Me encanta la vida!

Othmar and I

Another month has disappeared, but boy was it a fun one! Filled with lots of new adventures, new cities, cars, buggies, buses, tubes, planes and boats, beaches, sand dunes, mountains, and hot showers!
  

Paracas

Front of the march! 

Red beach

July began with our nations Independence Day, so naturally we celebrated too! I wore the famous USA flag pants to school, got told Feliz Dia all day with lots of hugs, and we blasted off fireworks in front of our house with friends! Which we bought from some random persons house for 3 soles a bottle rocket, 3 of which exploded before they got airborne, normal.

The 5th of July our director arrived to take us on our midyear retreat in Punta Sal! We were spoiled with enormous amounts of food, hot showers, comfy chairs, and a beautiful beach to hang out at all day! It was a wonderful break, time to get away, reflect, talk as a community, rest, pray, rejuvenate and prepare for the second half of our year!

Sunset in Punta Sal

Chulucanas baile!

The Nazca Tree line!

 Something that makes the Augustinian Volunteers more unique than any other service organization is the extreme emphasis on community life. Not only do we live and eat together, but we pray together, we discuss all of our ups and downs together, kind of helps we are the only other english speakers here, but still we intentionally live in communion! I can tell when either Chantelle or Lacie have had a rough morning from the way they open the door, I know exactly what makes Lacie happy and when she's about to start getting real weird out of boredom, I know exactly how long it will take Chantelle to get ready and how to give her proper were leaving warnings, I know how Chantelle can win over someone's heart in the first five minutes she meets them and Lacie's dry sarcastic humor that doesn't translate can make me laugh so hard I cry. We share everything with each other, including spoons, drinks, clothes, and Chantelle's peruvian boyfriend.
Anyway, midyear gave us the chance to talk, figure things out and come back to Chulucanas excited to make the best of our remaining months here! We also went tubing behind a boat in the ocean, saw whales right off the coast, ate sushi and walked around the big beach town Mancora.

Central pastoral!

Sandboarding

Our next big adventure began with a flight into Lima followed by a 3am bus ride to Paracas! Arriving at 8 am, the city was freezing, on the beach, and pretty deserted, we really had no idea what we got ourselves into! But, like most adventures it turned out awesome! We saw beautiful sand dune mountains, red sand beaches, cliffs, mind blowing rock formations, islands, war ruins, penguins, sea lions, seals, crabs, and birds! We ate super fresh seafood, went sand bugging, sand boarding, on a boat ride and then back on a bus to head to Ica! Ica is a big city famous for its wine and pisco making! Here we got a tour of a winery, lets just say its a lot differently than those in the US, tasted different Piscos, got hair wraps, saw an 8 headed palm tree, a beautiful cathedral, and I got food poisoning! Next day we got up and headed to Nasca on a bus! Nasca is peru's second most famous tourist destination. Famous for the Nasca lines, mystery ancient lines carved into shapes in the dirt stretching several football fields long and wide. Over 20 different figures cover many miles of the land! The best way to see the designs is by airplane. Unfortunately, after waiting around all day to go up in the little plane to see the lines they closed the airport due to poor visability so we had to settle for seeing 2 of them on a tower and head on back to Lima.
We got back to Chulucanas just in time to see the Independence Day week activities! This included two day long marches in the plaza with all the schools here marching the high straight legged duck walk in unison. It's rather militaristic or even Nazish, but either way entertaining. We had an achievement fair at school, the whole city was decorated in red and white and all the discos were Peru themed Saturday night.

Our last exciting adventure in July was our day trip to my new favorite city, Conchaque! Conchaque is up in the mountains, a 2 hour bus ride away (with 4 of us and 2 seats, normal) through windy narrow roads! Our day here was spent chasing after Hector (our tour guide), hiking, looking at waterfalls, eating, drinking coffee, and admiring the beautiful mountains.

Yenny and I in our classy uniforms!