Studying

Louis is a French computer science student, who's on an overseas "work placement" of sorts (the voluntary sort) at Amigos. His main task at Amigos is to build them a new web site, which he's doing using the very cool system Ruby on Rails. He hasn't got much experience with web design or development, and he hasn't been given many resources (he has his own laptop, but no Internet at Amigos!); but he's done a good job so far. He's also a juggler, a fearless drinker, and a great part of the Amigos team.

Delicious traditional Peruvian dish of chopped-up beef or lamb, fried potato chips, tomato, and some spices. Usually served with rice. This afternoon, Juan Carlos held a cooking class at the tiny kitchen at Amigos, and 5 of us cooked up and then ate some lomo saltado. It's really quite a simple dish, and it's very easy to make. I'll have to try cooking it up by myself sometime.

This afternoon, Juan Carlos took a gang of us Amigos students on what he calls a "real city tour" of Cusco. The sites on the tour are all various places where the poorer, less advantaged people of Cusco live, work, and study. Definitely not your average city tour. And after completing it, it became inescapably obvious to me that the tourist-infested city centre — the only area I really knew, up until now — is definitely not the real Cusco.

Juan Carlos is a young guy who really has a right to be proud of himself. He's the "director of activities" — basically the second-in-command — at Amigos. He was one of the first kids who went through the community English-learning program, which the school runs for disadvantaged kids in the local area. Now, he's a fluent English-speaker, he's an important part of the school's administration, and he's a great guy and a friend to everyone around him.

Cusco is a great place to learn Spanish, and it has about 20 schools for the aspiring student to choose from. Today was my first day of classes at the Amigos Spanish school, where I'll be having classes from 8am-12pm, Monday to Friday, for the next four weeks. After today's lessons, I'm really looking forward to the rest.