Estoy en Cuzco

I´m in Cuzco, as of yesterday afternoon. I had flew from Lima to here yesterday morning, a one hour flight, on a plane mostly full of Japanese tourists. I fell asleep for the first twenty minutes and when I opened my eyes, we were over the Andes...Unbelievable. Totally stunning. In case you can´t tell in that picture, those clouds are very very close to those mountain tops. I felt the altitude (about 11,000 feet) shortly after arriving at the airport, when I got a major headrush and could feel my heart pounding while walking briskly up a ramp to the bathroom. Luckily, it´s been nothing worse than that since. Anyhow, a girl named Rosemary from Aldea Yanapay - the place where I´m volunteering and living - picked me up and we took a taxi back to the hostel.

I slept most of the afternoon, and then went out to explore in the evening. When I arrived at la Plaza de San Francisco, a procession was just leaving the church - a representation of La Virgen de la Merced held aloft on the men´s shoulders, and a marching band of about 30 boys following with loud snare drums and solemn horns. Simultaneously, a wedding taking place inside the church was just ending. The wedding party and all the guests came outside amidst a showering of rice, and the bride and groom had their first dance right there, surrounded by their musicians and a crowd of onlookers. (I felt like an accidental wedding crasher.) But their cheerful music was almost completely drowned out by the nearby marching band, booming out their gloomy processional! I eventually ended up in la Plaza de Armas (the main square), and stopped on the way at a gigantic used book sale, which included Spanish translations of some of my favorites - El Gran Gatsby, Oliverio Twist, etc. I talked for a while with one of the boys selling books, and he told me his belief that in Lima there are a lot of good people (buena gente) and a lot of not-so-good people, but that Cuzco is full of good people. We shall see...

In terms of beauty, Cuzco certainly lives up to the hype that it receives. Narrow streets made entirely of stones, ancient Incan walls, and mountains on all sides. It´s really quite something. At night there are lights going up into the hills on every side, marking the houses nestled there. Though all the tourists add that level of self-awareness to the place and it´s sad to see how it exploits itself: mass amounts of alpaca sweaters, hats, scarves, gloves, brightly colored bags and belts, Quechua women posing for pictures for money. It´s refreshing that not that many people here seem to speak English; and it still surprises me when I meet people travelling here who don´t speak a word of Spanish. Anyhow, it´s not hard to get away from the tourists if you walk more than 5 blocks away from la Plaza de Armas, and I am happily living farther (further? shoot.) away than that.

There are tons of children here, in the streets, with parents, with siblings, by themselves, small small kids. A little boy, Carlitos, befriended me today while I was sitting in la Plaza de Armas. His mother was sitting on a bench near me, selling dolls, and he came over and started tying his ribbon around my book, around my leg...he had snot all over his face and was unbelievably adorable. I saw him and his mother and sister again later on, and he came running over. It made me excited for the upcoming volunteering with children. There are also a lot of dogs, like the one on the right, who I pass by most days.