I'm back!

This week I got off track as far as this blog, trying to get myself back to 100%.  I stayed at home on Monday and Tuesday, but by Wednesday I was feeling well enough to go teach my morning classes.  I was getting cabin fever and was missing my kids.  I didn't want to miss too much of this week, since it was our last week at Concepcion.

Wednesday after lunch, I was so exhausted that I took a long nap.  I had my last Spanish class before dinner and Ylfa and I also had our weaving class.  After dinner, James, Emil, and Ylfa went to La Rustica for drinks and Fiona, Lauren, and I stayed at home and watched the movie Mammoth.

What I have so far for my weaving.

On Thursday, my younger class was so enthralled with writing out numbers in English that we ended up doing it for the whole class.  Paola, the only girl who had come to class on Friday kept asking for more numbers, so she had me write homework up until 90,000.  The others followed suit and kept asking for more numbers for homework.  I couldn't believe I was turning down requests for more homework.

We ended up teaching adjectives in the older class.  The general energy was low.  Lauren and I were tired and the class seemed tired as well.  We decided to talk about Valentine's Day in the last half hour of class.  It was funny when I put up boyfriend and girlfriend on the board because one of the girls made a very sour face.  The boys were telling us that they weren't going to be in class on Friday because of the closing ceremonies and they told us they would see us next year.  I thought that was very sweet and funny.

After lunch, Lauren and I hurried over to the supermarket to buy notebooks for Tino, Mari, Mabel (another young woman who has been helping out at the house), and Pilar (Tino and Mari's oldest child). We were going to start teaching them all English, but it ended up being mostly me teaching.  We also got some lollipops for the kids to give to them for Valentine's Day and also for the last day of class.  I spent most of the afternoon trying to get the wireless to work on Tino's laptop.  Actually, it was getting Internet Explorer to work on his laptop because the wireless said it was working fine.  I'm thinking it has something to do with Windows Vista.  I was so frustrated by the time everyone got back from the mountain school and they pulled me away to start watching Harry Potter.  After dinner I taught the English class.  Tino and Mari's youngest, Angela, also sat in on the class.  I think she didn't want to be left out.  It was a fun class to teach since they are all very interested, but my mind was racing with English grammar after the class and I had a hard time sleeping.  It wasn't fun to have verb tenses crowding my head in my dreams.

On Friday, Lauren and I had our last day of class at Concepcion.  For the first bit of class, only Jhon was there.  He showed me his homework and we went over each number, saying them aloud.  We started making Valentine's cards and then Marycruz looked into the classroom with one of her friends from Lauren's class.  She had thought, along with most of the class, that there wasn't any class on the closing day.  I told her that there was and we were making Valentine's cards.  She and her friend stayed to make Valentine's Day cards because her friend wanted to do that more than what Lauren was doing in her class.  I figured since it was the last day, it didn't matter what class she was in.  We had a lot of fun writing cards with markers and putting stickers on them.  They made two each.  Jhon made them for his cousin and his friend, Camila.  The other two girls made them for their moms and grandmothers.  I'm going to miss my classes there!

None of the older kids showed up, so Lauren and I ended up walking around Concepcion a bit.  We went into the blue church that is cattycorner to the school we teach at.  We also looked at some bronze war statues around the corner from the church.  There was a band playing around the corner from that and so we peeked around the building and there was a funeral procession.  I thought it was nice that they were playing such happy music to celebrate the person's life rather than the usual gloomy setting at a funeral in the United States.  We looked into some of the stores and I ended up buying two pastries: one was called pañuelo because it was triangular like a handkerchief, and the other was called mil hojas, since it had a lot of fine layers of dough.  Both of them had caramel on them.  They were delicious when I ate them later.

The blue church near the school in Concepcion.

When we went to look for a taxi, our morning taxi driver Tito was in the taxi line and he waved at us.  We decided to wait a bit and take his taxi back to Huancayo.  While we were waiting for the cab to fill up, he showed us a book of pictures from excursions he has gone on around Huancayo.  It turns out he is a tour guide and he's friends with Tino because he takes volunteers on excursions that Tino's health conditions don't permit him to go on anymore.


After lunch we watched more of the Harry Potter movie.  I ended up taking a quick nap and then working on website ideas while the others were at the mountain school.  We had dinner when they got back and then I taught another session of English for Tino, Mabel, Mari, Pilar, and Angela.  After I was done with that, we ended up going out to karaoke.  There were a lot more people there this time.  I sang Como La Flor by myself, then Fiona, James and I sang Summer Lovin' from Grease, and then Fiona and I sang Madonna's La Isla Bonita.  The crowd really liked our performance of Summer Lovin'.  I'm sure it's a novelty to have English-speaking people singing show tunes.  The waiter was talking to me while I was waiting for the bathroom right before we left.  He asked where we were from and I told him.  I also told him we were volunteers teaching English.  He said he wanted to learn English.  


Emil, Ylfa, and Lauren went home, but Mabel took James, Fiona, and I to a discoteca called La Noche.  Fiona predicted that James would be the tallest person in the club and James guessed that there would be six people in the club.  When we went in, they were both right.  We ended up dancing anyway and there was a couple who started talking to us.  The girl was very drunk and the man, who was much older, said that he was from Huntington Beach.  He said it with a pretty thick accent though.  The girl took a liking to James and left her man for a bit to rub up against James.  Mabel and I were laughing because he looked pretty uncomfortable.  After awhile, three guys came into the club and Fiona said, "They've just doubled the number of people in here."  One of the guys asked me to dance.  It was really fun dancing cumbia, reggaeton, and other dances I hadn't danced before with this guy.  His name was Paul.  We all had a lot of fun dancing.  It was pouring rain when we went back outside to get the taxi Mabel had called.  We didn't end up getting to sleep until after 3.