Day 4-fri 24
Today we woke up early for an annual festival that is an all day event in cusco. The festival is called Inti Raymi-festival of sun (in Quechua). Basically they started off in a placed called Qoricancha where there are hundreds of peruanos dressed in different native attire and pretty much have a dance/play performance for everyone around. After this the performers relocate to plaza de armas a few blocks over for more dancing and singing. Finally the dancers end up in Sacsaywaman, where the play ends and they sacrifice a llama. Anyways, we made it to qoricancha but unfortunately there were a bazillion people there so it was really hard to see anything. Then we went to Plaza de Armas but since the performance was taking forever to begin we decided to hike up to Sacsaywaman to try to get some good seats. Let’s just say I wanted to die. The hike is so hard! There is a part in town were you have to climb 110 steep steps before walking uphill the rest of the way. High altitude + out of shape + way too long of a hike=me doubled over thinking I was literally going to die. To make matters worse I got to be a first hand witness of little Peruvian women in high heels with babies tied onto their backs hike up the mountain with great ease. At one point a little old Peruvian man turned to me and said, “Esta bien?” Am I ok? Let me think about that for a second…NO. Literally. Anyways, we got to the performance 2 to 3 hours early for our seats on the hill. We just sat on the hill waiting for the stuff to start. Scariest thing of my life happened—we were sitting on the grass when all of the sudden Rachel looks at my leg and jumps up and screams. I look down to see a huge spider on my pants. It was HUGE. (not tarantula big but definitely the size of at least a half dollar) it was so scary. But then it got boring just waiting for everything to begin again. I started getting really annoyed with how close Peruvian people sit next to you. Seriously, they have no concept of personal space. What was really funny was that when the performance finally started there would be people standing up blocking people’s views so the Peruvian people would yell, “sientense!” and chuck rocks and food at them until they sat down. Hilarious, I tell you. The best part of the performance was the sacrificing of the llama so we waited until that part then started our journey back down the mountain. We ate at a little restaurant and didn’t get home til about 7 or 8ish. It was an awesome time being able to be a part of such a special celebration. We were pretty tired so we stayed in for the night. Our host mom is so funny. She took in a chinese man for a few days so he could go to Inti Raymi. It was hilarious because he only really speaks chinese so maria elena would try to speak broken English to him so they could somewhat communicate. I wish I could have captured a picture to show his facial expressions. He would say something and then just pause with a huge, cheesy smile on his face and it was his cue for us to laugh. It was so funny to try to convince him to get a Facebook-he kept saying, “My master say study much books and articles, articles, articles. I no have time.” Now, just imagine this sentence coming out of a tiny chinese man’s mouth-it was precious and took so long to spit out since it was more like, “my my my my my master say he say say to study much books and and and articles articles articles.” Needless to say, it was hilarious.
Caution: Do not attempt to say the above stated quotes in a chinese accent. It may cause the wetting of the pants. The end.
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