Estoy bien!

I realise my last post may have made some of you panic a bit for my state of well-being, so this is just a mini-post to reassure you all that I am perfectly sane and happy and enjoying the new turn my adventure has taken. Huancayo is a lovely town with a vibrant market everyday, that sells alpaca ponchos, live rabbits, dead chickens, counterfeit DVDs and much more. Many of the locals dress in traditional peruvian skirts and hats, and yesterday was the festival of the mircale man so there was fireworks and dancing and artwork in the streets. All of which seems much more interesting and exotic than the life I was living in Lima. I have gone hiking in the surrounding hills and seen the Torre Torre as well. The spanish lessons are going really well and tomorrow Iàm heading to Cusco to hopefully see Macchu Pichu and maybe meet up with a girl I made friends with in Lima too.

my ringworm is nearly cured, my jaw has stayed firmly where it is supposed to, I've gotten over my anger at the landlady and the masturbating tramp has not given me any mental scars - more an interesting travelling anecdote with which to entertain people. So all is well

:D

xx

Ok, don´t be mad....

... but I may have run away from Lima.

It was quite a bad week really. Monday - I dislocated my jaw, Tuesday - realised I have ringworm, Friday - some tramp masturbated next to me in the street at 2am in the morning (eeeww!), and THEN my landlady emailed me on Sunday (3 days before I was due to move in) to say that I couldn´t have the flat because her sister was homeless and needed somewhere to live. Even though I´d signed a contract and paid a deposit##. Bitch! That was the last straw. I contemplated returning to the hellish routine of circling newspaper ads and scouring Lima for a cheap but livable flat, and just couldn´t face it. I realised that Peru probably had much prettier places than Lima, yet here I was languishing in high-rise, pollution ridden, ridiculously cloudy hell.
So, it just so happened that a guy I vaguely knew in the hostel was catching a bus to Huancayo to take a week´s Spanish lessons here. He hadn´t booked a ticket or anything, was just going to turn up and hope for the best. I was still very angry at the landlady, which is not the best emotion for rational decision making, but there you go, I ran around packing my bags and found myself in Huancayo at 6am Monday.
To cut a long story short, I´m no longer working in Peru, I am now travelling in Peru. Which is really just a return to the original plan, via a long stay in Lima in which I realised that I don´t want to work in Lima for a year. If I´m going to stay somewhere for a year (which I still intend to do after Christmas) then I should find somewhere beautiful, I think.
So at the moment I´m in Huancayo, on Friday I´m hading to Cusco where I´ll get the train to Machu Piccu (I would love to hike the trail but you have to book it months in advance), then to Puno where I´ll see Lake Titicaca, then maybe in the Bolivian jungle or back to the Northern coast of Peru. I haven´t decided yet, but I´m having lots of fun thinking about it!

## Don´t worry - I got my deposit back

Also, yes, I did sort of run away from my job and leave them in the lurch with many lessons and no teacher. And yes, I did only alert my boss to this fact on Monday afternoon, when he had about 4 hours to sort it out. Umm.... I am quite ashamed about this, as it was irresponsible, selfish and cowardly. But in many ways, they were hoisted on their own petard - I mean, the reason I could leave without saying anything is because I don´t have a contract. The reason I don´t have a contract is because they can´t be bothered to sort out work visas so a lot of teachers get paid in cash and work illegally. So it´s partially their own blaggardly fault for trying to swindle the Peruvian government.

And I was in an emotionally precarious state, due to the reasons stated at the beginning. So don´t think too badly of me!!

xoxo

Lima part 2 - ´Nah nah nahnah naaah, everything´s great!´

Ok, the purpose of this post is a summary of everything I´ve done, for those too lazy to read lots (naming no names... Joe Sandys). And also to make you all jealous (except maybe James and Taylor, who are having adventures of their own).

Ahem, so....

The Summary of Cool Things Josephine has Done in Lima

Gone on a mini road trip to a beach with five Peruvian and three American surfer guys. A classic gap-year aesthetic, I´m sure you´ll agree, of tanned and muscular surfers piled into a rickety old VW van, stuffed in any ol´ how amongst the wetsuits and boards. Except also with a pale, redheaded English girl sat in the corner.
Ok, so it wasn´t sunny, but I still went swimming in the Pacific! It was really fun, and next weekend I hope to try surfing.

Gotten completely lost whilst trying to find an art gallery, and stubbornly refused to get a taxi even though I was by myself and wandering through a definitely dodgy area of the city, where EVERYONE was staring at me and it was really quite scary and the sun was setting and I didn´t want to be out when it was still dark. This was very foolish, but then I happened upon a beautiful park full of fountains, had a nice sit down and eventually got a taxi back to the hostel.

Eaten ceviche with chicha and salted maize. This is a traditional Peruvian dish of raw fish in lime juice, eaten with salted maize and also a sweet drink made from maize (chicha). It was very traditional and delicious, and I ate it with Sosina in Barranco, so it was in a beautiful setting too.

Gone on many long walks around Lima, looking for apartments with Neto or Beto. These walks invariably fail to find the apartment, but we end up doing something nice instead like meeting up with Beto´s friends or drinking exotic tea in a tea-bar (I´m very taken with the idea of a tea-bar, are there any in England? Someone should open one)

Drunk a lot of free beer, drunkenly told the man who owns the hostel that his spanish accent makes him sound sleazy (but he didn´t really understand the meaning of sleazy so I managed to insult him and get away with it, ahahaha), then gone out dancing ´til 4 in the morning. Apparently it was a lesbian bar, but I must have been quite drunk because I didnt notice.

Had a conversation all in spanish with a taxi driver! Ok, so maybe that´s not very exciting, but I was very proud. There was no English at all! Some miming, but no English.

Gone back to the pretty fountain park with some Australian girls, because at night it´s all lit up and playing classical music and even prettier. We got quite hyper, ran around in the fountains and then went to Bembos (Peruvian McDonalds type place) for lots of junk food and ice cream. Yum!

Chatted and had a beer with people in the hostel on the roof, looking out across the city and feeling very lucky to be in Lima. Then we went dancing ´til the early hours of the morning again.

I´ve had a meeting with my boss and organised my first teaching class, possibly hopefully found an apartment to rent and bought some shoes. That´s a summary of the boring necessary stuff.

And there have been a few times where I had to have a comforting cup of tea and some biscuits, curled up on the sofa and felt absolutely terrified, homesick and lonely. I really really miss you all. But I´m also having an exciting and fun adventure in Peru, and I think occassional lonely moments are inevitable. At least that´s what I tell myself. And then I give myself a little peptalk, congratulate myself for being so brave and actually coming out here, remind myself that it´s going well, and feel a little better. And of course the tea and biscuits help too.

###

Lima part 1- Óh dear, what have I gotten myself into?´

To pick up where I left off in my last post - for a 36 hour bus journey, it was actually quite nice. The bus was only half full so each person had two seats to stretch out on, we stopped every 6 hours or so for a meal and to stretch our legs, and I started reading For Whom the Bell Tolls. Not too bad, all things considered. I was a bit worried at the border crossing, because I´d taken my Twinings English Breakfast teabags out of the cardboard box and put them in a carrier bag to make them easier to pack. And I thought - what if they think they´re drugs?! Oh god, I´m going to be one of those girls that you read about, stuck in a foreign jail for years, wasting away, filth be-smeared and singing rubbish karaoke ala Bridget Jones. Luckily that didn´t happen. The most eventful thing that happened at the border was two lads trying to chat me up and then stealing my pen... and it was my favourite pen too. How very dare they.
The high point of the journey was our first glimpse of the ocean! All the South Americans on the bus started yelling and shouting, and I don´t know what they were saying because my Spanish is still appalling, but I like to think it was Óh my god, look, it´s the bloody ocean!´because that is what I was thinking.

As we finally drove into Lima, I started to panic a bit. It looked horrible; all grey buildings, grey sky and dirty shacks. ´This is where I´m going to live for months? Why did I do this to myself? How quickly can I leave and go somewhere clean?´ Those are some of the thoughts I was having. It was 3pm when we arrived. Jo and I unfolded ourselves, gathered up various possessions that had become spread around the bus and stood on a dirty Liman pavement, feeling quite at a loss.
As all travellers will know, the best thing to do when at a loss is the head for the nearest internet cafe. So that is what we did. And there is something about the internet that is warmly reassuring - you have facebook, BBC news, blogs of friends, emails from family etc. and so you just don´t feel so lost anymore.
Jo and I gathered our thoughts, girded our loins, and booked into a hostel - The Flying Dog Hostel, well recommended by guidebooks, cousin Claire and various others. And now I shall recommend it to you, although if any of you come to Lima you wont need a hostel because you can stay with me! But yes, it is a lovely place full of lovely people who have been very nice and welcoming. Although I suppose that´s their job. In which case, they´re very good at their job.
The view from the hostel balcony^^

The next few days, we ambled around Lima and realised that in fact parts of it are really really pretty and nice. So I stopped panicking about how I was going to cope whilst living here. We went to Barranco, a beachy suburb, and paddled in the ocean (and got sunburnt). I wrote a LOT of postcards. We saw some Inca ruin-y type things (see facebook photo album), and some posh palace-y architecure-y type things (ditto). Most interestingly, I signed up to a website called Couchsurfing.org. On couch-surfing.org, a lot of very kind-hearted and brave people offer their spare-rooms/couches for travellers to sleep in. Also, some people don´t have space for someone to stay, but are very happy to meet up for a coffee/tea/drink and a chat, and give advice and guidance and friendship. Right, I thought. I need friends. I am going to be in Lima for a year, and I can´t spend a year making friends only with people in the hostel, who promptly leave as soon as you get to know them. So I emailed about 10 different people explaining who I was, why I was here, and would they like to meet up for coffee and a chat.
Yes yes yes, it is a bit dodgy meeting people off the internet. But I´m not stupid; I only messaged girls, we met in public places and I told the guys at the hostel where I was headed and what time I thought I´d be back. So it was fine. And I met Sosina, who is really friendly and has offered to teach me how to cook Peruvian dishes (yay!) and her parents don´t even speak Spanish as a first language, they speak Quechan, which is the pre-spanish invasion language. So Sosina is a proper proper Peruvian, which I think is very cool and exciting. But Sosina speaks English very well, which is good, and maybe when I get spanish lessons I can practice with her. And I met Nohelia, who is also Peruvian and also really friendly, and she has been very helpful in my apartment-hunting endeavors. Although her aunt did give me egg soup for lunch, and I ate it and everything but good grief it was disgusting. Egg soup? Who ever heard of such a thing.

I have also made lots of friends with people in the hostel, although ´friends´might be pushing it because many of them have left now, never to be heard from again probably. But such is travelling, and I enjoyed meeting Jennifer (US); Tina and Naomi (Australian); Neve and Emma and the other I´ve forgotten the name of (Irish); Hannie (dutch); Thea and Arti (Norwegian); that Columbian boy I also can´t remember the name of; Joel (also columbian); and Steve, Prescott, Randy and Mather (US - but you can tell that just from their names. Randy?! Mather?! Ahahaha, ridiculously American. Of course they think I´m ridiculously English as well. Which is true. But they say ´dude´and áwesome´and stuff. It´s very funny.)... Umm, yes, well anyway, I enjoyed meeting them all however briefly. (See, Joe Sandys, I AM being friendly, I´m not hiding away under my covers with a book... OK, so I may have done that the first few nights. But now I´m well into the swing of things).
Slightly less temporarily, I´ve also gotten to know the people who work at the hostel, such as Beto (short for Alberto) who has been ridiculously helpful in my apartment-hunt. Because I don´t speak Spanish, he rings up all the landlords etc. for me to organise viewings, and then comes with me to the viewings so I don´t get lost. And Neto (short for Nelson) who I went for a walk with and ended up in this really cool tea-bar that did all sorts of different teas. And Harry, who is mad and takes groups of people out dancing every night, hurrah, I love dancing! Salsa, anyone?

Right, umm, oh dear, this has been a rather long post. My next one will be short and snappy, I promise.

Oh, and I have my first class tomorrow evening. I´m terrified, I´ve forgotten how to teach! But the place where I´m working seems really good, very professional and organised. Which is reassuring.

And here is another photo, because otherwise this post will be hideously text-heavy.
That´s me, that is ^^
Bye bye for now

Oh my, gosh, where to begin?

Ok, well, quite a lot has happened so forgive me if I jump all over the place chronologically and don´t give very detailed accounts. Oh, umm, I´m all of a fluster in my internet cafe, oh dear...

Right, ok, I´ll set the scene for you. At this precise moment (12.13pm in Lima, 6.13pm in England) I am sat in a fairly clinical internet cafe (I say cafe, but there´s no tea or coffe for sale!) looking at cloudy Lima sky and looking absurdly red because I got sunburnt yesterday. Humph. How annoying. Also, I guess Peruvians aren´t used to seeing sunburnt people because I keep getting funny looks. Dear oh dear, before I got sunburnt I kept getting whistled at and commented on in the streets. It was awesomely flattering (although yes, I do realise they probably do that to all gringo girls.... still enjoyable though...).
I´ve just spent the last two hours doing internet-ish errands, researching possible flat-shares, uploading photos, messaging people on facebook, helping Kate decide what modules to choose... So I feel a bit dazed and over-technologied. But for you, dear loved ones, for you, I shall struggle on and write this blog!!

I arrived in Quito on Tuesday. I stayed with Tory and Nick, and an australian couch surfer called Jo. On Wednesday Jo and I bathed in hot springs in a place called Papallacto. It was a really beautiful place; because it was in the mountains your head and shoulders were pleasantly cool and mist-enshrouded, but the rest of you was immersed in warm water. And of course the view was amazing.

On Thursday, Nick took me around Quito, and we ended up at his friend Andrew´s flat. Andrew´s flat has a balcony that looks over the whole of the city, so we stayed up there drinking beer, singing songs and generally having a lovely time. I felt really happy, and that I´d totally landed on my feet and was very lucky to be relaxing with nice guys in an amazing place, and generally pretty smug with myself for leaving all you suckers behind in England. Yes, alright, I´d had some beer and whisky which may have added to the warm, all-over glow of contentment.
Look, there they are ^^^
Then we decided to go out dancing. We went to a nice club called Bungalow, which does a mix of salsa and american pop. I danced madly like I usually do when the pop was on and Andrew attempted to salsa with me when the more latina music was played.
Friday was spent mostly being hungover and eventually buying a bus ticket to Lima. I can´t remember what happened on Saturday, I did write it down but don´t have my diary on me. Bugger.
On Sunday Tory took Jo and me to a market in a town about an hour´s bus ride away from the house. This was the usual bright clash of fruit and cheaply made clothes, clay trinkets and pots and people shouting at you. I bought a watermelon. However, we spent most of our time in the animal section ($2 ducklings and live chickens held in canvas sacks!) because Tory is animal mad. She already has Blackie, Phoebe, Mrs Pugley, Herman Penelope and four unnamed geese. We left the market with a ginger tom kitten and the cutest sharpei-boxer mix puppy. The reason we got the puppy was because it´s paw was hideously infected, and the owners had just left it in a box on the side of the market. We rescued her and took her straight to the vet!
Isn´t she GORGEOUS!!^^^
On Monday, Jo and I went for a walk along a nearby canyon to tire ourselves out before the mammoth coach journey. It was impressive, and quite interesting because there was some sort of tunnel dug into the otherside that we couldn´t figure out a purpose for. Unfortunately it wasn´t beautiful, because forest fires have ravaged the plantlife. It was mostly scarred and brooding, as perhaps all canyons should be. And then we had a farewell dinner, gave Nick and Tory some thank you presents, cuddled the injured puppy one last time and got in a taxi at midnight to the bus station. And I will recount the fable of the epic journey in a new blog, because this one is quite long enough and I don´t wish to over-tax your little brains.

Until next time,
xoxo, gossip girl...... (just a little pop-culture reference for anyone who watches trashy US tv. You know who you are!)

Ps. here is a photo of Tory and Nick, with Mrs Pugley and unnamed Sharp-pei boxer rescue puppy.


See, I told you they were mad ^^^

Brief update from a Mariscal Internet cafe

Dear beloved friends and relatives,

I´m going to write a proper entry when I get to Lima but for now I just thought I´d let you know that everything is going swimmingly. I´m having a lovely time doing lovely things, but it´s taken me longer than anticipated to sort out going to Peru. This is mainly because the people I´m staying with have made me feel very welcome and keep saying ´ohh, you don´t have to go to Peru so soon, they´re very relaxed in Latin America, it doesn´t matter if you turn up late...´
The people I´m staying with, by the way, are called Nick and Tory. They´re a brother and sister who my cousin knew when she lived in Quito and they are completely mad. They have 3 dogs, a cat and 4 geese, and a big house in Tumbaco (a valley town 12km from Quito centre). And they are very lovely. Though a bit mad.

However, I have now officially booked my ticket and will arrive in Lima on Wednesday afternoon. The bus journey is direct, so I don´t have to worry about changing and getting confused... BUT it is 36 hours long. THIRTY SIX. Cor blimey.
But never fear, for I have bought two books to read, I have my spanish textbook to learn from, and there´s an australian couch surfer called Jo who is staying with Nick and Tory as well and she is coming on the same bus. So we will learn spanish together and tell our life stories and see Ecuador pass us by through a bus window.

More details when I get to Peru

Farewell ´til then

Josephine

ps. something about the water in Ecuador has made my hair go into perfect curls! This makes me very happy, as it was the bane of my life in England.