Last night was a little rocky.  First on all, I'm sunburned from my extended outdoor adventure yesterday.  And then, I woke up at 1:00am with this weird burning sensation in my throat and my stomach felt like it was going to explode…or implode… or both.  I writhed in bed for probably about 30 minutes until finally deciding that if I had some sort of parasite, I may as well go puke it out.  So I fumbled to the bathroom and stared into the toilet, waiting for the eruption.  When it never came (and the pain remained) I tried gagging myself, but to no avail.  I curled up on the bathroom floor (about 3x3) for over an hour, and eventually felt a little better (after passing about 2 liters of gas).  In retrospect, I'm pretty sure my body was going into shock after going from 8 years of no carbonation and substantial water consumption to 24 hours of only tea, agua con gas, and soda.  It was like a CO2 overdose.  But I felt much better this morning.

I went for a run and then off to Spanish class.  Lunch with the fam.  Playing guitar and singing with Pablo and Valentina.  Then I had my orientation.

It looks like my internship is going to consist in 3 jobs: (1) working with Fernando, a local guy who owns a small chacra (farmland) and gowns flowers and vegetables, etc to sell at the market, (2) working on the ProPeru agrotourism project, and (3) working with another NGO called Chakana (www.chakana.org) and travelling to "altoandino" communities (indigenous people who live WAY up in the mountains) and building greenhouses and doing little educational workshops.  At least that's the plan for now…  The coordinator, Mercedes, is really cool and kept reminding me to just let her know if I ever want to change my project or do something else.  So… vamos a ver. 

At dinner (fried "camote", sweet potato, and rice) we talked about different food cultures and they asked me what I usually eat.  I told them about my berry/avocado/spinach smoothies and they freaked out.