It´s funny- I imagined my whole time in Peru being lived in hostels, and this is actually the first time I´ve actually stayed in a hostel. It´s really a great one. It was recommended to me by this girl volunteering with the same place I am. The owner is this awesome lady, or girl really, maybe younger than me I can´t tell. She is so helpful with everything, and $5 gets you a comfy bed and breakfast with fresh orange juice.
Occasionally I feel lonely when a huge group of polish or french friends come through and they´re a party until themselves. But I chat with everyone. Breakfast is always a good time to chat with people. Yesterday I met this british woman and we went to the Catalina Monastery together. It is this huge, gated mini-city. It was founded by a wealthy Spanish widow and only accepted women from upper-class families. Each woman needed the equivilant of $50,000 for a dowry to enter the convent. After an earthquake destroyed much of the original monastery, the rich families of the women rebuilt it even more lavishly. Most nuns had their own rooms, even their own houses inside the gated community, and up to four slaves or servants. I asked our guide if these nuns took the traditional vows which include the vows of poverty and sacrifice, and she said yes they did. But I guess there is always room for hypocrisy. Something the nuns did sacrifice was medical care, however. In the early years of the monastery, absolute no men were allowed inside, which meant no doctors. In later years, doctors were allowed only if they were old men, and very well-known by the families of the girls.

The night before last, I hung out with the volunteers. Many of them live at a house together, which is kind of the Real World Volunteers. We had drinks and then went out. When I got back to the hostel, not much past 2am, everyone was sleeping. It´s definitely not a party hostel, which I appreciate. The only people I found awake was a couple waiting to get picked up for an early-morning tour of Colca Canyon, which condors fly across. I couldn´t sleep in the next morning, though, so I went to bed at like 9:00 last night and woke up feeling so good. The beds are so comfortable and all the guests are so considerate and try not to wake each other up.
I was thinking of moving into the real world house, but it is more expensive, doesn´t include breakfast, is a 5 min taxi ride outside of town, and is basically the real world house. So I don´t think I will.
The volunteering is less intensive than I thought. It is really only two hours. An hour of teaching english to different levels, then an hour of playing with them at the park. But it takes almost an hour to get out there, so it takes up a bit of the day still.

I think this experience has helped me get over comparing myself to others. After the first ten or twenty tall gorgeous european girls who speak 5 languages and are in the middle of well-planned, well-funded 6-month treks around the world, I kind of got over it. Ok, I get it. There´s always someone smarter, cooler, prettier, richer, more creative, more popular, more .. . linguistically gifted, with more friends available for travel, etc. Who cares. Of course it´s always stupid to compare, but I think I needed something like this to shock me into reality. It´s just who you are and what you do that matters.

more on the jungle:
I am learning more how to prepare trips and tours myself, saving money and making sure to get exactly what you want. I would do things differently now. But with mike, we took a package tour. It was pretty awesome, we stayed at this really nice hotel with a pool and awesome breakfast buffet. It was so luxurious, not like anything I´ve done in the longest time. We woke up so early to get our bus to Iquitos, then we were supposed to get a city tour after checking into our hotel. Our guide is really just someone who trys to sell people tour packages. After waiting an hour in the lobby (don´t ask me why we waited that long. sometimes mike and i together are too easy-going for our own good), he took us for our "city tour." He spoke english decently, but didn´t know the english words for anything on our "tour," which was only like 20 min? 30 min? and at one point actually included the description " now over here is . . . an old building." Then we ate this really delicious pork with some kind of awesome barbeque sauce and fried plaintains. Then ice cream, then back to the hotel and passed out and had the best nap ever. We went swimming, went in the sauna, then came back. I love showering in hotels. That´s almost the best part of the experience. My shower in Lima is heated electrically, I think I´ve mentioned. Water is heated as it passes through a coil, and the water temperature is really uneven and could go cold for minutes at a time and the water pressure is terrible. This shower at this hostel is amazing as well. I took the best shower- hot and great water pressure. So relaxing.
ok, back to iquitos. Then we went to this restaurant that is floating on the amazing river. Maybe not the amazon. A tributary. We went at night, and it´s so beautiful. This is the dry season, so all the water levels are down like 15 feet from where they are during the other half of the year. So a lot of the banks are muddy and slimey and gross. So at night you can´t see anything, just the water and lights. You take this thatched-roof long-canoe-gondola type boat with lanterns out to the restaurant. There were only a few other people there. It´s so beautiful, this fancy floating restaurant. We got really good, tiny food that once we got it, we were like "what is this?" "what did we order?" and to me, that is the mark of a fancy restaurant. They also had a swimming pool attached to the whole floating platform, swimming pool and bar on the first floor, restaurant on the second. You could see all the lights of the shore and areas of darkness over the water. It was so cool.
The next morning we took an hour motorboat ride to our first lodge in the jungle. We took a hike through the jungle, met a group that lives there. Now, they wear modern clothes, but for groups of tourists they dress in their tradition dress and give them an idea of what their life used to include. It sounded strange or demeaning or something when I heard about it, but the experience seemed more like them sharing something, teaching something. They use paprika to color their grass skirts and also to make a paste that they use to mark everyone´s face before their dance. Three different symbols they painted on both cheeks- one for married, one for single, one for . . . widowed maybe? I have to ask mike. They painted that on our cheeks, then they showed us this dance and we danced with them. Then we all got to try blowing darts at a dummy. They make a rod out of the center of a palm tree, whittling out the soft core until it is hollow, then they can blow poisoned darts for hunting animals or people. After they would hit an animal, a bunch of people would chase the animal until it bled out, cleansing its body of all the poison. We tried blowing this 15 ft blowdart, I got a perfect shot in the dummy´s neck.
Ok, more later.