photo album on facebook, so this is just going to be written.

As for my weekends, we've spent several in Lima and one outside of the city. The first two days of December, we went to Lunahuana (about two hours outside of Lima) to go whitewater rafting. The trip was really fun, between the actual rafting and the hour or so we took to just swim in the river. Last weekend, we went for a last LLI lunch with Lara in Barranco and played a pretty intense game of Risk at night, with a visit to the art museum and Indian food the next day.

However, Thanksgiving was probably the most fun out of my last few weekends. We decided to have a two part celebration. On Wednesday, we went into Lima and had a great brunch at Cafe Z in Miraflores, then prepared the most amazing tacos (with fresh guacamole!) and strawberry milkshakes for dinner. On Thursday, we went to an all-you-can-eat sushi bar for lunch, went to a women's rights march in downtown Lima organized by a group LLI works with, and then saw RENT the musical in Spanish at night. I ate so much that weekend it was ridiculous, and all of the food was wonderful. And RENT was done really well, between the actors' great voices and the fact that it didn't even sound like it had been translated.

Since then, we've just been wrapping up all of the classes. We did a photo workshop for art class, where we built pinhole cameras out of shoe boxes and developed the photos. And the day after that was the chess tournament, which Hereka and Jhordi won again! And tomorrow we will be giving out attendance prizes for all of our students, then there's a field trip for our 9 best students from all of the classes. We will leave for Lima at about 5 pm for dinner and to see STOMP. We'll get back at about midnight, then my taxi comes about 3 hours later to go to the airport.

And that's the highlights of what's been happening. I'll post here one last time, but it won't be until I get home since I don't have the time to finish this properly right now.

Until my next post from the USA!