First full day in Lima was packed with new learning and great food. Grateful to have had the time at the U.S. Embassy and the Fulbright Commission Peru to kick off this experience. We spent the day talking with Embassy officials and representatives of the Peruvian Ministry of Education about the core goals, challenges, and opportunities facing local teachers and education as a whole in Peru.

(Not pictured: our time at Embassy Lima - no phones allowed, so I was happy to leave picture taking to actual experts)

On top of the incredible professional insights and important education conversations, I can report that Lima's reputation as a food destination is absolutely well deserved.

Attached, some highlights of our initial foray into all things Peru, including Chaufa and ceviche, ceramic llamas (will find real ones at some point), and the Miraflores night sky. Incredible start, and more to come.

Our visits to Lima's public day schools bookended the first leg of our experience and between them, they showed me two very different communities doing remarkably alive work.

Day 2 recap: An overview of Peruvian education, an amazing school visit, and World Cup soccer

We started the morning with an in depth briefing from our teacher leader, Karina, on the state of Peruvian education. It was a fascinating deep dive into the unique challenges and opportunities currently facing Peruvian teachers.

The highlight of the day was our visit to IE Dora Mayer. The students were incredibly welcoming - huge shout out to my guides Gensis, Luana, Mariluz, and Alejandra, for their patience with my Spanish and for showing me around their school. The sense of community there was unmistakeable in every single space, whether it was the classrooms, the courtyards, or the basketball courts.

I was especially struck by a DPCC (Personal Development, Citizenship, and Civics) class we sat in on. They were tackling the complex issue of water rights, linking local contamination in Lima to the global concerns around microplastics. It was a perfect local-to-global lesson that reminded me so much of discussions in my own classroom.

We wrapped the day at a local food market for Argentina v Algeria. There is truly nothing like watching a Messi hat-trick performance surrounded by that level of football passion. Plus, the food (as I've come to expect) was phenomenal.

Later in the week, a visit to IE 3061 Jorge Chávez Dartnell.

We walked in to custom welcome signs and found the students holding ours, which meant we were deep in conversation before anyone had a chance to be shy about it. The whole day was like that.

We toured a school that's been through it. Last year's earthquakes hit hard enough that parts of the facility still can't be used, so classes are running out of temporary spaces. And yet the place was alive: a packed library, a computer lab, and classrooms doing genuinely impressive work. I watched primary students prepping for Father's Day (a very big deal in Peru) and sat in on a group of 5th-year secondary students debating whether traditional economic metrics even hold up given the scale of Peru's informal economy. Sixteen-year-olds. Casually dismantling GDP. Impressive.

Then three students performed "Riptide" by Vance Joy for a room full of strangers with a confidence I have never once possessed at that age, and absolutely blew us away. Turns out their teacher uses pop music to teach English, which means I watched language instruction, a performance, and a flex happen all at once. We signed more autographs (a literal line of students, notebooks open, filing past each of us) and were sent off with parting gifts from the school. Just an extraordinary community of educators and kids who clearly love being there.

We closed out Lima at Mayta in Miraflores, which is ranked among the top 50 restaurants in the world and earns every bit of it. I went full Amazonian: paiche (look it up, the fish is genuinely enormous) and a dessert of Amazonian fruits I could not name but will be thinking about for a while.

It was an incredible way to wrap the first leg.

Between visits to the two public schools on our agenda, we took a lengthy drive out to Colegio Mayor Secundario Presidente del Perú to visit COAR Lima. Quick context: COARs are Peru's high-performance public boarding schools - free, fiercely selective, and built for the country's most outstanding students in their last three years of secondary school. So, no pressure walking in.

Got a great presentation from the staff on how the COAR system works and the thinking behind it, but the real highlight was the students.

Met two groups of 5th-year students, who are essentially Peru's version of high school seniors, except secondary school wraps at age 16 here, so these are 16-year-olds doing work that involves wrestling with what comes next for their academic careers. We talked about their projects, which involve the exact same real-world problems we tackle back in my own classroom, and about where they're headed next. One student explained (in German!) that he wants to head to Germany to study economics. I nodded thoughtfully and did not let on that my German peaked at "danke" and "gegenpress". Genuinely impressive, sharp, generous kids and the kind of real conversations that remind you why this work matters.

I'll admit one of them asked for my autograph, which I was NOT prepared for, having no real signature to speak of. So somewhere out there is a teenager holding my very confused handwriting.

Lunch back at the hotel turned into dinner, courtesy of a 3-hour return drive (Lima traffic remains undefeated). Karina then gave us a fantastic crash course on Peruvian history and culture, after which a few of us decided to experience said culture firsthand by walking to Larcomar to catch more World Cup with the Pacific as the backdrop. Research, basically.

Our departure to Cusco started early in the day. Not as early as some of our cohort members, but early enough that I knew coffee was going to be exceedingly necessary. Thankfully, Peruvian airports keep making travel suspiciously easy, and finding a Pukku Pukku in the departures area did a lot to repair my mood. The flight itself was the most scenic I've ever taken, and somehow it still didn't prepare me.

I do not have words for the beauty of Cusco. For those who know me, me running out of words is itself a news story.

We met our host teacher, Martha, at the airport and headed up to the hotel. The four of us set off on foot toward Martha's school - until, one by one, the rest of our Crew-sco wisely recognized that discretion is the better part of valor and saved their energy for the days ahead. I kept climbing, and the altitude, to my surprise, barely registered. The sun was another matter. Cool morning air, deceptively strong sun, and a New England complexion - Avenida del Sol lived up to its name. But it was a world unto itself, so I took my time and took it all in.

At the school, two of Martha's students gave me a full, comprehensive tour, rattling off history and facts from memory like it was nothing. One told me about his love of astronomy after I noticed the NASA patch on his uniform. I went to grab an Uber back, the app had no idea where I was trying to send it, and so I walked. Honestly? Felt great.

After lunch, Martha took us up to some of the city's overlooks, including the Cristo Blanco statue. Once again, no one photo does the landscape justice, which is probably why they were the only pictures I took all day.

Spent the evening prepping the professional development session I’d be delivering the next morning to teachers from the greater Cusco area. High altitude, no pressure…right?

Some days you plan; some days Cusco hands you a six-hour parade. Day 2 was both.

I arrived early at Ciencias and was promptly greeted by a stray dog - which sounds like a sad detail until you know two things. First, Cusco's street dog population runs into the thousands, and many of them actually have owners who simply let them roam, so the scene is a little less Dickensian than a first-time visitor assumes. Second, and more important: this one was a husky. My dog-owner empathy and my specific weakness for that breed activated simultaneously. A strong omen, I decided.

Onto the main event. Our tech cooperated in exactly one classroom, so we consolidated there - which, with an audience of around 16 or 17 teachers, turned out to be the perfect size for actual conversation. My Crew-sco (yes, I named us; no, I will not apologize) delivered: Melissa took listening strategies, Ramona took reading and writing, and I stepped up for speaking. Not exactly outside my wheelhouse (anyone who's endured one of my unsolicited verbal essays on pro wrestling or Coheed and Cambria lore can attest I have range when it comes to talking).

My session centered on using Project Zero thinking routines to jump-start purposeful, authentic verbal communication in the classroom. And, as I do with very nearly every presentation I have ever given, I went long. Long enough that we sacrificed the practice activity I'd planned. It didn't seem to be a problem, though. The conversations I had with the Peruvian teacher afterward were easily the highlight. The kind of exchange that's the whole point of being here.

After, we claimed a coffeehouse balcony over the Plaza de Armas for what turned out to be a marathon of culture: the Desfile de Danzas Típicas del Nivel Secundario. High schoolers in full costume, marching bands, and enormous student-built floats openly satirizing local and national politics and broadcasting exactly where these kids stand on the issues facing Peru. This went on for hours. June in Cusco is, I'm learning, essentially one continuous festival.

Last was the market in San Blas before yet another amazing dinner - this time, alpaca.

Day 3 in Cusco saw us touring the Sacred Valley, with our inimitable guide Casio leading the way.

We started outside the city at the home and shop of a family of Quechua weavers. Fed alpacas, met the guinea pigs (admired, did not eat), and got walked through the whole weaving process start to finish before being gently deposited in the showroom, where gifts were duly acquired.

From there: Chinchero, with its stunning Incan structures and terraces. Then the ruins at Moray, an Incan agricultural laboratory. A masterclass in Incan ingenuity. Then a salt stop in Maras, lunch in Urubamba, and a final climb up the archaeological site at Ollantaytambo.

History everywhere you turn here, of Incan engineering, of Spanish conquest, and of Indigenous people carrying their traditions into the present, which is how I came to pay for handwoven wool via Apple Pay.

As for the scenery, I'll let the photos do the talking. They're better at it than I am.

Monday in Cusco was our day to observe, co-teach, and actually get into the classroom at Ciencias.

The whole school opened by celebrating the upcoming holiday with a ceremony honoring Inti, the most revered deity in Inca tradition, whose festival, Inti Raymi, marks the winter solstice and the start of a new year. What made it special wasn't just the music, history, and dance, though. It was one of the days when the usual uniform requirements are relaxed so students can wear traditional Andean attire, and many of them did. The assembly went from a sea of khaki to something alive with color, the whole room transformed by students choosing to show up in the dress of their heritage.

Then into the classroom with the 5th-year secondary students, where I got to reconnect with Abel and Meyer, who had toured me around the school earlier in the week. After some language and reading work, Ramona led the students through building 8-sentence essays on their readings while Melissa and I sat with individual students to develop their writing and pull out the key parts of the text.

The next class flipped the script: the students delivered in-depth presentations on all things Cusco. Standing and delivering in front of a room of strangers is hard at any age, and they did it with real pride in what makes their city unique. It showed.

We closed the day with a meeting of the communications and English staff that turned into an impromptu Father's Day celebration, cake included. A good reminder that some things about school communities are the same everywhere.

Found myself sidelined by a stomach bug, which meant trading my planned spot in a parade for a balcony seat above it. Not the version of the day I'd drawn up, but Cusco made it hard to feel shortchanged.

What filled the streets below was part of the city's Jubilee Month, the run-up to Inti Raymi, when Cusco's provinces and schools fill the streets with dance, costume, and music for hours on end. I was supposed to be down there with my host teacher's school. Instead I cheered from above, which my stomach and I agreed was the wiser call.

A Wrap for Cusco

My last day in the Andes started at the Centro Artesanal Cusco, talking with vendors and picking up a few handmade pieces of the culture to take home, while Inti Raymi played live on TVs throughout the market. From there I walked up to the Plaza de Armas and claimed a balcony at a local lunch spot to take in what was left of the festivities in the city center.

Once the crowds had thinned, I headed back up to San Blas for a little more shopping with the local artists whose work is genuinely some of the best I've seen anywhere. By the time I made it back to the hotel, I'd covered about three miles on foot, which is to say the stomach bug that stole a full day was officially in the rearview.

We closed the night with a farewell dinner alongside Martha and her family. Gifts were given, certificates presented, and yes, a few tears shed. I'm deeply grateful to have worked with an educator as special as Martha, and I'm already looking forward to coming back to this remarkable city.

Peru. What an experience.

We spent our last days in Lima the way the whole trip went, learning right up to the end. We started at the Museo Nacional Afroperuano, which spoke directly to the question I carried through this entire experience: in what ways do Peruvian students construct identity amid the competing pulls of Indigenous heritage, national culture, and global citizenship? A museum dedicated to a too-often-overlooked thread of that story was a fitting place to sit with it.

From there, a Peruvian cooking class, where our group tackled pisco sours, causa, ceviche, and lucuma mousse. Picture a room full of teachers carefully following each step, quietly hoping we were doing these dishes justice. The verdict, thankfully, was that we did.

We closed with an alumni roundtable, including a conversation with Peruvian educators about AI in schools, a focus of mine back home. What stuck with me was how fast the room moved past "is AI good or bad" into the harder questions. Phones are banned in many schools here, yet they're often the most realistic way students access technology at all. And AI learns largely from what's widely available online, which raises a real problem for a country where Quechua, the language closest to many students' roots, is barely present in that digital world. What does it mean when the tools don't speak the language of the people they're meant to serve?

No clean answers in the room, which is exactly why it was the right conversation. Across 26 regions and, as one educator put it, even more realities than that, the throughline was one I think about constantly at home: tech in education isn't about the devices. It's about access, equity, and the real human learning those tools should support, not replace.

Two weeks, two cities, more lessons than I can fit here. Grateful beyond words to everyone who made it possible.

Hasta pronto, Peru.