Juliet and I are getting seriously confused about these busses. We thought we had it sorted and knew exactly which busses were ours and which to take… But after waiting at the bus stop for half an hour this morning because NONE of our busses drove past (every five minutes a bus pulls up and there’s three different ones that go to Ccorao and NONE of them today were ours) we hailed a taxi. Unfortunately the first taxi refused to drive all the way to Ccorao and the second one we stopped said he’d charge 25pesos, instead of the bus rate of 2pesos…
Thankfully Peruvian people are extremely amicable and always eager to help and so as a random black mini bus with no name drove past, they waved it down telling us it goes to Ccorao… How they know every single bus’ route, even ones like this with no name, I have no idea but we hopped on and arrived at El Jardin the Kindergarten, just in time for circle singing time. There was only 7 niños there when we arrived and the teacher explained that lots of children would be late because of the cold… It was a cold day in the mountains but why that makes the children late I don’t know… Maybe they wait until it warms up. After about half an hour more children showed up and we had about half of the kindergarten in a circle singing the Peruvian national anthem in practice for Independence Day. The head teacher then decided that the children needed to practice marching, and as the rest of the niños showed up, the children were parading around the garden, marching in true Peruvian fashion with straight arms and straight, very high legs.

Juliet and I were actually shocked by how long the teachers made them do this for, it was about an hour and the teachers had a chat while Juliet and I stood as boarders for the children to march around. Soon they lost interest and started fighting and playing and not marching at all and the teachers carried on their chat while Juliet and I tried to wrestle them all apart and get them to march again! Eventually enough was declared, and lesson time began. I spent the lesson stocking instructions on work sheets and although it seems quite tedious, I was using liquid glue and a paint brush and the glue was going everywhere and it was actually quite a challenge! (I felt like a kindergarten pupil myself!) the children spent the beginning of the lesson going over the days of the week and the months of the year, with a few pupils who clearly didn’t know them, got put on the spot having to prove that they did or no breakfast at break time! The rest of the class whispered the answers and tried to help out their friends, and I too, was trying to mouth the days to the poor little boys standing up, speechless! After about half an hour of otra vez! (again!) they eventually moved onto something a lot more exciting for them, all the different types of animals that live in the different areas of Peru! They were fascinated and loved hearing all about them. Eventually it was break time and as Juliet and I sat in the sun, children came and sat between our legs, in a circle around us and three little girls all took it in turns to braid my hair. All of the Peruvian girls always have their hair in beautiful plaits and every day the little girls come into kinder with a different hair style and they were also, for four year olds, so good at braiding hair and did mine over and over again.

After kinder, Juliet and I headed into Cusco for lunch and after our menu del dia in one of our favourite-cheap-restaurants-with-wifi, I facetimed my family which was so lovely. The plan for the rest of the day was to go to the inka museum but Juliet and I decided we’d seen inca ruins for real and the most amazing one ever, Machu Picchu and so a few items in a museum probably wouldn’t impress us. We’d much rather sit in the sunshine in the middle of the absolutely beautiful plaza de armas, right by the huge water fountain and read our books… And that’s exactly what we did. We also did it I disturbed in peace until the man on the bench with us decided to try and have a conversation with us, Juliet and I soon told him (in Spanish) that we didn’t speak Spanish… (Whoops) and he eventually stopped trying and we were left to enjoy the beautiful cusco and our books (we’re both reading the book thief… Absolutely fab book).
Eventually, like it always does in cusco, it suddenly became very cold very quickly and we headed to the house to relax, paint our nails and chill, before heading out to our usual dinner spot, Basilica for our daily vegetable sandwich and blog writing time!