Sunday, January 29, 2017

Cusco - Day 2

We decided to take a walking tour of Cusco. It's SO much more commercial / touristy than anything else in the Inca Valley. 
These folks stand around all day in their best Quechua outfits just to pose for pictures for 50 cents. They are irresistible to Patrice when it comes to taking pictures.

Note the sidewalk in the background. They are incredibly narrow in this old part of town. You can see how people walk single file.


Here are some other street scenes.  





 Many of the homes and businesses have courtyards and they encourage you to wander in and look around. Or, in some cases the courtyard is a restaurant.
Just like other places we've seen, Cuy is a delicacy here.





Apparently, it's the skin that is the tastiest part of the Guinea Pig. There's not a lot of meat on the carcass.




 We stopped for a coffee break on our way to the San Pedro market. It was up on a hotel balcony overlooking a pretty square. No less then 20 street vendors selling everything from artwork to alpaca sweaters to shoe shines dropped by our table.
Sure it was annoying, but we realized that everybody's got to make a living too.  
 Our goal is to reach the San Pedro Market. It's the big market where all the locals shop. And it's conveniently on the path of our walking tour.  Here are a number of pictures from inside the market.
    
 Here's one of many entrances. We didn't see this  until we were on our way outThe market has a lot of fresh stuff, including flowers 
    
 Lots of inexpensive fresh food. Looks like chicken is the specialty 
    
 Every kind of jugo (juice) you can imagine We saw some fruits we'd never seen before
Here's Patrice and the artist buying some artwork for a friend:
 
 

 All those Inca artifacts had to end up somewhere. Besides the ones that Hiram Bingham (discoverer of Machu Picchu) took back to the U.S., many of them ended up here in this History Museum.

Today is our last full day in Cusco. Tomorrow we start our journey back to North Carolina.


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