From there, on to our first mild disappointment. We were promised that lunch would be wherever we wanted, and while this technically was true, the restaurant that the tour company brought us to was far enough away from anything decent (we did try to find something) that is pretty much was our only option. It was a pretty boring Peruvian food buffet tourist style.
From there we went to Ollantaytambo, which was incredible. These ruins are all going up a hillside and are so well preserved it is incredible. We will put up pictures of it later. But it is a lot of the Incan terraces for farming and then temple ruins with huge stones for walls that still have some of the reliefs carved into them. Our last stop of the day was in Chinchero which is a very quaint town with a marvelous colonial church built atop an Incan temple. The art inside the church was quite nice and it was in front of one of the more beautiful plazas that we have seen so far.
Our second disappointment was on the bus back to Cusco. For some reason, a musician came on the bus and he was quite talented with the pan flute and that was very interesting. But once he started to play My Heart Will Go On with a wooden recorder, the line was crossed into absurd. And then of course, everybody had to tip him and it was very frustrating. So the moral of the story is, while getting a very cheap tour can be awesome, be prepared to put up with some ridiculous things.
On Friday morning we completed our last day of Spanish. Sarah got a pretty good review and I think that she is doing fine with it. I need some serious vocabulary to go with my verb conjugating skills that I learned. I am understanding most things as long as they aren´t said to quickly, but I have trouble putting sentences together.
After Spanish, we went back to the contemporary art museum for one of the more interesting displays I have ever seen. It was a flower competition and the 1st, 2nd, 3rd and honorable mention pieces in each catagory were displayed. The catagories ranged from religious flower arrangements to "A Semi-formal Tea for Two," in which the designers tried to match the tea set, the flowers and the tablecloth. There were some more abstract ones that were really cool involving a large frame and much more freedom of design. That was very interesting to think of flowers as art when they are so temporary and thus the art itself is temporary.
Work on Friday was pretty noneventful. There weren´t very many kids there, so Sarah, Tom (a new English guy who started this week) and I put together our display of the house with the pictures of all the afternoon kids so that volunteers will have an easier time with names and it shows the Inti family. It is cool and on Monday we should be finishing the display of the morning kids.
Friday night was our first night out in Cusco. We went out with Tom and he certainly knows how to work the system. Most of the clubs offer a free drink to get people to actually come in. So we jumped from free drink to free drink at the tourist clubs until settling in a slightly more Peruvian club that offered half priced drinks. These clubs are hilarious. They play a lot of bad hip-hop with some good songs thrown in here and there. The best one was called Mama Africa which seemed to play slightly better music and a wider range with Jay-Z followed by the Killers followed by Green Day and then Kanye. We had an excellent time and stayed out far longer than we planned.
On Saturday morning we had to be up by 7 to make it into town for horseback riding around the ruins near Cusco. Waking up was terrible, but we were both mostly recovered by the time we started our tour. We had a great guide and we joined by a French Canadian couple from New Brunswick who were very nice.
Unfortunately, two months ago, the excursion would have been much better. The city banned horses from getting near the ruins due to erosion, so we rode around the countryside between sites, but never quite up to them. Our first site was called Tambumachay which was a Temple to the sun. It was rather small, but very well preserved and like Pisac, still had running water. The water looks so clear and clean and cold and I would love to drink it, but I would also rather not risk it. From there we went to Pucupuchay which was a fortress and a checkpoint along one of the old trading routes. From there we got back on our horses for the ride back to Saqsayhuaman which is the biggest temple of the area. The horse riding itself was pretty awesome, the views were incredible, we had a good guide and it was just really cool to be riding through the country.
Our guide was definitely in his element at Saqsayhuaman. He is a grad student in archeology and participates in the digs there. They are still uncovering quite a bit and it is fantastic. Our pictures will show just how awesome it is. Some of the rocks are over 100 tons and just the fact that they were able to build something like this was incredible.
After our tour we took a much needed nap before going out to dinner at the house that one of the girls we are working with is staying at. She is staying with a very young couple who are both Salsa dancing teachers and love to party. Dinner was very interesting with them, it was tapas and pisco sours. I will never forget this, but they served, as one of the dishes, hotdogs cooked with red peppers and celery in coca-cola. Out of respect, the meat eaters tried it, but nobody would eat more than a single bite. And none of the Peruvians ate it, so we think it may have been something that they think we,as foreigners might like. The host father said that it was just something that he thought might taste good so he made it up. The rest of the food was better, chips with guacamole and individual pizzas. The drinks were also quite good as they have both been bartenders. We had a good time there and then went out to a club for dancing. Sarah and I did not last long since we stayed out late the previous night, but everyone else stayed out until about 5.
This morning was an awesome ceremony up at Saqsayhuaman. It consisted of first, an hour of traditional dances by 1st graders who were mighty cute, an opening ceremony introducing the Inca king, queen and warriors and finally the competitions between the different warrior teams, all high schoolers. The competitions were amazing, the involved some rickety contraption of really high logs that they had to climb up and then something to get across (a rope bridge, rings, balance beam, etc...) and fire below it. Basically, if they failed to get across, they fell into the fire at which point kids with stretchers carried them away. Most of the contenders weren´t actually hurt, but if they didn´t land on their feet, they had to be carried away. It was amazing. The whole point of this ceremony is to distinguish the manliest of the boys of Cusco and improve their marriage prospects. We also have lots of pictures that will go up soon.
This afternoon was a bummer because we thought there would be a soccer game, but it was false information. So we are in the internet cafe instead. Th-th-th-that´s all folks.
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