Hello!  Right now I am listening to Britney Spears! I haven´t listened to pop music in such a long time and it is such a big part of summer for me. I am in a smaller city of about 50,000 people called Tingo Maria and it is very green!!! This morning I woke up in the city of Huanuco and I ate my leftover Chifa food, which is like Peruvian mixed with Chinese. They have a lot of restaurantes all over the cities I´ve visited that serve Chifa food and I was excited to try it! I took an auto here. I asked a few different people how to get here, a french couple that was staying in the hostal I stayed at, and a lady who started talking to me while I was walking around the main square of Huanuco and she asked me if I was from Alemania, which is Germany. I´m always flattered when people ask me if I´m from Europe, haha. But once they hear me talk they know I´m American. It was great, the ride here. A small toyota with 4 other people. They don´t have buses that come here, solamente small autos. I´ve met so many people that tell me about where things are. I took an overnight bus to get to Huanuco and we arrived at 5 in the morning and it was still dark. I was planning on waiting at the bus station until it got light and then going to look for a hostal, but the man I sat next to on the bus, who is a doctor told me that it is safer to go straight to my hostal and he helped me take a rickshaw to the taxi I wanted to go to. Magic!! The magic of life! Anyway, the ride here was great, it was so cool seeing the climate and landscape slowly change from dry and brown to humid and green. Today, I found a hostal from my lonely planet book and got a room. That book has been so helpful. Its helped me to find inexpensive hostals, restaurants and it usually has a map of every city. It´s great! So, this afternoon, I took a mototaxi out to this place called Cueva de las lesuchas, I think it´s called. It´s a beautiful cave!!! Oh my god it was so cool. A giant cave with stalagmites and tites and all these birds that you can´t really see but you can hear them so loudly. It was so beautiful. I walked around there for a while and it was all so beautiful. I took so many pictures. Sometimes I forget to take pictures and then I worry about remembering everything and I have to breath deeply and remember that I can enjoy everything and it will be fine. Oh my gosh it is so beautiful. I can´t believe that I didn´t think I would want to visit the forests here. if I had more time, I would take a boat down or up the Amazon river. I met a guy from France who is staying at the hostal I´m staying at and tomorrow we are going to go to some other great places around here. I came back on the autotaxi as the sun was going down  and it was so beautiful, the hills covered in jungle plants and the city in the valley with wisps of fog above it. Yeah!!!  I read some really cool travel quotes on my way here in the car; I had printed them out before I began my trip but I hadn´t read them yet. yesterday  when I was at my hostal in Huanuco, I went out into the backyard because I wanted to sit and read my book and I noticed there was a bigger cage and that there was a toucan inside. I looked at him for a while and looked into his eyes and went to ask the man at the front if he gets to come out or fly and he told me that he doesn´t have wings and he´s from the jungle and I walked back down the hall and couldn´t help but start sobbing and I thought about cutting open the cage surrepticiously so that maybe they wouldn´t notice at first but then i decided I probably shouldn´t do that but I sobbed for a long time and it makes me so sad to think about it. Later, when I came back out of my room to the front of the hostal, the owner told me the name of the bird and I didn´t know what to say. I was very nice to him. The whole time i was thinking about how I don´t know how animals feel just by looking at them, but god. I don´t know. I know that I want to work with animals in my life. Anyway, now I´´m listening to Madonna and it has really good base and it reminds me of riding my motorcycle which I´m so damn excited for! The bird will be ok. Haha, I remember this past Christmas, before I left to go visit Big B and his family, I was getting really sad about not being able to bring Cocoa and I called Robin to talk to her and to get some comfort and after I told her what I was feeling and the kookiness I was experiencing, she laughed and said "Oh honey, you shouldn´t be allowed around dogs when you´re stoned." It was so funny and cute and sweet. She just meant because I get so emotional with dogs. It makes me laugh so much now. Anyway, its so good to be in green land with lots of green plants! It reminds me of how great it is that I lived and will live in western Oregon!!!!!! Yeah! Thanks for reading!
Love
Josie