¡Hola mis amigos! Greetings from sunny/rainy/hot/cold/hailing Cusco- city of Incas, thin air and highly changeable weather. We’ve been here for about 4 weeks since our last update now, and thought it was time to give you an insight into our little world of Andean domestic bliss.

We’re currently learning Spanish and volunteering at FairPlay, an NGO that trains local single mothers to be Spanish teachers and then pays them a much fairer wage than they would otherwise get. Our typical rock n’ roll day goes a bit like this: up at 7ish, have showers, make some porridge (it’s cold here, so fruit just ain’t going to cut it), and do some Spanish homework. Leave the house just before 9am to meet our practical teachers at San Pedro market (as well as grammar lessons, we have speaking lessons out and about in town, which is ace), walk and talk a bit of espanolish until 10am, then settle in at school for two hours of grammar (preterite perfect subjunctive anyone? Yummy.) We finish those at noon, make ourselves some lunch, and then get to work in the office for 4 hours or so (piccie right). We’re currently redoing the website, giving some fundraising suggestions and designing leaflets. Hopefully all useful stuff….

After school, we normally head back to our (ace!) little apartment on Calle Ceniza (piccie on the right), make some tea, do some homework and discuss current affairs. Ok then…, maybe when I say “discuss current affairs” what I mean is “watch Friends and Two-and-a-Half Men on the Warner Brothers channel then listen to a podcast”. (Watched over by the friendly face of Jeebus, as in the pic left) We are (or at least Fran is) a teeny bit obsessed with the election campaign (se photo evidence left), which means that we are currently ending many a day listening to Michael White or some Radio 4 election-themed ‘comedy’. This would be utterly tragic behaviour if we were in London. It is perhaps unforgivable given that we’re in Peru. Nevertheless, Thursday is David Dimbleby on BBC World and copious Cerveza Cusquena day. Party on!

Anyway, our apartment is in a gorgeous 18^th century building (lookie left) not far from the main food market, which means that we can go and buy lovely, cheap local fruit and veg to make dinners and lunches. And that is brilliant, because it turns out that every Peruvian meal involves at least two of: potatoes, rice, bread, pasta. If we ate out all the time, we would be gargantuan fatsos by now. As if that wasn’t enough, the apartment comes with a free dog thrown in- she’s called Danka, and once she gets to know you, she might well be the friendliest dog we’ve ever met (see pic right). When we get home, before we can get across the courtyard to our flat, she sprints out from the back and basically does a Fosbury Flop onto her back to present her stomach for scratching. Lovely animal, but no dignity.

As well as learning and working at FairPlay, we’re also deeply tied into the social scene, which revolves around cooking classes every Wednesday evening and volleyball on a Saturday morning (Rhoddy action shot on the left). The cooking “classes” actually involve a few of the teachers cooking a different Peruvian dish each week (e.g. Causa Rellena, a sort of cold potato cake as in the pic), while a bunch of the students sit around chatting, but they are a really nice way to meet the other people on the course. The volleyball is mainly for the benefit of the teachers, as they are in the process of getting two teams together to enter a league, but they like the students to come along and get involved. In our case “getting involved” means being rubbish, but using our cunning secret weapon: height. At least for the first week, this was a potent weapon, but since then we have been joined by an Aussie guy called Tim who stands at 6 foot 4, and he’s on the other team, so we’re less of an asset. Gutting. The final, crucial element of our Cusco social whirl is the Dodgy Discoteca, of which there are copious examples, mostly with Inca-themed names. These usually involve free salsa lessons until about 11pm, during which a large number of Peruvian lotharios attempt to grind with gringas, followed by generally appalling pop/dance mixes until the wee small hours. Maybe we’ve been away from London too long, but after a few Pisco sours this can be most entertaining, esp. when joined by a group of boogie-loving Peruvian women in the form of our teachers (see pics on the left).

As a change from our (admittedly very pleasant) daily routine, a few weekends ago we caught the bus out to Pisac, a small town in the Sacred Valley and stayed overnight on the Saturday, then headed for a tiny village called Huaran on the Sunday, where we had been told that there was a really good walk to do. This turned out to be true- a lovely trail leads from the end of the village up a river valley, through forests filled with hummingbirds and flowers, up to a really remote little settlement called Qancha Qancha. Annoyingly we hadn’t packed any lunch, as we had assumed we’d be able to get at least something in Qancha Qancha, but that turned out to be a bit optimistic as there were virtually no people there and no-one who was able to even sell us a potato. So we turned around and headed back the way we came, and were pretty ravenous by the time we got to Huaran. Luckily we spied a little hostel just before the village and popped our heads in to see if there was any sustenance to be had- it turned out that they normally only did meals when the family was eating, but the incredibly nice woman in the hostel took pity on our sad, hungry gringo faces and agreed to rustle us up something. “Something” turned out to be some absolutely delicious chicken noodle soup, which was a very pleasant surprise. It also slightly softened the blow of the fact that it took us about four hours to get back to Cusco, involving one 20 minute minibus journey with Rhod sitting on Fran’s lap in the front with my head out of the window like a dog because there was no room inside the cab. Sounds fun? Well, it wasn’t. Here's a couple more piccies.

Cusco on the whole has been a great place to live- very beautiful, lovely setting, and Peruvian enough that you can get away from being a tourist if you try (which most people don’t) whilst being gringo-ish enough that you can get a good burger on those occasions when you want one. We even did a pub quiz last week, in the city’s resident British theme pub (not as bad as it sounds). Here’s a few more pics to give you a flavour of the place.

Well, that’s pretty much it for now. We’re in FairPlay for a one more week, then we’re doing a five day trek to Machu Picchu via Mt Salkantay (the trail apparently gets up to 4,800m at one point, so it should be a tester), of which I’m sure we’ll say a bit more later. And then it’s off to Caracas, which is almost certainly going to be quite a change of pace…