first week

Its hard to believe we´ve been her only a week. Lots has happened. We just got into Cuzco yesterday and it is really different from most of the places we have been so far. Here is the rundown in short order:We started in Lima. Stayed in a small area called Barranco. Lima is pretty smoky, but the area we were in was really beautiful. Everything there was low buildings and it was very towny feeling. I realized how bad my spanish was when everone was friendly enough to want to stop and talk to us on the street. There was some really nice graffiti in spots and some amazing old buildings that were in perfect disrepair. The way they were crumbling, you could see exactly how they were constructed which was really interesting. The sad part is that just like st luois, there is a lot of really amazing stuff that is expensive enough to fix that it just fall deeper into disrepair - not to mention the thick layer of smog dust settling onto every ledge. Alot of kids in Barranco wanted to sell us weed.We took the bus to Ayacucho at night. We ended up in the very front of a double decker bus with a giant windshield in front of us. It was like flying around mountain roads on the roof of the passenger side of the car. Slept a bit but woke up when we entered the hairpin turns because we were swinging back and forth like crazy. Went through Pisco - where the earthquake was. Lots of tent and everything is pretty demolished but it was nice to see that the people seem very determined to get things put back together again. All of the rubble has been cleared out of most of the buildings and is sitting on the side of the road. People seemed to still be going about their business to some extent.Ayacucho was a bit of a whirlwind. We got there and somehow the first day stumbled into a religious festival. We wnded up dancing through the streets of the town (some very steep) with a giant group of people and a brass band. They fed us and we drank beer and chicha with them. For those who don´t know, chicha is a kind of corn beer, I saw where they were fermenting it in big open tanks like a cow trough. Apparently the process starts with people chewing the corn. It tasted pretty all right and we were all drinking out of the same cup anyway. The festival culminated in people throwing items out into a crowd- everything from underware to tupperware.We met a lot of really cool people at the festival. A guy named Willy who was a lawyer and told us about the devistation of the Incan Empire by the Spanish and got teary when he talked about surviving the crazy years of the Sendero Luminoso when something like 40,000 were killed. We also met Betty (Benigna) and her husband Donato who were artisans who made retablos. We ended up going to their house the next day to see how they made their work and meeting their son Arturo and their cousins who have a workshop behind their. We talked a lot with all of them and they fed us a snack and lunch which we totally weren´t expecting. We went to dinner with them (and two french couple who had also gotten swept up into the celebration) that night and had a great time. They gave us all gifts and were really gracious and amazing people.We actually ended up meeting Betty the next day and she took us to meet a ceramicist whe was also very gracious.From there we checked out the market and left that night for Andahuaylas.We got to Andahuylas at 5:00 in the morning. The road there was a 10 hour dirt trail winding through the Andes. I woke up at one point to see abridge that looked like some total Indiana Jones shit. I am pretty sure I heard pieces of the wooded deck falling to the rocks below. We slept late and took a cab to Laguna de Pacucha about 10 miles from town. We got stuck in a cab for probably an hour and a half because there was a rally race going on that had shut the road from Ayacucho to Cuzco down for most of the day. The lake was huge and we say some guys catching carp with their bare hands wading in the lake. They must have had 20 of them there so it seemed like they really knew what they were doing. We ate a fried trout in a tiny restaurant and fed the head and the skin to a dog that was hanging out by our table.Rode the bus to Cuzco fron 6am to 5pm. It smelled like some major BO inside and everyone had on blankets even though it was 80 degrees in there. We were freaking out because there was no breeze and it was another windy one through the mountains. The last bus smelled like the bathroom because the door kept opening so our only saving grace was that this bathroom seemed to stay closed.Our place in Cuzco is nice. We havent had a chance to check things out oo much yet but it looks a bit like a Peru theme park. We´ve seen a tenfold increase in the number of whiteys around and even got called gueros last night. Even the dirt hippies have popped up here. Had a good talk with a guy ogn the street. We´ll see how it goes.
Camf