Day 28: Huancayo/Concepcion and concert

In the morning I went to the hairdressers, and 3 hours later walked out with slightly shorter partly-curled hair (the curls have now fallen out, but such is life). I stopped by John and Danny's on the way back - Juliana was there too, so we chatted until midday. Then we three volunteers walked into town and I bought a watch, then got a bus back for lunch at Hilda's.

After lunch, we'd arranged to meet up outside Juliana's house to go to Concepcion. I asked Yesy if Juan Jose could come too, so he came along. Jesse didn't come in the end because he felt ill, so only five of us went. After waiting for a while on the streetcorner for the bus, we ended up catching a taxi. Juan Jose and I ended up squished in the front seat for the half hour drive to Concepcion, but there was at least some lovely mountain scenery out of the window.

When we got to Concepcion, we waited a while for another taxi, which took us up to where there was a giant statue of the Virgin Mary. It was absolutely beautiful, we walked around and climbed up to the top of the statue, coming out of the top of her head. From there the view of the mountains was just stunning. We climbed down and saw small figurines of a battle fought here when the Spaniards came, then took a taxi back to Huancayo.

In the evening I went with John and Danny to the internet cafe, then John stayed there a while longer while Danny and I went out for coffee and juice respectively (the fruit juice with beetroot tasted as good as ever). Then all of us volunteers went round to Juliana's, and from there walked to the Plaza de Armas. There was a concert there, protesting against the planned construction of a mine in the glacier Huaytapallana (http://www.facebook.com/home.php#!/pages/Salvemos-el-Huaytapallana/181917309322), so we stayed for a while to watch. After that Juliana took us to a pub where a live band sang in English - that was good fun. I had a drink containing pisco sour (a national type of alcohol), lemon and aniseed tea - even though there wasn't much pisco sour in the drink, it was strong enough to result in me going red and constantly swaying to the music. Then Danny, Juliana and I got a plate of yuca to share, that was great. We left about two hours later - by the time my taxi got back to Hilda's it was nearly midnight, so I locked up as quietly as I could and went straight to sleep.