Cusco Cuscoooo

If you have ever been to a bus station in South America then I´m sure you remember that at every station a person is yelling out a destination to intrigue all the potential buyers. It´s tough competition since there are twenty or more stations all offering pretty much the same thing. One person yells Cusco Cuscooo, and immediately 5 more people around them start yelling too. This ´Cusco Cuscooo´ phrase has been stuck in my head since the night we waited for two hours to go to Cusco. There wasn´t anyone else around except all the people, already holding tickets, waiting to get on the bus to.. CUSCO!

Back in Ollantaytambo, we were woken up with, ´tamales tamales tamales!´Lynne said she heard a bus driving away and the same woman yelling, ´Muy RICOS!´At that moment Lynne and I were set on finding tamales later that day. We were unsuccessful in Pisaq but figured Cusco would satisfy our craving. Nope, no tamales. Well, today is Sunday, and apparently it´s Cusco´s tamales-on-every-corner Day. I passed tons of women with steaming hot bags of tamales, but of course my craving wasn´t in full force at 9am this morning and I would rather treat myself to the free breakfast at my hostel, but I am hoping to find the tamale chicas around lunch time. Lynne, I suggest you come back for tamales tamales tamales :)

I´ve been watching some of the Euro Cup, had a great lunch at an Irish Pub called The Irish Pub yesterday, and haven´t really worked yet. Can´t complain about that! The hostel hosted a big Friday the 13th costume party and I must say Halloween is my least favorite holiday, so I was all but excited about getting dressed up. I took a few shots, I mean, I buried my huge ego and put together a costume with some left over leopard material. There were face and body painters too, so naturally, I was a cat. I would have been satisfied with the basic nose, wiskers and some cool eye make-up, but of course that is far from what I got. Here, you see what I did get and me drinking on the job, totally necessary, obviously! The party got pretty big downstairs with mostly locals and the hostel crew pretty much stayed upstairs. However, it was a pleasure to meet a well known group of gay guys that frequent the parties at the hostel. So overall it was a good party, I´m just hoping I´m out of herre before the next costume party!

While walking around this afternoon I noticed the main plaza was blocked off to cars so I ventured over to see what the action was. Just like Santa Barbara and State Street, it seems that Cusco uses any excuse to have some sort of parade in the Plaza de Armas. I´m not entirely sure what the parade was for today, but I heard they do it a lot on Sundays. People of all ages in different groups were dancing through the streets in authentic costumes. Very pretty! I was drawn to the niños of course, this little guy was so good! The alpacas were also very stunning with their fancy bows. A little dog starting sniffing the back of the alpaca´s leg, it took the alpaca about 10 seconds to turn its neck all the way around, and they startled each other. It was pretty funny becauase the dog was the size of a cat.

Things have been pretty mellow here. I either go walk around by myself, watch movies in the TV room, EAT good food, or hang out with my roommate Katie, from Australia and one of the other bartenders, Gadi, from Israel. I met a really nice couple from England last night who just did the sand buggies in Ica so they were getting me excited about that, and I was telling them about the Jungle Trail because they are going to do that in a few days. It´s fun swaping travel stories with people! I´ve heard there are some good hiking trails around here, so I am going to get someone to go with me soon. I also think I am going to find a Spanish class tomorrow since I will be here for a while and it gives me something else to do during the day.

I purchased an enormous water, 2.5 liters, for about one dollar. I must stay hydrated! Plus a lot of peeps are sick here and that´s the last thing I want. I discovered a huge market today with food and hand crafts and basically anything you could ever want. There were rows and rows of smoothies, it was glorious. These markets seem to be pretty standard everywhere we have been b

ut it´s still fun to walk through them. I hope my next blog will be more interesting, I just haven´t really done that much in Cusco yet!