Yusuf here trying my hand at this whole blogging thing. We survived our first night in Cuzco! It does get pretty cold at night but with 2 sweatpants, three t-shirts, a hoodie and 2 blankets I managed alright. I think we are all getting a little more accustomed to the altitude as well.
In the morning we went on a tour through the city of Cuzco and some of the surrounding Incan ruins. Our guide, Archie (okay that isn’t his real name) walked us through the city and pointed out all of the historic landmarks within the city and also took us to a local market where I tried a pepino dulce. It looked like a yellow, striped tomato and tasted like a cantaloupe. There were a bunch of other very interesting fruits that I didn’t get to try for lack of time and for fear of getting a stomach bug. From what I learned from Archie, much of the history within the city was centered around the Spanish conquistador’s attempts to stamp out Incan culture – all the major Incan temples (within the city and out) had been razed to the ground and replaced by Catholic Cathedrals. All that remained of the initial Incan structures were the stone foundations characterized by the irregular brick shape and lack of mortar holding it all together. Although I could still sense some historical resentment by the Peruvians for what the Spanish did, it was interesting to see the major impact the Spanish played on the formation of the modern city of Cuzco. I found the similarities between the Peruvian city of Cuzco and the southern Spanish city of Cordoba uncanny. Both cities have narrow, hilly, winding streets that usually led to large open plazas, and many of the houses had a similar architectural style characterized by a rectangular building with a large open courtyard in the middle. Not to mention that the Spanish converted the Mezquita of Cordoba and the Incan temples of Cuzco into Catholic cathedrals. But I digress.
At lunch we tried alpaca meatballs, a first for us all I’m assuming. Your’e probably wondering what it tastes like and the best answer I can give you is that it simply tastes like alpaca. After lunch we ascended 200 meters into the windswept hills northeast of Cuzco to check out the Incan ruins of Saksaywaman and Qénqo. Saksaywaman was a large temple dedicated to the gods of the sun, water, and lightning, among others. Qénqo was a smaller set of ruins that were carved into natural cave formations and was used as a place to leave offerings for the gods and carry out the process of mummification. I could go on and on about the amazing history of these ruins but I will save you the time and me the energy (check out Wikipedia if your’e really interested).
The entire day I was wearing Pippen’s GoPro on my hat and he was controlling the video recording with his phone. As a result, I never knew when he was recording and hopefully this leads to some good, candid video of the trip. I guess we will see when we compile our Peru montage…
The last thing we did after eating dinner that night was go out and look at the Southern night sky. I was expecting Cuzco to be a great star gazing spot but the city is much more brightly illuminated than I had initially thought. The first thing I noticed was that the moon was waxing and waning from the bottom to the top instead of from the right to the left like we are accustomed to in the northern hemisphere. Using an app we were able to locate the constellations of Scorpio, Libra, Lupus, and Sagittarius and that was pretty cool and a first for most of us. If you focused long enough on the night sky, you could see the faint glow of Milky Way in the middle of the night sky. A few of us were also fortunate enough to see a shooting star streak across the sky. I was especially excited because I had never seen one before. It was a little cloudy out so I’m hoping to go back out tomorrow and see if there were any other major constellations we missed. If I spot anything else I’ll make sure to fill you guys in.
-y
EGL Family Abroad 