Cookout

A few days ago we met up with our friend Jenny's friend Manuel who lives in Cusco. I thought we were just going to have some coffee and chat, but Manuel was saying something about his friend and a party and cooking potatoes in the ground. We said, "Sounds good!" and we were off hiking accross the city to Oswaldo's house.

There were only a few people there when we arrived at what appeared to be a house still under construction with a beautiful vista across the city. We made ourselves comfortable in a narrow fenced-in yard space where there was a small oven-shaped earth construction with a roaring fire in it.

We talked happily for awhile as more people arrived and the earthen stones in the oven turned black. Eventually, Oswaldo collapsed the top of the oven with a stick, and started throwing in potatoes, plantanes, and chicken with fresh rosemary wrapped in foil.

Oswaldo shoveled more earth on top to seal in the heat as much as possible, while others started making fresh guacamole and salsas.

After about 15 or 20 minutes, we unearthed our dinner, and everyone dug in! There were several varieites of potato (including a somewhat sweet one I'm unfamiliar with), and everything was delicious!

Last Day in Cusco

Here is where we've been living for the last 2 weeks:

The two major up-sides to the room were its price and location. Right outside our door is a large, infrequently trafficked street with a lovely median that kids would use for all kinds of interesting activities. Every night on the way home we'd see dancers, skateboarders, or jugglers practicing. Here's a shot of some of some bikers right across the street from our house.

Last night, as we headed out for dinner, we found the street closed-off entirely with a small parade of elementary-school-aged kids with homemade lanterns.

The major down-side of the room was the maximum of 2-3 minutes of hot water a day. Perhaps we were showering at the wrong times, but that was all we could ever get.

So, for our last night in Cusco we decided to treat ourselves to a night in a more upscale hotel. The best way to describe their shower is the feeling of standing under a waterfall. The new room is a wonderful, large place, with a seemingly inexhaustible supply of hot water. After 30 minutes under the steaming falls, we feel thoroughly rejuvinated and ready for another 3 weeks of camping conditions (which is more or less what we're going to be doing in the Colca Canyon and the north of Peru).

Next time we write, we should be in Arequipa! Cheers everyone!

"Now I really feel complete"

Remember the piazza and hamburguesas van from a few posts ago? We had never seen it move from its spot next to our favorite cafe, until last night when we found it awake and operating two blocks down the street! (Selling, from what we could tell, only chicken)

As Jen said, "now I really feel complete; we can leave Cusco"

Our hike out of the city

Greetings all!

Today we took a long hike out of the city. We're feeling pretty aclimatized by now, and the views were spectacular. Here are some photos.



Here is Jen about to set out from the Christo Blanco (which it's already a bit of a hike to get to). (This was the sweet photo to counterbalance the "tough" photo we had just taken (not pictured here)).



This is a shot (from the side) of the Sacsayhuamán ruins above the city. We had already read about these ruins in the book "The Last Days of the Incas", because one of the Incan emperors fled here to hide out from the Spanish. They were able to throw rocks to keep the Spanish away, but eventually they ran out of rocks and water and were captured.



On the edge of a small town above Cusco we saw this billboard. In case you can't read it, it appears to be advertising a public restoration project for this apparently barren field from 2004 that was scheduled to be completed in 90 days. Regardless of whether this was what they were aiming for, we thought it was nice.



As we continued out into the countryside, we walked through a small town rimming several large fields. To the left of the photo, there were people actively scorching some wheat fields, and behind us there was a large number of workers harvesting what looked like potatoes. Many of the workers stopped to wave and ask how we were doing, and a few tried to interest us in a horseback ride through the country. We're considering it.


Several more switch-backs up the road was this beautiful home, with this beautiful pig tied up across the street.





In addition to the pig, we also witnessed a sheep crossing further up.



The countryside surrounding the city is a patchwork of farmland and occasional houses. If you look at the large version of this next photo, you can see some of the terraces on the hillside.



We left the paved road and started walking along dirt roads and trails somewhere around here...









Here I am hiking through an anonymous field to get back to the road we spotted from the crest of a hill.



And Jen on the trail.

It was a great hike! Afterwards we enjoyed our favorite hole-in-the-wall vegetarian lunch, and had a recuperative coffee at Cafe Punchay. On the advice of our friend Manuel we also went to see the pre-Columbian art museum, but more on that another time.

Here are another set of photos from around Cusco:

Here's a shot of a playground on the way up the hill to the Christo Blanco.

A few dogs lounging in the late afternoon. There are many friendly, free-roaming dogs all over the city.

This is another shot of the streets above the Plaza de Armas.Why aren't there any pictures of the streets below the Plaza de Armas? Because they're a lot more like any conventional city anywhere.


This is not the Plaza de Armas, but the side of a smaller plaza about a block away.

We found a new way up the Christo Blanco that involves an extremely long and steep stairway. Near the top of the stairway, we found this kitten!

This truck has been parked outside our favorite cafe since we arrived. This shot also gives a good detailed view of kind of walls that are so characteristic of this area.

This was taken from a bench in another of the smaller plazas.

Another shot on the way up to the Christo Blanco.

* * *

Jen has just gotten over a slight sickness for the past few days, so we've been doing a lot of low-key, indoor types of things recently. In this coming week, we have a few new sights we plan to see, as well as a day-trip to one of the smaller towns an hour or so out into the countryside. We also have our longer hike from last week to tell about. So keep an eye out for those!

About Food

Cooking is great. But Cusco has taught us that our interest in cooking wanes significantly with the availability of delicious, multi-course meals for $2-5 apiece.

There are a few distinctive varieties of restaurant we have run across so far in Cusco.

The Polleria: The most common type of restaurant are the pollerias and broasterias—restaurants specializing in chicken and other roasted meats. Walking past (which is the closest we have been to such restaurants) you can often see large stone ovens with 4-5 rotating spits, each containing 3-4 whole chickens. Because of the ubiquity of these restaurants, the number of whole chickens entering the city daily has been the subject of some speculation for us.

Vegetarian Restaurants: We've been frequenting a variety of restaurant I didn't expect Cusco to have—the local vegetarian hole-in-the-wall. I had (perhaps naively) assumed that if there were exclusively vegetarian restaurants they would market to upscale yuppie tourists. Instead, we were pleasantly surprised to find a robust culture of vegetarianism, and a greater density of vegetarian restaurants than many parts of the bay area.

The typical vegetarian restaurant we frequent is quite small, with 4 or 5 tables, often filled with locals, and offers a daily set menu for anywhere from 3 to 10 soles ($1-$3). The set menus usually include some kind of salad (often buffet style) consisting of parboiled carrots, beets, cabbage, potato, and other shredded vegetables (no greens); a hearty bowl of soup, bread, and your choice of a few daily main courses. If the menu's price is closer to 3 soles, you can expect main courses to be based almost exclusively on potato and/or eggs and rice (though there is a great variety of things one can do with these basic ingredients). As you get toward the 10 soles end, you branch out into other vegetables, grains, tofu, fake meats, etc. The set menus also typically include some kind of mate (that is—herbal tea infusion). Yesterday at lunch we had a delicious lemongrass infusion.

(Our--I should say Jen's--only disappointment so far has been the apparently sub-standard quality of the french fries. Though many restaurants offer fried potatoes, they tend to be kind of greesy and sad. Never having been much of a fan of the fry myself, I'm doing great).

Market Stalls:
The only way to eat even cheaper than the local hole-in-the-wall is to eat the snacks sold at stalls in the central market. It has several long rows of counters with 1 or 2 small wooden benches in front of each food stall. On our 3rd day, we enjoyed a breakfast of fried cheese on toasted bread for 1 sole each (30 cents). To our surprise, the elderly woman running the stall cut several slices of cheese off her wheel which she fried separately from the toasting bread. This turns out to be a delicious way to do "grilled cheese". You can get a fried egg on toasted bread for the same price. Other vendors sell chaufa, different kinds of soups, meat sandwiches, fried fish, etc. The market is certainly not on my list of cleanest places in the world, but it's a very lively and exciting place to be. The prepared food vendors occupy a place in the market next to large stainless steel containers of raw milk and butcher tables with many whole chicken and pig carcasses in various states of mutilation. If that's not a fun place to eat, I don't know what is!

Chifas:
Another very common variety of restaurant is the “Chifa”, or Chinese restaurant. They tend to be a little more expensive (10-20 soles, or $3-7), and it isn't unusal for them to be (apparently) run entirely by non-Chinese peruvians. “Chaufa” (fried rice) is far and away the most common dish served at every Chifa. Of the 30 or so Chifas we've walked past, every one has an entire column of their menu with 15 or 20 items that all say “chaufa con pollo”, “chaufa de verduras”, etc. Sometimes this assortment of chaufas constitutes their entire menu. Yesterday I did manage to discover a place that would give me a heaping plate of tofu and vegetables, but in my experience so far this is a rare occurrence.

For Tourists:
The last variety of restaurant are those aimed at tourists. They tend to be centered around the touristy Plaza de Armas, and can range in price from 20 to 40 soles ($7-14) (or perhaps more, we didn't really look very closely). Their menus are in English, and they often employ someone to stand in the street with a menu and attempt to shuttle tourists inside. In the evenings I've started replying to their invitates by saying “Gracias, pero ya he comido quatro churros!” which means “Thank you, but I've already eaten 4 churros!” (Often not far from the truth). This revelation has received many surprised and genuine laughs from the restaurant employees.

Bakeries:
There are many delicious and cheap bakeries everywhere. Every morning I walk to the bakery two blocks down the street from us and buy a “pye manzana”, which is something like a largish croissant, generously filled with apple pie filling. It costs 50 cents. For 30 cents, they also sell funnel shaped pastries filled with dulce de leche, large ovals of fried dough filled with a light coconut cream and dusted with powdered sugar, as well as several other confections we lack the vocabulary to describe. Almost every evening we walk to a stand which sells freshly fried churros—long, thin, fried bread with an apple cinnamon filling, and rolled in granulated sugar. Finally, it is not unheard-of for us to go to one of the many cake shops in the afternoon and buy a slice of one of their many varieties of cake--again, for 50 cents apiece--to top off lunch. Since we'll be in SE Asia soon, we thought it appropriate to eat as many non-bean-paste desserts as we could now, while we still have the chance. (Not that we dislike desserts filled with bean-paste; they're good too, just in a different way).

About the cuy:
"What about the guinea pig?" I hear you ask. Yes. Well, it's true that there might have been a lot of big talk before our departure about our plans to eat cuy. The real truth of the matter is this: We haven't seen cuy offered in any non-tourist restaurants. The cuy also tends to be comparitvely expensive, and, when push comes to shove, it's hard to pay 4 times as much as our normal, delicious meals to buy a cuy, which, at best, we will barely manage to choak down (and which would certainly necessitate 4-5 churros apiece to cleanse our palate, afterwards). So, no; despite the talk, it seems unlikely that we will be consuming those furry, lovable cuy on this trip.

On the other hand, I have begun referring to all the pigeons in the main square as squab.....

Some shots of the Fiesta!

We aren't terribly good at taking pictures--especially of people. Having a camera out when there are crowds of people makes us look like lame tourists (as opposed to the awesome tourists we know we are in our hearts), and, as Jen says, alters your whole experience of an event; instead of just enjoying yourself, you're constantly looking for or planning shots.

We also have trouble taking photos of individual people. We don't want to take (let alone post to the internet!) pictures of people without asking their permission. But it can be complicated to ask permission (particularly when you're a tourist; the question of money always seems to be in the air which can make it difficult to have normal interactions). Also, once you've asked permission, now they're posing when what you really wanted to do was catch them as you saw them originally.

What thoughts do all you photographers out there have about these dilemmas?

Anyway, here are some of the few photos we took during the festival last week.