cuzco and more new friends and lots of walking and planning

i´ve decided that i want to take spanish lessons when i get back. i know, it would have been more helpful to have learned more spanish before i came to south america. hindsight´s 20/20, eh? but yeah, i would have really liked to chat more with the locals and other spanish speaking travelers. hanging out with alberta and, later, other guys from spain who speak limited english, as well, has been fun but it would have been more fun if i could have taken part more in the conversation. so i´m gonna look into spanish lessons when i get back. that or work on improving my mandarin...

anyways, so i said bye to alberto on wednesday morning at the bus terminal in puno and hopped on a bus that stops at important cultural points along the way to cuzco. i got over my ¨i don´t want to look like a tourist¨ thing and ended up taking somewhere around 100 pictures that day. the mountains here are beautiful - but i think i still like the rockies more. i was chatting with an east indian lady who now lives in hawaii with her husband and she agreed that mountains are different depending where you are and the rockies were just majestic. i agree with her. so i´m excited to head out to the rockies when i get back. we stopped at a couple cathedrals (no matter how small or poor the town, there will always be a well constructed church on the main plaza) and wandered through some inca ruins. it was interesting. arrived in cuzco wednesday night.

and since then, i´ve continued to meet more people - some more randomly than others. two incidences of note:

• oliver and his two other spanish friends whose names i cannot remember - alberto and oliver went to school together in spain so alberto gave me oliver´s number and i called him and we met up on thursday night. him and his friends are hilarious! everyone´s trying to sell you something in cuzco and that includes food. oliver and his friends are fast-talking bargainers who got guys from two different restaurants trying to up the other´s offers. i felt like i was in hong kong for a while there. it was definitely a different experience as i had NO idea that you could bargain meal prices and ask for free food (like appetizers) and drinks. so for 10 soles that night, i got a three course meal, a free appetizer and a free glass of wine. i don´t think it gets much better than that.
• federico and aldo - i went to a highly recommended vegetarian restaurant by myself for lunch on thursday but there were no free tables when i got there. a couple invited me to join their table and it turns out that the guy is from a town north of vancouver. so we chatted a bit about canada and how he likes living in cuzco more. anyways, they finish their meal and leave just as my meal comes. and then two older men come into the restaurant and ask if they can sit with me as there were still no free tables. they sit down and one guy - federico - asks me where i´m from. federico is visiting from lima but lived in england for almost a decade so his english was more than decent. his friend, aldo, is from cuzco and speaks very little english (much like my spanish) so we end up talking through ferderico. these guys were super nice and friendly. they told me where the good markets were, where the touristy things i had to do were, how much a cab ride from point a to b should be, where cuzco oktoberfest was going to be - they even drew me a map of all this! we talked some more and then they offered me a ride to some nearby ruins (Sacsayhuaman). they had rented an old-school vw bug and were excited to drive it around. so off i went with them and had my first ride in an old vw bug! and when i say old, i mean old. we had to push it to get it started. anyways, they dropped me off at the ruins, made sure that they didn´t overcharge me, and told me how to get back to town when i was done. and they gave me the address of their store and told me to find them the next to go for lunch. and i went looking for them the next day and we had lunch at an italian restaurant that doesn´t serve italian food - that was a little odd. anyways, i feel like i have a grandpa in lima and an uncle in cuzco who are looking out for me. =)

what else has been going on in cuzco. oh, i met another irish guy in the hostel the night i got into cuzco and we started chatting. turns out he´s volunteering in cuzco right now - teaching english at a boys´ shelter. we chatted a bit about that and the next thing you know, i´m inviting myself along the next day to see if they need anymore help. so i went with raymond to the shelter thursday morning and had a blast! it was like teaching english in china again! only this time i REALLY couldn´t understand what they were saying when they weren´t speaking in english. and one boy picked up a guitar and started playing ´wonderwall´ (oasis)! i was quite excited about that and took a video of him playing. so that was fun. and apparently there are a lot of similar types of volunteering opportunities in quito (ecuador) so i´m going to look into that and maybe volunteer for the week before i head out to the galapogas islands.

other than that, my time in cuzco has included a lot of wandering around, visiting inca ruins, cathedrals, and figuring out the next two weeks of tours i´m doing. i leave tomorrow morning for a four day trip into manu (part of the amazon jungle) - which i found out includes whitewater rafting and zip lines!!! then i come back to cuzco for a day to get ready for a four day hike through some villages leading to machu picchu and then a four day hike on the inca trail up to machu picchu.

and that´s it for now. i´ll blog a bit on thursday when i´m back cuzco. =)