Cochabamba Week Two

The theme in the Guardería this week is family... which is quite hard for the kids to do, seeing as some of them don't have mums or dads, or if they do, they have trouble remembering them. On Monday they had to draw all their family (the hardest task of the week), Tuesday do a family tree and Wednesday a flower of family with what family means to them. Thursday was my day to think up a task so we drew houses and made a collage of a casita, and then they drew who they lived with at the orphanage. On Friday, Laura (another volunteer) thought up an idea for a mobile, so we made a 'family is...' mobile with houses hanging down saying 'love' and 'security' and things like that. Tomorrow we start 'mama' week in preparation for mothers day so any ideas for things we could do would be great!

Monday night I decided to be cultured so Luke, Emmy and I all went out to a short film festival. What a load of bull. The films were awful! The best one was about a man who had a relationship with a corpse (only to shove her back in her grave when she mentioned having kids) so you can imagine how bad the others were! But look on the brightside... I understood all the spanish in the films so my listening must be improving loads!

Wednesday night we went to another volunteers leaving do at a place called cafe fusion. It serves Italian food and is really good. People were surpirsed to see me though, as before then I'd been known as 'the english girl who never comes out'. Now people know my name. SHOCKER!

The Projects abroad social was on Thursday night so we had a barbeque and I met a load of other volunteers. However, I was a bit late as a bridge is closed so my bus had to go a different way. After driving along for 20 minutes and thinking 'this doesn't look right but hopefully it'll end up close to the office soon' I asked the driver if we were close. He says 'yeh of course, it's 2 blocks that way'. About 30 blocks later I arrive at the BBQ. At least all that walking burnt off the calories of the giant steak I had!

This weekend has been great. Friday night we went to Casablanca, a bar with quotes and misquotes from the film on the walls which serves food too. Saturday we went to an arcological museum which had a tour in english from the sweetest guy who kept thanking us for coming so that he could practise his english on us. We went to Casablanca again for lunch where I had the biggest pizza of my life (not joking, I had to leave a third and you all know how much I can eat) and then went to La Cancha where I got a typical Bolivian bag to shove all my junk in. My host mum also announced that she's preggers so Valentina is going to get a little brother or sister! Sunday we went to the cristo again to go up inside on the most unsafe and steep steps I think I've ever seen (we're standing on them in the photo which expains the slight ahhhh look). We then got a taxi back to the centre that was making a quite unsettling rattling noise in the boot. He pulled over halfway to this food stall, pulled out a gigantic lump of ice and shoved it on a chair. Remind me NEVER to get anything with ice from a street stall. Enough people here have parasites (one person has four) and I don't really fancy getting one too!

Week over and I'm knackered! Hopefully an early night tonight before starting another crazy week :) Photos on here are for the Grandparents to show them what the city is like. It's very sunken with mountains surrounding it (where one girl decided to walk, get lost and had to sleep on the mountain... sound familiar mummy?) and these photos are what can be seen from the living room and the cristo.

A x