First full day in Huanchaco
Today we settled into our new home and walked around the town. We will live with Wilma for the next month, who is an older woman who lives alone in a nice house one block from the beach, and about a 5 minute walk to both our volunteer sites. She has a nice garaje, which is more of a courtyard filled with chairs and a garden that I saw a hummingbird visit this afternoon. We have our own room and a kitchen (yay!). The only other lodger (from Pittsburgh) left this morning. Wilma’s getting her kitchen painted because somehow salt water rises from the ground and marks up the walls, at least that’s what I understood. So for now, we are sharing the kitchen with her, which is fine. She made us breakfast this morning (toast and jam and tea) since we didn’t go shopping yet. When we walked out the door there was a produce cart, so we bought enough produce for the next few days. apparently it’s cheaper to buy produce from the cart than the mercado. I would think it’s fresher, too. Wilma watched us pick out what we wanted and when I grabbed a head of lettuce she yelled at me not to get it. When we were ready to pay, she came over and inspected our purchases and yelled at the guy that our spinach was limp and he shouldn’t sell it. Once the quality and price was approved by our new Senora, we brought our stuff inside.
It’s nice to already know the language. I may not be fluent, but I know enough to ask questions and understand her. No more going without hot water for a week like I did in Spain. (her water is heated by electricity but we only get water from the town from 7am-3pm. After that there’s a reserve tank on the roof but we are encouraged to not use it). We walked through and around and through town again, trying to find the lavanderia to wash our clothes. The girl who left this morning gave us some helpful tips about a lot of stuff, one of them being the lavanderia. There’s really only one in town with a sign, that charges sl. 5 to wash and sl. 6 to dry (Mr. Phil’s). But on the other side of town there’s a place called Chill Out that will do a bundle of laundry (wash and dry) for sl. 5. Chill Out also has a swimming pool (which is an in ground tub about the size of 4 bathtubs, but deeper), free wi-fi (hooray for Matt), food and happy hour from 6pm-12am (3 beers for sl. 10). We tried to bring our laundry there, but their dryer was broken and we couldn’t get our clothes until tomorrow. So we had to go to Mr. Phil’s for now, but we can hang our clothes to dry in our garaje.
We also (finally) found the grocery store that has the best deals- El Hornito on the street La Ficus. It’s a tiny jam-packed store full of almost anything you want, except nuts. They were almost out of fresh bread, so we grabbed a few rolls and now know to get there earlier in the day. We bought TP, soy milk, jam, quinoa cereal (the photo looks like oatmeal, we’ll see tomorrow), maca cereal, rice, quinoa, beans I’ve never seen before, the giant corn called chocle, spaghetti, sauce and swiss cheese that tastes more like cheese curds-it’s high in water content and tastes a little sour. The holes in the cheese are very small. I like it better than Swiss cheese. Tonight we meet with Peter and Juany, who run the show, to take care of our schedule.