Qosqo... I love the Quechua spelling :)

(Very) unfortunately, we had to be up at 2:30am in the morning so we could get to the airport 2 hours before our 5:40am flight to Cusco. (Cheapest flight, worst departure time, don't recommend.) We didn't get much sleep that night, of course. Our drive to the airport was interesting since it was pitch black outside and we were essentially the only ones on the street. Big contrast to the crazy, bustling city of Lima during the daytime! Once at the airport, we first felt highly pissed off that we had to sit on the ground for 2.5 hours waiting for our flight to depart... but our feelings soon turned to delirium since we were running on no sleep. I don't remember what was so funny, most likely nothing at all... but we sure laughed a lot. I then stuffed my face with a ham and cheese croissant and a giant strawberry donut. Mmm mmm good. The flight to Cusco was only a little over an hour, but it was the scariest flight I think I've ever been on. I'm not sure if it's always so turbulent over that area of Peru, but if so, I'm not sure I have the guts to get on a plane again and fly there when it comes time to spend my last month there!! It seemed like almost the entire way our plane was shaking from side to side. Not fun. But the flight attendants (young and attractive, of course. We're in Peru, remember?) didn't even have a hint of worry on their faces and somehow managed to still serve us all drinks as the plane bounced around... WITHOUT SPILLING. Where do they learn these skills?

Arrival in Cusco... also not fun. We'd been warned that the second we got there, people would be trying to sell us things. Well, they were right, multiplied by 1000. We got off the plane and before we even got to the baggage area, our poor ears were bombarded with loud Andean music from a live band. At seven in the morning. We were not happy, not happy at all. We kept asking ourselves, ¨What the hell?¨and declaring to everyone that ¨This should be illegal!¨. We were so tired we could barely even think. I felt like I'd been hit by a train. But somehow we managed to get our bags, rent a cell phone for 10 bucks (what a steal! Unless we lose it), and haggle in our sleep with some taxi drivers for a cheaper fare to the city center. They all tried to tell us it'd be at least 25 soles (too much) to the center, but after sleepy arguing, we somehow got it down to 10. Our taxi driver had a travel agent escort, which we thought was odd. I made a point to ask them squarely why there were two of them, so they'd know that we knew it was weird (you know?)... but in the end the travel agent turned out to be super friendly and made sure we got a room at our hostal of choice, Osiris in the cute, hilly San Blas neighborhood.

Even though it was only 7:45am and we had the whole day to explore the town, well... we didn't. We passed out and didn't wake up again until 3:30 in the afternoon. We walked around our neighborhood a bit and decided after only a few hours that Cusco was our new favorite town. The San Blas neighborhood is in the hills above the main square. It is very artsy and laid back, there are countless wonderful cafes with delicious food and baked goods, and it´s incredibly cute because all the streets are so tiny a car can barely fit through and the streets and walls are all cobblestone. It's a great mix of Spanish and Inkan architecture. A lot of the building walls still have their original Inka stone foundations and it was pretty amazing to see the stones up close... you can't even fit a credit card between them because the fit of the huge, interlocking stones is so perfect. Cusco was once the capital of the Inka's from which they spread out and conquered lands to the north and south (all the way up past Ecuador and as far south as parts of Chile and Argentina!). The town is apparently designed in the shape of a puma, too. Another great fact that I just discovered online... I guess in 2006 Cusco was found to be the point on Earth with the highest ultraviolet light level. Isn't that nice?

We spent our first evening at the South American Explorers Club, conveniently located just down the street from us. (It's an informational club for travellers that hosts weekly events, too.) They were having an unlimited cocktail night. We were still pretty tired but figured we'd try it out anyway. It ended up just being mostly the club staff and a few of their friends... and sleepy party pooper Rachel and Kerri in the corner on the couch. We drank our first pisco sour (the national drink, made with pisco [grape brandy], egg white, and some other odd ingredients). It's supposed to be smoother than a margarita, but I can't say I liked it that much. We also had some great baked potatoes with yucky South American chunky cheese along with our alcohol. They all kept trying to serve us more drinks (in miniature cups), thinking it would wake us up, but our eyelids just kept getting heavier and heavier. We were highly entertained, however, by a 41 year old British man who we can only describe as being similar to a young British fraternity boy. He was the most hyper person I think I have ever met, perhaps because of all the whiskey he had been drinking. He was the DJ for the evening and everytime a song came on, he jumped up and smiled and yelled like it was the first time he'd ever heard music in his life. TLC´s ¨I'm Pretty¨came on at one point and he deemed it his most favorite song ever. We realized there was a problem when we found ourselves reading a magazine in the middle of the party... at that point we knew we had to say goodbye and just go to bed.

The next days we spent wandering around town, snapping photos of every cute cobblestone street we passed and saying ¨no thanks¨to all the women and children (dressed in their traditional clothes with their most photogenic llamas and baby goats) who asked us to pay to take a photo of them. We went to the main plaza, Plaza de Armas, and snapped a billion more photos of the two churches and the plaza itself because it was all just so beautiful. We visited the Inka Museum, which thankfully included artifacts and information from all the pre-Inkan societies (who the Inkans conquered) as well as the Inkas. We later walked down Avenue del Sol to the Cathedral of Santo Domingo/ruins of Qorikancha (Temple of the Sun). Qorikancha was once one of the most important Inkan temples, dedicated to the Inkan sun god Inti, with floors and walls covered in sheets of gold and with a garden of golden statues. But when Spanish conquistador Francisco Pizarro came in the 1500s and conquered the Inkas he and his men took most of the gold with them. (At that point they had one of the last incas held hostage. Pizarro told him that if he surrendered the gold of Qorikancha, his life would be spared... but even after allowing the Spanish conquistadors to steal and melt down all the gold, Pizarro decapitated the inca anyway.) Qorikancha was later turned into a monestary of the Dominican order. Some of the stone ruins of Qorikancha are preserved within the monestary walls, giving the whole compound a really interesting dual history. In the 1950s a large earthquake destroyed most of Santo Domingo, but the Inka walls of Qorikancha withstood it all.

Our favorite restaurant was called Cafe Ritual Cultural... it served up some great banana pancakes and 3 course lunches that stuffed us silly. I'm not so sure they liked us so much, though. Everytime we tried to pay, something was wrong... either they thought we were giving them counterfeit 5 soles coins, or we gave them too big of bills and they couldn't make change and had to run across the street with our money and buy rice or something. It's annoying how the banks give out 50 and 100 soles bills, but most of the time people don't even have change for a 5 sol coin and ask you over and over if you´re suuuuure that you don`t have anything smaller. Same thing with Ecuador. Bah!

Anyway, we were going to go visit the Inka ruins at Sacsayhuamán (remember how to pronounce it with the catchy phrase ¨sexy woman¨), just a few kilometers north of our hostal (up a billion flights of stairs), but we decided we'd try to see the ruins when we come back to Cusco after our visit to the Sacred Valley and Machu Picchu. Plus we were still a bit worn out from not sleeping well the previous nights and didn't feel like that much exercise. Instead, we spent our last day buying our train tickets to Machu Picchu before we caught a local bus to the nearby town of Pisaq in the Sacred Valley.

Oh, one last thing. As we were walking back to our hostal one last time after breakfast on our last morning, we saw a GIANT dog the size of a horse prancing down the street ahead of us... with a tiny plastic bag in his mouth filled with biscuits. It was the funniest/cutest thing. The dog kept glancing back every so often to make sure his master was following him, and then once he was satisfied he'd turn around and continue on. I want a dog that does that! That's the crazy thing about Ecuador and Peru... nobody has leashes here, their dogs just are so loyal that they follow their owners wherever they go. I'm not sure I want a dog the size of a horse, though.

Bye for now, Cusco! I´ll be back in a few weeks...