"My teacher is the best"

I'm starting to fail at keeping up with this blog! After this week I swear I'll be better.

This past week was my last week of TEFL! I taught my own class every day from 8:00-9:00am. It went really well every single day! I only had 1 student the first day which was rough, but the rest of the week I had 3. They were a great group and I wish they were still mine! I taught them comparatives, superlatives, adverbs of frequency, some vocabulary, and played jeopardy at the end of the week. It was a blast. The goal of teaching ESL is getting the students to speak in full sentences, and one of the highlights of the week was my student Milagros producing the sentence "My teacher is the best". It was awesome. I actually was lucky enough to see her out several times at the bars this weekend and she was so excited to see me every time. I love teaching!

In between lesson planning, writing a professional development paper, and putting together my portfolio we did manage to have some fun this week and finally hiked Viva, a BIG mountain that says "Viva El Peru" on it. It's a pretty steep, rocky hike, but it was amazing. There was sadly a decent amount of trash on the way up so we got a bag and started cleaning some of it up. A little deposit in the Bank of Karma if you will. We decided to bring a trash bag every time we hike now. Anyway, the view was amazing. I got to watch a plane take off from the tiny Cusco Airport which was really cool. Of the 30 pictures I took on the hike, at least half are of the dogs that were wandering the mountain. Some of them were so freaking cute. My obsession with the street dogs is becoming a problem. I want to save them all!

Friday was the big day, our last day of TEFL. After teaching, we had class for a bit and then had to finish up some work. Then it was time to celebrate! We had a few drinks at the house to unwind and then met our whole class and our instructor at a bar/restaurant called Muse. The food was delicious and the drinks were obviously flowing. We eventually moved to one of our usual bars, instructor included, to dance the night away. Eventually we met up with our housemates and friends from the other house. Lots of fun and dancing, and I even got to see the sunrise over the mountains! It was amazing.

Saturday was a recovery day, but we still had enough energy to hike up to Cristo Blanco and take some awesome pictures. At 8:00 that night we had our TEFL party at Maximo. Free drinks, free food, and a little ceremony where they hand us our certificates. I got some GREAT news at the party...the director of Maximo came up to Maggie and I and told us that he wants to talk with us next week about working there! So it looks like we have jobs! And we found a place to live in an apartment with other teachers because 2 of them are moving out. Everything is falling into place...yay! After the party we went to the bars to cause the usual ruckus. More dancing on the bar & such. We only stayed out until 5am this time (seriously, who am i?) and got our faces painted!! It was fantastic! Slept for a few hours and then woke up to run errands and get ready for our trek to Machu Picchu that starts in 5 hours! Ahh! It's going to be amazing. There are 8 of us from my TEFL class going. Will take LOTS and lots of pictures :)

Hope everyone has a good week and is getting ready for Christmas! Wish I could celebrate with all my friends & family! Love<3

PS. I'll add pictures to this post when I get back, the internet is too slow today.