Around Cuzco

I am in a three person room at $10.00 per night but currently do not have any other room mates.  The room is on the east side of the building with the morning sun so it was warming up by 6:45am when I got up. It looked to be a promisingly nice day. 

The hostel has a continental breakfast so I went down for that after re-organizing my room.  I met some guys from Minneapolis MN who tried getting up to Macchu Picchu but it was a nightmare trip of pretty epic proportions.  I also met a man from San Jose, Ca. named Phonc, I believe. They were all leavng today. 

I started out with a walk up into the San Blas neighborhood which is uphill from where my hostel is for an overview of Cusco.

I spent a lot of the day researching and mulling over my options for Cusco and also for the rest of my time in Peru.  As for Cusco I decided to get El Boleto Turístico (tourist ticket). It is a pass for sixteen different sites including museums, a cultural center where dances are performed, a monument to Pachakuteq, and most of the Inca ruin sites in the Sacred Valley.  Since I want to do the Sacred Valley tour on Friday I got my ticket today and proceded to walk around the city to many of the sites and get my Boleto punched. 

I visited the Museum of contemporary art, Museum of regional history, Museum of popular art, and the monument to Pachakuteq. 

Contemporary Art

All of the museums were a little on the lame side, not kept up very well, except the Museum of regional history. It had some nice religious paintings from the 16th and 17th century School of Cusco which was a very important era for religious paintings in Peru. The idea was to teach drawing and oil painting to the Quechua Indians as a way to convert them to Catholicism. The defining characteristics of the Cusqueña style are believed to have originated in the art of Quechua painter Diego Quispe Tito.



Cusqueña paintings are characterized by their use of exclusively religious subjects, their lack of perspective, and the predominance of red, yellow and earth colors. They are also remarkable for their lavish use of gold leaf, especially with images of the Virgin Mary.  Their works were a departure from Italian Renaissance paintings in that they used brighter colors and added native flora and fauna as a backdrop in their works. A painting of Jesus at the last supper has him looking down with his eyes averted as the indians had to do in the presence of the Spanish.  Another one depicts guinea pigs at the feast of the last supper. 

After visiting the monument to Pachakuteq, it looked like some nasty clouds were surrounding and moving in on the city so I headed back to the hostel.  I got back around 2:30 pm to find I had a room mate, a japanese guy from Ohio by the name of  Mitchel.  I guess he has been traveling for 7 years but I did not get his whole story.  He was pretty tired as he had just arrived and was having some altitude sickness.  Around 3:30 it began to pour down rain and hail pretty hard.  I went out on the patio by my 2nd floor room and watched it for a while.  Later I went out to eat at a Mexican restaurant called