Tracy Carolyn Photography

San Blas is the neighborhood of Cusco in which we live.  It’s known as the more bohemian neighborhood around here, though I’m not entirely sure why.  I think of it more as the hilliest part of Cusco (which is saying something.)  Above is a photo of Plaza San Blas.  It has a nice fountain and square, where there is a marketplace of local artisans on Saturdays (that’s where John bought his alpaca slippers.)

Every street around here is narrow, cobblestone, and steep.  Many of the pedestrian walkways are just stairs.  Oh so many stairs.

Peruvian style barbed wire fence…?

These gorgeous doors are just down the block from our house, and we pass them daily.  They are very intricately carved and really beautiful.

The ubiquitous Quechua ladies with their alpacas…

Seriously.  Always with the stairs.  My calves and thighs will be rock solid by the time we leave here.

This is the view we walk by each day leaving our apartment to go toward the plaza for Spanish class or to get something to eat.  Most of the houses here are left unfinished while the families wait to save money to build the top floors.  Many of them have those metal pieces sticking out of the tops, or other signs of half finished construction.  You can’t quite see it, but there is a brewery down there that brews Cusquena beer on Wednesdays, which is actually quite good.

Can you tell how steep this hill is?  It just keeps going up.  We walk this nearly every day.

And another photo of Cusco from above, from the top of one of those many flights of stairs.  It’s very brown, but really beautiful.  They don’t get snow here in the winter, so the mountains stay brown pretty much year round.  Apparently in the summer it stays just as cold, but rains and hails.  I’m glad we are here for the dry winter!

The ancient Inca fortress known as Sacsayhuaman towers above Cusco, just a 30-40 minute walk/hike from our apartment.  The name Sacsayhuaman in Quechua means something like “seat of the eagle,” though the locals like to laugh that tourists remember it as “sexy woman” since that is somewhat close to how the name is pronounced.

The walk is nearly all uphill, of course, and at such high altitude it can really get your heart pumping (I take comfort in knowing that even the locals walking up the hills were out of breath.)  But the view from the top – so worth it.

Can you see the Plaza de Armas?  That place is huge.  There’s also a token Jesus statue looking down over the city from a hilltop adjacent to the ruins.

Hey, look – it’s us!  We are alive and well, if a little rough around the edges these days :)

There are alpaca wandering around everywhere.  They look a little mangy up here, but still pretty cute.  Also, the ever-present Quechua lady leading around an alpaca in hopes of making a few coins for photos (they are everywhere in Cusco.)  We finally acquiesced because John wanted to pet the alpaca and thought maybe she’d let him get away with it.  No such luck – she quickly yelled at him for doing so.

John was obsessed with how amazing the stonework is.  Every stone was carved to perfectly fit the ones around it, and there is no mortar.  A single piece of paper wouldn’t fit between many of the stones on these walls.  In all fairness, I think most of him amazement was due to watching too many episodes of the History Channel program Ancient Aliens, which proposed that ancient Inca couldn’t possible have built such walls without extraterrestrial help.  Everyone has a theory, I guess.  Still, it is pretty impressive.

The scale of this place is huge.  I’m not sure how they moved those enormous rocks around.

There are spots all over where you can tell they carved chunks of stone out.  Most of them look like little seats, and a few are chunks taken out of walls.  (Side note for Tricia – I was this close to climbing into one of the wall ones to take a photo in a small space as a Europe flashback.  Not sure what stopped me, but know that I thought of it :) )

And of course, you can’t go to an Inca ruin without thinking of doing a yoga pose there.  At least, I can’t.  I had to hop over a wall to get to the grassy ledge for this pose.  After I came back, John tried to hop down and do a pose.  He was totally busted by the authorities who quickly shooed him back onto the approved areas.  Either it pays to go first, or being 6’5″ and wearing a bright green jacket make you more conspicuous.

This is just the first of many Inca sites we’ll be visiting – including Machu Picchu in two weeks!

*Please note that these photos are not mine.  My point and shoot camera suffered a water-related injury just before making it to the animal sanctuary and does not currently function.  These photos are courtesy of Jana, a Belgian student who was also on our field trip.

That’s right.  That’s a photo of John having a staring contest with a condor.

At this animal sanctuary in Pisac, Peru, they let you wander around in the condor cage.  Then the giant birds fly over your head in the impressive way that only a bird with the largest wingspan in the world can do.  It was cool.

The animal sanctuary also houses pumas, coati, turtles, alpaca, vicuna, and several species of birds, but the condors were everyone’s favorites.  I thought the pumas were pretty cute, too, but they were sleeping.  (It’s hard to compete with flying condors when you’re curled up like a lap cat.)

We visited this place as a field trip with our Spanish class on Friday.  The intention was that we’d practice our Spanish in the field, but in reality the guide was having far more fun asking us how to say things in English.  I guess I did learn how to say “Don’t scare the baby alpaca” in Spanish.  That ought to be worth something.

John and I have an odd arrangement when it comes to traveling in Spanish speaking countries.  I’m generally pretty shy and don’t like to chat with people, but John thrives on personal interactions.  So when we are in a taxi, or chatting with a vendor or random person on the street, John takes the lead and starts speaking Spanish.  After a short while, it becomes clear that John doesn’t fully understand what they are saying, and I start to interpret for him.  That’s when said taxi driver or vendor discovers that I speak Spanish, and that I understand better than John.  After that, they start talking directly to me, which I then translate for John so that he can speak back to them.

Did you follow that?  It’s complicated, and not the most effective means of communication.

Since we’ll be living in Spanish speaking countries until December, it seemed like a good idea to adjust this arrangement a bit, both by upping my confidence to think and speak on my feet, and increasing John’s comprehension.  To that end, we’ve just spent the week studying Spanish at the San Blas Spanish School here in Cusco.  We took classes 4 hours a day for 5 days, a total of 20 hours of intense Spanish classes (and for only around $100 per person.)

John and I were in different groups – he speaks excellent French but has less experience with Spanish.  I studied Spanish for two years in middle school, three years in high school, and a semester in college, and I still need quite a bit of work.  I guess it has been over 10 years (can that be right – how old am I?)  In all fairness I can usually read, write and listen well, it’s just the speaking that I’m not good at.  Which is, of course, the main thing you need when traveling.

Another big benefit of group classes is getting to meet and hang out with other students, most of whom are from Germany and Belgium, oddly enough.  Last night our school held a game night at a local bar, and today we took a field trip to the zoo – which was really an animal rehabilitation center with really cool animals like condors, coati, and pumas.

Classes generally took up most of our day, so we still haven’t done too much exploring yet, but I think they were worth it.  At the end of the week, I feel a bit more confident in my speaking, and I think John has learned more reading and spelling (two things he never learned from audio tapes he studied with in the past.)  I suppose the real test will come in the next few weeks when we try to communicate.  Vamos a ver!

You’ll probably fall into one of two camps on this one.

The first group will look at these photos and think, “Wow!  Look at all that produce!  And I bet its cheap!”

The second group will look at these photos and think, “Dear lord, I hope you washed everything you purchased from there within an inch of it’s life, and even then I’m not sure you should eat it.”

Needless to say, I fall into the first group (but I still wash everything.)  Look at that produce!  All this stuff is local.  Keep in mind it’s winter here, and we are at 11,200 feet.  How are they growing strawberries??

Not to mention bananas, apples, giant avocados, and whatever these are.

Everything is pretty much just sitting around in giant sacks, but this is probably one of the most organized farmer’s markets I’ve seen in another country.  There are sections divided by type of vendor (bread, cheese, fruit, etc), and the aisles even have signs hanging above them.  It’s very easy to move through and not chaotic at all.

All of the vendors have been super nice to us every time we shop, even when our Spanish isn’t stellar.  Often they are sitting around their booths having lunch with their family or cleaning produce, and several have even been sleeping when we wandered by (see the woman in the first photo.)

The meat always seems a little gross to me, but nothing smells and there are no full carcasses hanging anywhere.  Much calmer and cleaner than what I’ve see in Spain or Guatemala, for example.

There is, of course, a more traditional supermarket down the road from our apartment as well.  We’ve gotten a few staples from there, but it’s just more fun to shop at the San Pedro Market for produce.  Even if we do have to schlep it way back up the hill to our house – its good exercise :)