Plaza de Armas, Cusco

We’ve been ill.  Very ill.

Last Saturday night I made a pot of black beans for dinner.  I foolishly soaked the beans in tap water thinking that since the beans boiled for 2-3 hours any water issues would be handled.  Rookie mistake.  You have to boil the water here in Peru before you drink it, or it will make you sick.  As John later pointed out, the inside of a bean doesn’t quite reach boiling point, and might still be full of bacteria even after hours of cooking.

Well, crap.  Serious minus points deducted from my savvy traveler score.

Of course, we didn’t discuss this detail until well after we had eaten the beans.  The result of this little slip up?  Poison.  I’ll spare you the details, but suffice it to say Sunday was filled with the kind of gastrointestinal pyrotechnics that could only be rivaled by our experience on our honeymoon in the Philippines.  Not exactly the kind of experience I was looking forward to repeating.

Since we were both heavily weakened from illness, it hasn’t exactly been the most exciting week in Cusco.  There’s been a lot of laying around, reading, and watching weird Peruvian TV shows in Spanish.  (One show was like American Gladiators, and thoroughly entertained us for a good 20 minutes.  Another colorful show had a Peruvian hipster host, who sported a Mickey Mouse sweatshirt, cheered on by mimes decked out in red sequin outfits while he dialed viewers at home in some sort of game show. This was only made more entertaining by our inability to fully understand what was happening.)

In short, we’ve been trying not to overexert ourselves.

Now, six days later, my body is still trying to recover.  I still can’t really eat real food (white rice and blue Powerade are still staples of my diet), but I can leave the house knowing that I have enough energy to make the climb back up the hill to our apartment – which is no small feat.

Finally, I have some photos to share of the lovely city we currently live in.  What better place to start than with the hugely famous Plaza de Armas in Cusco’s Centro Historico.

Plaza de Armas is a beautiful, large square in the heart of Cusco surrounded by two beautiful churches and a host of little shops and restaurants.

Think it’s beautiful during the day?  You should see it at night when everything is lit up.Cusco comes to life at night.  The hills that surround the city center are lit up beautifully, and the streets are full of life.  Unfortunately, it’s also freezing cold at night which makes it a little harder to enjoy the beautiful ambiance.

Hopefully in the next few days we will regain enough strength to venture out and photograph a few more things.  I am thankful we still have three more weeks in Cusco, but so over being sick.  And not interested in eating black beans again for a long, long time.