Saturday was fun! A whole lot more fun than I expected it to be at least. I had to wake up early (Friday is usually my sleep-in day) and head over to the stadium to prepare the track for tomorrow's meet. It's a dirt track so we had to mark the lanes with "yeso" (powdered chalk-ish stuff). It took forever! For about half the time I had the help of two other awesome volunteers and Julio, one of the ProPeru staffers. We messed around a bit and it was fun to joke around with the kids. I acted like I was gonna throw chalk at one of them and he replied with something along the lines of "then I'd look like you" (because he'd be white...haha). It sounded better in spanish. Lol.

The last thing we had to do Friday was dig up all the grass around the shotput/discus pit. We did a bit but the ground was really hard and Lucillo and Hector decided they had a better idea. They started lighting it on fire! It spread pretty quick becuase it was mostly dead, dry grass, and then we got to stomp it out. My flip-flops are pretty black. It was fun though, nothing we'd really do in the states.

I feel like I've really been building some relationships these past 2 weeks, even though it's been a lot of fun and games. This week I've really felt pretty good about what I'm doing here. Like I'm getting somewhere with it all. And I felt pretty accomplished today when we were done with the track on Friday. It looked good. And it is our track. And our first meet there.

The meet on Saturday was pretty cool. I got to do a bunch of coaching before, during, and after the races and it felt good. I hung out with the girls quite a bit and I loved it. Our kids did pretty well. =] I left at "refreshment time" around 1for lunch and returned a little after 2 to find the place completely cleared out! I guess they actually ended at 1 and decided to continue on Sunday.

I unfortunately missed the end of the track meet on Sunday because we had a trip to some small "pueblo" with ProPeru. I got to know some of the new volunteers a bit better though which was pretty cool.

After returning Sunday, mid-day, a few of us "oldies" decided to go to Cusco for dinner. We hit up this little bar where I enjoyed an amazing smoothie and we sat around and talked for awhile. We totally splurged on dinner at this delicious restaurant called Incan Grill. It was definitely a good decision. I tried Alpaca (in the llama family) and loved it and was convinced to spend even more money on one of the best desserts I think I've ever had. It was really cool just to be there.

This week's been good. Monday we had 3 kids show up for morning practice and afternoon practice was cancelled. Probably the worst thing you can do after a meet, but the kids here need to spend more time with their families, working and stuff. I was told that the meet took up a lot of time and they kinda had to make it up in their homes. Yesterday, Josh and I got to ran practice ourselves. I really wanted to make them do a ladder but we decided to be nice and just ran some normal races. It was pretty awesome. During the afternoon practice I was really missing my camera. We were practicing high jump with these little middle schoolers and it was hilarious. To practice approaches and jumping I was standing on top of our "mat" (bags of wood-chips and a couple thin mattresses) with my hands up and they had to touch them. Halfway through practice the school who owned the mattresses came to get them and we practiced jumping by holding my hoodie in front of the bags and when they jumped over (or through) it, Hector would catch them/cushion their fall. It was pretty entertaining. I'm really not sure how he made it out of practice without any injuries.

...to be continued...