Cusco: Is your mama a llama?

I'm in Cusco, which means that my trip is rapidly nearing its end! boo. I feel like I need to see and do everything and anything to make sure that I maximize on my time down here! And at the same time, I want to do nothing more than lounge around on the sunny lawn at my hostel with all of the other sunbathers so I can get back some sort of tan to show people at home, or to just sit inside and catch up on emails, or take naps in my comfy Loki bed. The smarter decision would probably have been to run out and do a million things, but I chose to go down the lazy road.  I figure, Nina will be joining me in two days, I might as well just rest up before Machu Picchu. So that is basically what I did.  I spent my first day in Cusco sitting around, catching up on emails and getting acquainted with three south african guys who were in my room.  Ended up going out and having a great time with them, and happened to also run into some familiar faces from La Paz.

I spent my second day in Cusco doing something worthwhile.: I went to volunteer at a boy's home that was about 40 minutes outside of the city.  A group of us from the hostel took some taxis out to this random place, and after what felt like ages, we finally got dropped off and then walked another 15 minutes to the actual location.  Unfortunately, I didn't feel like it was a very fulfilling experience.  The intention was the spend the day laughing and playing with young children and helping with school work at an orphanage, but no one in the group knew that it was a boy's home, and that the ages ranged from 9-16. Now, I could be wrong, but my initial thoughts are that young boys only really feel like bonding with older guys.  They don't really see me and think, I want to spend time with her! Boys are way cooler for boys..does that make sense? What I'm trying to say is that is it's easier for young boys to connect with older guys, and our group of 10 only had 2 boys.  And there were actually only 9 or 10 kids, and since there were two other volunteers coming from somewhere else, the ratio of volunteers to kids was too high. Is that even a bad thing? I think it was considering the fact that only 4 of us had any spanish speaking skills and they were still crap in comparison to the spanish we were receiving from the kids. We had to wait almost 1.5 hours just to start interacting with the kids since they were at school when we got there and then had to eat lunch when they got back to the home.  Once all of that was said and done, and everyone realized how hard this was going to be time really slowed down.  I must sound like a horrible person for saying that I basically wanted to go back to the hostel as soon as we got to the home, but when I tell you that the sitting around doing nothing for the first 2.5 hrs was followed by being assigned garden work in the green house, I think you can agree with me.  The most worthwhile thing I did the entire day was weeding in the green house that they had, and let me tell you, I WORKED.  I had a pickax and even though I was in sandals and I had an infected cut on my foot, I was all up in the dirt making sure to get rid of those weeds so they could plant their veggies.  (I did accidentally kill a tomato plant, but don't judge me too harshly! I tried to put it back together again...and failed.)  After we finished the gardening, we all went inside to help the boys with their homework, and somehow I got put next to the boy whose homework was to read. How am I supposed to help someone with their reading homework if it's in spanish? And it was about how the digestive system works. What the shit? I mean, I can sound things out and stuff, but I'm pretty sure the kid didn't need any help from me considering he only had 3 pages to read.  So I ended up just sitting their and chatting with the two other volunteers who weren't with our group. We finally left and ended up spending the next 30 minutes walking into the town and waiting around trying to find a taxi to take us all the way back to Cusco.  Finally settled on taking a 45 min bus ride.  What a GREAT day. No, really, as much as I'm complaining about how unfulfilling the day was, I am happy I went.  After all the time I've spent down in South America and all of the different people I've seen, I needed a day to give back to a community. I think I'm a little addicted to community service anyway. haha.  Even though the most helpful thing I did was to pull out weeds, everyone I was with definitely commented on how much effort I put into it, so at least I can say that I helped provide some sort of food for these boys.

Nina came in super early on my day 3, and instead of letting the poor girl sleep and rest after her 24 hours of traveling, I made her shower and get revved up for a day of walking in the city.  We mostly just hung out in the main plaza in the city catching up since all we've talked about for the last 2.5 months is machhu pichu things, and then we checked out some artisan shops for llama and alpacha gear.  Some random guy took a picture of me while we were walking down the street...creepy.  He did said thanks, but I still think that was weird, and now there is a picture of me at some stranger's home..or on the internet somewhere. She crashed at around 6pm and was out for the rest of the night, and I figured it was my last night to do anything in Cusco, so I might as well go out and make the most of it! I ended up having a bit of a ladies night with two lovely girls I had become friends with in La Paz.  Basically got no sleep since Nina had plenty of energy, so after breakfast and some more time down at the Plaza de Armes, Nina and I spent our last day in Cusco getting ready for our trek to Machu Picchu which was going to start bright and early the next morning with a 5am pickup.

I'm really excited to do the Inca Trail with Nina.  There are some cool people at the hostel coming on our trek with us, so it should be a good time, and it will be interesting to see how hard this trek gets and how much I can handle. I'm a little weary considering my last trekking experience, but I figure since I have someone to carry everything for me except some spare rain gear, snacks, and water, I should be ok.  Hopefully the last few months of being with super in-shape people has whipped me into shape a bit. :)