"Nothing was planned today until a Cusco & surrounding area tour at about 2pm so I was very excited about sleeping in. I think it may have been about 10:30 when we went to sleep and I was awake this morning at 7:30! Ah! I guess that's sleeping in when you've been getting up at 4! Ha ha! I just missed a bunch of people going out for breakfast when I came out of my room at 8am. Tyler & Andrew were already up too and we waited until about about 9 for Tanya, Sari & Liliana to be ready. Then we all went shopping!"We chose not to go back to the Plaza De Arams, so we went the opposite way to another market we had heard of. We finally found it & had a great time shopping, but I couldn't for the life of me find a place to exchange my money. I still had $62 and wanted it in soles, but it just wasn't happening. The other night I had tried to change it over too but Kirk decided we needed to leave before I could b/c he didn't feel right about the men in there. Fair enough. So we played musical money & I owed Sari & I owed Liliana & she owed me and Tyler owed Andrew, etc! We all bought some things & then stopped for lunch & went back to meet with everyone else for our tour. I had a cheeseburger for lunch & it was real good- lots of cheese! Tanya ordered a hot dog & it came sliced up long- ways on a croissant. The rest had pizza & again, we had leftovers & gave it away (to the same girl from the day before!) It had gotten warm out so after lunch before we left, I changed into my new skirt & sandalls with a shirt & sweater and thought it was great. I later learned what a mistake that was!
"Our tour began just around the corner from the Monastery at the Catholic Cathedral. It was pretty impressive in there with all the gold & silver crafted so intricately & wood as well. There were also huge oil paintings that sometimes spanned an entire wall! Some of them were probably 60 feet high! (if not more) Our tour guide spoke a lot and I should have been interested (like Chris Nichol was) in the history of the Spanish coming and forcing their religion on the native Peruvians. The Catholicism & of course worship of Mary (who the Incas learned to worship as the Mother Earth) was somewhat disturbing & rightly so. They had statue upon statue of the crucified Christ, some covered in blood, some with a large cultured skirt on down to his knees; even one where Jesus' skin was black in color. Wow! Very diverse, and pretty neat to look at.
"After the cathedral we went outside of Cusco to about 3 different sites where more stone brick formations were found. They were pretty cool, but the same as Machu Picchu. After a while, I started to get cold and then colder & colder & became quite uncomfortable. At the last stop, I said I was going to stay in the bus, but slowly everyone else got out and I thought if I was the only one left, I bus driver may ask me to get off too and I couldn't argue with him in Spanish, so I willingly went & walked quite fast up to our destination. The other ones had been cool, though, even using some large, unsculpted rocks and one was in the middle of an outdoor meeting place, squared around with a low block wall-fence and the large half circle wall facing it had large seats built into the stone wall for a douzen or more people to sit, evenly spaced, facing this large, uncut stone. At other places, there seemed to be images in the walls when you combined the shapes of many blocks. At one point, our guide pointed out a "snake " starting at the tail & following it around to the head. Then, he showed us a llama, throwing pebbles at the higher blocks (ears, head) and then pointing out the body & legs & lastly the tail. It was pretty impressive!
"The last stop, though, was the coolest, so I was glad that I had went to see and not stayed on the bus, despite the fact that I was freezing. It was like a fertility temple but you couldn't go into it, you just looked at it from the one side and you could drink the water (as the legend went) and have the chance of having twins! It was pretty cool, and to this day, they don't understand how the Incas got the water to flow out of the front in two small waterfalls and into a pool at the bottom. They know there was a spring or water source about 2km away, but have found no irrigation system to bring the water this far. Even if the Incas got the water to travel underground, they are still baffled as to how. And our guide added that the rate of waterflow at this Temple never changes- it remains constant from the dry season to the rainy season- it always comes out at the same speed, same pressure. Bizzare, huh? These amazing people sure accomplished a lot in only 500 years!
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