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Published: November 16th 2012
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Our home for the next 6 days: Cusco! We noticed quite quickly that we'd moved about half a km up in altitude - we were panting like crazy when we had to carry our backpacks up quite a few stairs to our hotel (which, to our defense, was pretty much as high as you can get in the center..)
As we wandered around town to explore the first evening, we found ourselves agreeing with what was said about Cusco in the guidebook: a nice, friendly city, with loads of tourists and the kind of shops, restaurants, and other services you typically get in cities with lots of tourists, but still JUST below the tipping point of being wasted by tourism. The historic center is beautiful, with the many churches and other historical buildings. Unfortunately many of the Inca temples have been ruined by the Spanish. The foundation of one of them has even been used to build a church on, and many have been broken down so that the stones could be used for Catholic purposes. So if it weren't for the Inca walls that still line some of the very steep streets, and the mountains in the background,
you could easily forget you're in Peru. (One of these Inca walls contains the 'world famous' 12 angled stone - so if you're ever in Cusco and wonder why those crazy tourists are taking a picture of a random wall - yep, that's why). Cusco also has some beautiful plazas, all nicely lit at night. You could very well imagine to be in Paris instead! (..the garbage waiting at the bottom of some narrow back streets helped reinforce this comparison with Paris 😉). And although the city apparently has its share of petty crime, it feels safe to wander around in the center, also after dark. No wonder it has become a bit of a backpackers paradise..
We were however in Cusco with a mission beyond only visiting the sights - we were going to improve our Spanish through a 5 day crash course!
We had picked Fairplay/ Fairservices, a school recommended in the Lonely Planet, in particular because we really liked its setup. The school was founded by John, a Belgian who had fallen in love with Peru, and Fanny, a Peruvian language teacher who wanted to set up an alternative to the existing schools
that often exploited the teachers (and yes, they are a couple now 😉). The school now trains and employs single moms, a very vulnerable group in Peru, and the charity backing the school funds education and health care for their children, to help them have a better life. Rather than receiving just a low salary, the teachers get 2/3 of the students' payments directly. The school really functions like a little community, and Fanny and John do not only look very well after their teachers, but also their students. Not that it's all rosy at all times - Fanny, who was my grammar teacher, told me also about some of the challenges they had had around rising expectations from some of the former teachers. It's not always easy to do good, I guess..
Our crash course consisted of 5 days, with 3 hours of grammar and 3 hours of practicum each. Exhausting? Yeah, a bit.. Especially since both meant speaking Spanish all the time.. Our practicum teachers did not speak any English, and like true Peruvians they would not tell you if they didn't understand you, they'd just nod politely. Not that the was often the case, of course
😉. 3 hrs of practicum seemed a bit long, and our teachers were at times at a loss about what to do with us, especially as these lessons would go until 7PM, i.e. after tourist attraction opening times. So more often then not we ended up inviting them for a coffee somewhere warm for the last hour or so, rather than sitting outside. But it was fun to explore the city with locals. My teacher turned out to have history as a hobby, so we effectively had our private guide in all museums and ruins (which, unfortunately, were much less impressive than the ones in the Sacred Valley, but we had known that already). We wandered over local markets, had guinea pig at a local restaurant, tried proper chicha morada (drink made from purple corn, and much tastier than it sounds), and learned many things about Cusco life. Oh yes, and on the side we improved our Spanish.
Before we left Cusco, we still managed to fit in two touristy things I had been keen on - the chocolate museum and the center of traditional dance.
Stephen thought the chocolate museum, which of course also had a cafe
attached with yummy chocolate snacks and drinks, was too much a tourist trap. In my opinion, it was a smart entrepreneurial move to enrich a chocolate cafe with some interesting facts and artifacts, and draw more clientele. For the record - the Mayan chocolate drink was pretty tasty too, even Stephen had to admit that! Interesting fact - Peru´s chocolate export is rising quickly, as the government is trying to convince coca plantations to convert to chocolate instead. And the Netherlands is one of the major importers of organic Peruvian chocolate beans (Switzerland being nr 1, with over 40% of the total).
In the center of traditional dance we got to watch an hour of various dances originating from the communities around Cusco city. Of course there were quite a few foreigners, but about half of the spectators were Peruvian too, including a bunch of school kids (I guess from Lima or so?). The dances were quite well done, and fun to watch, although their similarity meant it was getting a bit less interesting after a while. A bunch of people left well before the hour was over, which seemed incredibly impolite to me, but I guess that's a cultural difference.. Us staying around was rewarded to with a great, passionate final couple dance though, so we felt quite smug.
And then our almost 6 days in Cusco were over, and it was time to embark on our long journey to Puno, at Lake Titicaca..
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