School, stalkers and stealing

We´ve finally sorted out our fight and our official return date is 2nd June! It´s very strange to think we´ll be home in three months! There are so many things we´re going to miss about being here, but also lots we´re looking forward to...like food!

We´ve properley settled into life in Chiclayo now and we´ve nearly finished our second cycle (term) at the school. The teaching has been great so far, but, like any job, it can be frustrating at times. It can also be very entertaining as well, especially when you receive strange letters from your students (Candice), your students point blank refuse to work and when there are some pronumciation issues (¨I shat on my computer¨ instead on ´I chat´).

In other news, I have aquired an admirer/stalker who has been sending flowers and notes for the past few weeks. Apparently he lives across the road from our apartment but I´m yet to rfind out who it is. The flowers are a welcome addition to the apartment though. The only bad thing is the slightly worrying tone of some of the notes - I NEED your friendship!

We were also the victims of a mugging In January. A couple of guys followed us home o a motorbike and snatched Candice´s bag as we were going in the door to our apartment. Typically, the bag had Candice´s last S/50 and our house keys. It was a pretty horrible experience but it all happened so fast and it could have been much worse. Apparently, muggings are pretty common here and we´ve actually seen another three happen in the last week or so. The problem is that everyone in Chiclayo get paid on the same two days in the month and they always get paid in cash. So, on those days the motorcycle theives spend their evening robbing people of their wages. Nice. In my opinion, they should ban motorbikes after 6pm in the evening. They did this in Cartagena and it seemed to work. In fact, everyone thing Colombia is a dangerous place but, having lived both in Colombia and in Peru I´d say tha there are certainly more dubious characters in Peru. But, it´s still safe (don´t worry mum).

Apart from teaching, we spend our days going to the beach, sunbathing on our roof terrace and enjoying English films at the cinema at the mall. We´ve also joined a gym that has machines from the 70´s. Nothing is electric. You have to actually push the belt round on the running machine! There´s also no air conditioning which makes for a very beefy and very funny workout session. Every time we go the people in there are constantly telling us what to do and how to do it. Either they are trying to practice their English or they think we don´t have gyms in England.

We have a little break from school on Sunday to Wednesday so candice and I are heading up to the highlands to a city called Cajamarca. They are having a festival at the moment which involves lots of water throwing, dancing and drinking. Cajamarca is also said to have the best cheese and the best ice cream shop in Peru. Thier local speciality is cow brains - if I´m feeling brave I might try it and let you know what it´s like. The only problem with this trip is that hostels are said to book up weeks in advance during the festival and we haven´t booked anywhere yet. In the LP it says hundreds of people end up sleeping in the main square - I hope we don´t have to!

Christmas fun and back to reality

It been ages...sorry about that.

Candice and I headed six hours up the coast of Peru to a little surfer town called Mancora. We'd been there before on our first trip through Peru so we knew what to expect. The beach there is lovely and we stayed in a really nice hostel called Loki which had a swimming pool. However, because the hostel had a swimming pool and a bar, we ended up only going to the beach twice which was a bit lazy of us. But, after all the stress of moving countries we just wanted to sunbathe, chill out and drink cocktails. We also met some really cool people people which made the evenings fun.

On Christmas Day we treated ourselves to a speacial seafood lunch and an ice cold beer in a restaurant overlooking the beach. Afterwards, we thought we'd walk back along the beach to our hostel. When we were almost there we tohught we'd take a little nap on the sand before heading to the party at the hostel. Unfortunatly for us, just as we started to nod off, a huge wave came and soaked us both - and everything in our bags! Candice's phone was the only casualty, but it took me three days to get the sand out of my hair. It was funny though.

The only bad thing about Loki was that for the first few nights we had to share a room with two dirty Australian boys who stank, stole Candice's water and half a pineapple and seemed to feel the need to have very loud conversations when they came in at 6am. God, that makes me seem really old...but it was very annoying. Luckily they left before New Year.

On New Years Eve Candice came down with a terrible bout of food poisoning and spent most of the day throwing up and....going to the toilet. But she pulled herself together and still came out to the yelow and gold party at the hostel. Did you know in Peru it's traditional to wear yellow underwear on for New Year!?

We came back to Chiclayo on the bus journey from hell on the 2nd. Not only did it seem like the driver was trying to kill us (as usual) but the people in front of us had their chairs so far back that our knees were bruised for days - idiots!

We've now started teaching at the school and after a few teething problems - which you probably all know about - things seem to be going well. But, if we've learnt one thing from living in South America, it's that nothing is ever straight forward. So, we'll have our guard up until we have the money in our pockets.

I'll put some pictures up on Facebook soon. xxx