My 'Round the World' travels!: Spanglish es muy bueno!

My first week of Spanish has ended and I've loved it! The classes start at 8.30 in the morning and go on for 4 hours. Obviously I'm in the dopey beginners class with a Belgian friend, due to our failure of our placement exam and only being able to write our names and the date. The classes are so intense and the teacher is so sweet and converses only in Spanish, but slow enough to understand what she's saying.

It's great being on the other side of the desk again and feel like a big kid. Learnt so much of the basics with lots of verbs (which do my head in with all the endings and tenses), the usual masculine and feminine of things and a swear word or two thrown in for good measure. Still don't get it why a table has to be feminine and a marker is masculine - was always rubbish at that in French. Can actually string about one sentence together and am able to ask for things in shops etc. Decided to first test my new Spanish out by asking for a notebook and a blue and red pen..woopeee! The guy in the shop understood or maybe he just understood me pointing at things.

Enjoying it so much that instead of just having one week of Spanish, I've decided to do it for another extra week to help with my volunteering after that. The only problem is at the end of the week when students finish their Spanish at the school, they must stand up in front of everyone/teachers during break on Fridays and make a speech. There must be a way to cheat somehow. There's no way I'm standing up making a tit of myself saying dopey things like: My name is Mary, I'm a teacher, the sun is yellow, can I have a kilo of green and red apples please and it's good to drink alcohol!!.. (Yo soy Mary, yo soy profesora, le sol es amarillo, puedo un kilo de manzanas verde y roja y es bueno tomar alcohol!!)..that was my basic Spanish incase you thought that maybe you'd accidentally fallen onto some Spaniard's blog as it was so fluent (not).

I've now moved from my host family's house into a shared apartment with 3 other students at the Spanish school. The place is gorgeous and I've managed to unpack my rucksack for the first time since I got here - hardly know myself. Nice to have a lovely, clean house with a hot shower, TV, kitchen etc. Spent the last week having freezing showers in my host family's house and sleeping in my sleeping bag as the houses here have no central heating. Effing sleeping bag is crap, so had to put on layers and wear underbody skins one night as it was so cold.

My new apartment/house is about 30 minutes walk from the centre of Cusco city and 20 minutes from the school in a nice area. There's a smallish park beside the house where I'll be using it to run. Can't really run round the streets in Cusco as no-one seems to do it and they all stare. Managed to find a gym the other day - equipment is really old and outdated and are probably casts offs from gyms back home. The cross trainers don't have any power and it's funny watching the locals use it. They get on it, go like the clappers and get off it without breaking a sweat. Managed to also break one of the weights machines and get oil everywhere. They have no running machines either so spent most of my time on a spinning bike which was the only decent thing there. They have spinning lessons, so hoping to do it next week after Spanish classes.

Really enjoying my time here and would love to stay longer and learn more Spanish. Before my trip started I was more looking forward to getting to New Zealand. Now I don't want to leave - fallen in love with South America, especially Peru and the Peruvian people.