I am having a lazy Sunday morning catching up on my blog whilst watching the Queen's Diamond Jubilee pageant on the River Thames on CNN. Typically the sky over London is grey and it's now raining but it seems like there is a great atmosphere there!

So I arrived in Sucre in the evening on Thursday 17th May. I decided that I wanted to spend at least a week doing Spanish lessons and also do some volunteer work. I visited a couple of schools and organised lessons at one I had been recommended (Me Gusta Spanish school) to start on the Monday. So far I have spent 2 weeks doing lessons, mainly working on my grammar but also conversation practice. My main objective was trying to master the use of the subjunctive so have spent a lot of time on that and it has improved, though I still find it tricky! I am staying with a lovely family doing a homestay as it gives you the extra opportunity to speak Spanish as well as get to know local people. I have had a busy routine here, with my Spanish lessons in the morning 8.15-12.15, then lunch with the family at the grandparents' house. After that I have gone on the internet before doing my volunteering in the afternoons (3-6).

I have been going to a children's home and doing activities there. This has included playing games, drawing, making mosaics and pancakes. Making the pancakes was particularly good fun! Today I am taking the boys to the cinema for my last day working with them. I have really enjoyed it and glad I had the chance to do it.

I have enjoyed my time in Sucre as it is a nice place to be and it's nice to experience 'living' in a place. I now want to explore the town a bit more as I always seem to be rushing around from place to place but it is a really pretty colonial town with whitewashed buildings and it's a Unesco Cultural Heritage site.

Apart from doing the classes and volunteering I have also had the chance to catch up with people I had met previously- Joe who was in Banos doing Spanish lessons when I was happened to be here so we had dinner before he moved on. Since Ecuador we have taken very different routes so I was happily surprised that we managed to cross paths. Tom from the Navimag (and Valparaiso/Santiago) was here too so we met up again too and I joined his birthday celebrations. Sandra and Hannes, an Austrian couple, who I met in Tupiza arrived in Sucre too and are taking lessons at the school as well. Speaking of the school we did a cooking class one evening, learning how to make 'papas rellenas', basically mashed potato balls filled with hard-bolied egg or cheese or both then fried. They were delicious and it was good fun.

Last Sunday Anjali (a girl also doing classes) and I went to the village of Tarabuco to see its Sunday market. It's popular with travellers for its textiles but I mostly wanted to go and see a small village and the local people's market; we saw lots of indigenous people in traditional dress. It was also a good chance to get out into the local area and see the surrounding countryside. We ended up coming back on a different bus as we couldn't find our bus, despite wandering a lot looking for it!

It was a good time to be in Sucre with a 'feriado' (like our bank holidays) Independence Day here on 25th May. This involved about 5 days of parades- hard to imagine there would be that number of people to parade but sometimes there were even 2 parades in one day! A lot of people were involved in the parades though ranging from kindergarten children one day to high school to the military. Sucre had a kind of holiday atmosphere and it was good when they closed some of the streets to traffic so there was more space to walk around. Being an old colonial city the centre has narrow one way streets and narrow pavements- lunchtime and evening 'rush hour' the pavements are always overflowing with people!