Too much time has passed... sorry!

Hey all! I~m very sorry i haven´t written in so long. Well I´m in Brazil for the 3rd day. before this i was in peru for three weeks with my family. Before that I was home for 10 days, and before that i was in galapagos. all of which i have not updated you all. So, i will give you a brief summary and if you want any more information please please email me at juliekobs@gmail.com. I~m also going to start putting photos up on snapfish, so i~ll email the link to whoever is on my email list.. email me if you didn~t recieve the link!
So, to begin. I was in galapagos for ten days with my class ecology and conservation of the galapagos. Even though it was a class it was really fun! I loved my group and one of the two professors we went with! Although two of the days were spent inside with lecturers they were still pretty interesting. it was great to finally see all the things we had learned about too. The islands really just made all of us happy. We spent most of the time on Santa Cruz, some on Isabella, and day trips to Seymour Norte and Bartolome. We saw loads of sea lions, blue footed boobies, frigate birds, penguins!!, white tip sharks, iguanas, and turtles. Tortuga bay, a beach on santa cruz was the most beautiful beach ever!!
All in all, I had a great time in galapagos. when ecuador was all over and i went home on dec. 23, i was really sad because i love my host family so much and the country and made a lot of good friends there. Someday i will go back though, I still have a lot to see there!!

-peru-
It was great to travel with the fam around peru, especially with my sister, since i haven~t seen her for so long! First we stayed in Pisac which is very close to cuzco for two days and saw some pretty cool ruins there. Then we headed to cuzco where we stayed a night and my sister allie and i went to do the inca trail to machu picchu for 4 days. IT WAS AMAZING!!! It was really hard at some points, but so worth it. It was so beautiful where we were walking, it~s no wonder it~s sacred!! There were beautful trees and plants surrounding us, waterfalls all over and rivers right next to the trail, mountains with glaciers and fog, and we were walking exactly where the incas had hundreds of years ago on the same steps. it was great!!! We all agreed that the experience was actually better on the trail then machu picchu. Not that machu picchu was bad by any means, but the inca trail was one of the best things i have ever done in my life.
Machu picchu was very beautiful. We climbed the little mountain wayna picchu after we toured around the ruins a bit. They had a sun dial made by the incas there, but apparently about a year ago, the sundial was broken by a beer company trying to make a commercial there! how absurd! Anyways, it was great, but unfortunately i didn~t get any good pictures of machu picchu as a whole because of the fog. just pieces close up!
From Cuzco we went to Puno, the port to lake titicaca by train. The train ride was really fancy, but long. the views were pretty nice though. We did a 2 day tour of the lake and visited these really impressive floating islands were people still lived. the islands were made out of a reed plant and everytime you took a step on the island it was like stepping on a bog or trampoline and some water would gush out on to your feet. I really liked it. We visited two major islands, Amantani and Taquille. We hiked a bit and on Amantani we stayed with a family which was very nice! The islands were beautiful and the lake was beautiful, and all and all i really enjoyed it!
From Lake titicaca my fam and i flew to the rainforest! Iquitos, Peru. It seemed like a city i would like to stay in for a little longer, but we only got one night there. then we went into the rainforest the next morning for 5 days. We stayed in relatively rustic lodges and saw some pretty cool animals. It was great to actually be in the amazon river. the jungle itself was really amazing too. there were almost no wild animals that we saw, just some birds and sloths from far away. One day we went to monkey island, sort of an animal sanctuary i suppose, where there were tons of monkeys that jumped on us and held our hands and it was really great!! My favorite part of the whole trip though was on our last day, when we went to a village of a native tribe and they had a baby sloth there and i held it!! If you didn~t already know, sloths are my favorite animal in the world, so holding a three toed baby sloth was absolutely a dream come true. it was so cute and soft and i wanted to take it home!!!! I think i~m in love.
After the rainforest we flew back to lima where i left my family in the airport because they flew back to the US that night :(
I spent the next two days in Miraflores, a suburb of lima, in a really great hostel that was $4 a night. i loved it! I met some guys and we walked around all day the first day - the ocean views are beautiful! and we went to a museum of the inquisition in central lima where we saw various torture devices that they used to use... a little morbid, but cool.
On the 23rd of Jan, I flew in to Sao paolo brazil with jen, my travel buddy. We enjoyed walking around the city for the day and then that night we got on a bus to floreonopolis in the south of brazil (11 hour bus ride). Now i´ve been on the island of santa catalina (where floreanopolis is) for two days and it~s wonderful. we are at a campsite right by the beach and it is gorgeous! So far i have felt completely safe in brazil and I love it!!!
REMEMBER, Email me if you want to know more, i could talk about this stuff forever, its just that i am bad at writing mass email things.

hopefully i can keep up with this blog better!