Sacsayhuaman Ruins - pronounced Sexy Woman!

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Tyler says ¨Lets Go Hawk´s´´ can you believe he´s thinking about football in Peru! Just kidding, we have some time to kill before we see an Andean dance exposition and it´s raining outside.

We have had a big two days. Yesterday we mailed postcards, and it was ridiculously expensive, so if you get one from either of us you should feel very special (and that we knew your address).

Qoricancha is what we visited yesterday, if you do a google image search for that or some spelling of that, you´ll see some of the beautiful pictures. Here is an example-http://bltourscusco.com/fotos_city/qoricancha.jpg
It gets confusing because some things are spelled different in Spanish, English, and then Quecha (not sure on spelling) which is the language spoken in the mountains. It is massive ruins pretty much in the middle of the city, and the Spaniards built a huge church on top of it. A lot of the structures were still intact and awesome to explore, with beautiful gardens and views. There was also an archaelogical museum nearby showing some of the finds etc.

These were the first ruins we´ve seen and it was really exciting! We ate at an Irish pub because my stomach is still leery of foreign food, and I got my first Peruvian ketchup! It wasn´t the same, but nice to have. It was funny to have shamrocks and Irish stuff everywhere and no one spoke English. Tyler still found something exotic to eat, he´s a much better traveling eater than I am. We were warned that New Years Eve is nuts, so we were chickens and hid in our rooms to watch fireworks out of our beautiful view, and I´m glad we did. Everyone shoots off their own big fireworks apparently without regard to anyone else. It was also pouring rain, which would have been miserable! We also discovered that our hostel does not have hot water, which is unhappy to say the least. But, at this point, to stay somewhere and not have to move our huge bags and pay more, we´re putting up with it.



Sacsayhuaman is what we visited today. You can read about it and see pictures on good old Wikipedia here-http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sacsayhuaman I can´t find any other English sites searching here that describe or explain it. It was absolutely amazing. We hiked up to it, which was rewarding if not painful, and spent the whole afternoon exploring. Our travel book made it sound scary and ominous, but we felt completely safe if not stupid, when some mean Peruvian woman mocked my friendly ´Hola¨. Ít´s hard to describe in words how crazy and awe inspiring they were, which makes us anticipate Machu Picchu even more. The views were amazing and the stones were so fun to examine and wander around. We probably took way too many pictures, but thoroughly enjoyed the hike and exploration. We met a chatty dude from Alaska, which was surprising, you don´t meet that many people from there! The cold water showers are still awful, but otherwise the hostel has been nice and cheap. We´re planning on going to an Andean dance tonight, and going to horseback ride tomorrow in the nearby city of Urubamba on Peruvian Paso Finos!

I´m not sure if I said this before, but we´re going to upload pictures at the end of the trip because we don´t trust the computers here. Adios!

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Comments

[Joanna]

oooooohhh
thanks for including the links. looks like you are doing a lot! i feel comparatively lazy. i think my sister really liked Urubamba. i can't wait to talk to you guys when you get back!