Christmas and the beach

It's March and my adjustment to the US is going... okay. Today I almost cried in church when they started talking about Easter, since Easter was such a special part of my experience of Peru. The isolation of living with my parents in the suburbs kills me. But as I "look around" and try to figure out my life plans, I'm doing several things at once. Teaching ESL at CASA of Maryland; looking sporadically for a full-time job; arranging to teach voice lessons at my local Music & Arts center; even maybe waitressing in the near future. I was going to go to bartending school but that's on hold for the moment.

And now to post about the great friends-gatherings I had at the end of my stay in Lima!
In December there was Christmas. In Peru everyone stays up on December 24th to celebrate Christmas at midnight, and all the partying is over by Christmas morning, so on Christmas Day nobody does anything. Since I didn't have family to celebrate with, I invited everyone to my house on Christmas Day to make a sort of repeat of Thanksgiving dinner. 15 cooks is a lot of cooks, but the sisters let us have the house in Delicias all to ourselves, because they're awesome.
Aren't my friends gorgeous? :)






















This is the convent living room transformed into a dining room!

After eating we took a walk down to the beach, except they wouldn't let us in to the private beach area, so we had to come back. I got sent back at high speed on a bus because we realized we'd left our apple pie in the oven! Miraculously, neither it or the convent had burned up..



















After Christmas we turned around and went to the beach two days later! This was another mega-day of shopping for food (the night before), cooking at my house (the convent in Delicias), and then going about 30 minutes to the south of Lima to a non-polluted beach.