Una noticia breve/A quick update

Sorry everyone for not updating in a while, it has been a crazy week finishing up everything in Cusco and getting read for my solid week of traveling (with no school commitments!). I am actually now in Puno, Peru on the shores of the famous Lake Titicaca and not in Cusco but my time here is a bit more limited as we are doing a lot of traveling and such so I will be giving brief updates as I can and hopefully getting some pictures up as well.

Well, since Monday, school has been fairly hectic. Tuesday I had my presentation on Andean Myths as well as a final paper but everything ended up fine and I finished it all and maintained my sanity.

Wednesday through Friday were basically days I just wanted to wrap everything up. I had five hours of community service to do and I did that and more trying to spend as much time with my buddies at the clinic as possible. The kids are so great and they are really just balls of energy despite their handicaps. I really am going to miss them but I did get to snap a photo of some of my best friends there, Kemchi and Amilcar:

Also during the week I had to get my recordings in gear for my quechua thesis. I ended up with a ton of recordings for that time period (5.5 hours in less than 5 days) but my last appointment for the final 1.5 hours fell through as my participant didn't show up so I think things didn't quite turn out as planned. Our tour guide on this week of traveling, however, does speak quechua and we have a lot of looong bus rides, so I think things will be fine and I should be able to salvage things despite the trouble I seemed to have had.

Friday was also our last night in Cusco but I had a bit of trouble with an ATM. I took out 250 soles from the ATM expecting to be able to have everything in order for when we went on this long trip but when I took out the money I noticed that the 50 sol note wasn't quite right. It turns out I got a fake bill from an ATM so I went through about four separate attempts to get everything straight and I had to work with the police for a lot of it (they were all extreeeemely nice and were advocating for me as if I was peruvian) but at the end of everything, I just ended up having to eat the 50 soles and file the report with the police. Because we had to leave at 6:30 the next morning we couldn't have done anything with the bank so I basically just helped some tourist out in the future who gets the same thing done to them. I did, however, learn a 5 step plan to check if peruvian bills are indeed counterfeit so I will now be using that thoroughly every time I get change.

So, now here I am on Saturday evening in Puno. Puno is on the shores of the famous Lake Titicaca which is the world's highest lake. We enjoyed the night here by going to a restaurant featuring native dances of the area as well as great food at fairly reasonable prices. Afterwards we went to a local "casino" which ended up just being basically a penny slot parlor. We paid 20 soles ($6.67) for 2,000 credits on the machines and we stayed firm with that and just played for a while. I've never really done anything like that at a casino-type atmosphere so it was fun to just play for fun and especially because it was so cheap.

Tomorrow we will be leaving Puno via boat to spend a day and a night on the islands in the lake. We will be living with host families and spending all our time like islanders so I am really looking forward to this! Unfortunately, I won't have any electricity access so I won't be able to update this until Monday night at the earliest. I hope you didn't forget about me and stop reading because it took so long, but don't worry, I won't forget you all! Just out of the goodness of my heart, here are a few photos that I have of the week-long trip so far!