Cusco

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Waking up and already being in Cusco was a great feeling. There was also a festival going on for Corpis Cristi. The hotel gave us a map of the immediate area showing different churches, and plazas that might be interesting to see.
Lisa and I were very excited to explore the city. The first plaza we saw appeared to have a few protesters, but since we do not speak fluent spanish, we weren´t sure what they were saying. THe protesting ended really fast too. We continued our walk around to the main plaza. There were so many people in the plaza. It was crazy. THe churches are also beautiful. It looked like some kind of ceramony was going on when we arrived. We tried to get a little closer to at least see what was happening. As we did this, I ran into a friend Rachel from highschool. We both recently found out we´d be in Peru at the same time, however we did not have confirmed plans yet. It was fun seeing her and her boyfriend again. I hadn´t seen them in years.
After grabbing a quick lunch with them, Lisa and I continued to walk around the city. It was so crowded that it took a long time to get anywhere. Since there was a feswtival going on, there were local food vendors all over the streets. A specialty during festival times is guinea pig. Lisa and I had heard about this, and she really wanted to try some. I did not. Once Lisa saw the guinea pigs she wasn´t as sure at first, but then decided she had to try it anyways. The guinea pigs looked like they were shaved, and then fried. I thought it looked disgusting. You can even see the teeth in some of the pictures i took. The other foods out were a mix of potatoes, chicken, sea weed, and other meat. Lisa and I didn´t try anything from the street as we weren´t sure if we´d get sick.
We spent the rest of the day walking around the streets, and markets. We bought a few items. Lisa does not know how to bargain as well so i took over doing that for the both of us in the little spanish I know.

At 6 pm we returned to the hotel to meet our tour leader to talk about our 3 day hike. At the meeting we found out that at night it might reach -15 Celcious. We didn´t realize it was going to be that cold for what we read on the internet so we had to rent additional sleeping bags for our hike as both of ours only go down to -5 Celc.

Our group decided to go out for Chinese for dinner. We all learned that Chinese is horrible in Peru. Whatever I ordered seemed to be the worst out of the group too. I think i took only a few bites out of my main dish.

We all returned to the hotel to pack for our hike. Our duffels could only be 7Kg. Everything else we wanted to bring had to be in our day packs.

Lisa and I were both exhuasted by the time we finished packing, and went straight to bed.

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