machu picchu.

the 3rd week?! i can´t believe that it´s been that long, although, i am beginning to feel at home here. that feeling was the most intense last wednesday on my way to urubamba for a fun night with the volunteers. i sat on the bus for an hour with my iPod blaring Radiohead and everything made sense... it was as if i´d been here for years.

this last week went by pretty fast. we had a fun day in the kindergarden with the kids. there was a fiesta and the school had a group of people come dance for the kids with Barney and Winnie the Pooh costume people. quite entertaining i must say. i can´t say that my stomach has been too pumped about being here. i was laughing at the people who were having issues with the food and of course, that was the exact moment that it got me the worse. not goign to go into detail because i´m sure your brain can comprehend what i´m saying...but let´s just say it´s not pleasant. whatever..it´s all part of the experience right?

i went to machu picchu this weekend. needless to say that it was an amazing weekend. i will say that a lot of the reasons behind it being great were the people that i went with and the ones that i met.

Libby, Kathleen, Sebastian, Maxim and I left for Ollantaytambo on Friday around 3. we had a horrible taxi experience (some of the rubber blew off our tires but he kept going) on the way there so we decided to stop in Calca, 30 min from Pisac, and got a minibus to Urubamba. i employed my iPod once again to make me feel more at home and ended up feeling like i was in a Hummer going to the jungle in Africa or something(there was a military guy in there too). the scenery definitely went along with that. if you get a moment, Brooke Fraser´s "Albertine" did the trick that day. we rode to Urubamba and stopped at the office to say hello to whomever was there. friday was the social in Cucso so there was only one person there, Hannah, and we just chatted for a second and then headed to the restaurant that we always go to with the other volunteers called The Muse Too. it´s a cute, chill space painted in bright colors with modern fixtures and accents. of course my natural inclination was to access where the best spot for a bed would be when i converted it into a chic loft. i can´t help it...

everyone ate food and drank tea while we listened to Tracy Chapman and watched the Simpson in Spanish. we then headed to Ollaytaytambo in a taxi. you must understand that everytime i write "and we rode in a taxi" i always should add to the end "and we almost died" because that literally applies to every taxi ride i´ve had so far. to save time in the future i´m just going to leave that out. so we got to the O-town and i had to exchange some travelor´s cheques so that we could pay for our bus ride up the mountain to machu picchu and eat during the weekend. we stopped in a super cute restuarant, once again i had converted it into a cozy, chic one-bedroom flat within moments of entering it. it had all of the Incan designs but there were white sofas and hardwood floors and fun bob marley cover music. we had a glass of wine to wind down from the traveling there.

our train left around 8:00 and we had to be there :30 early so we bought the tickets and got on the train when we were supposed to, hanging out in coche A and laughing with the people around us at how little space they gave people to be comfortable in there. libby and i sat across from a Belgian couple and across from people from somewhere in Asia. that always happens and i always feel plain. oh well.

we arrived late to Agua Calientes, the town below Machu Picchu, and spent time looking for a hostel to stay in. a man saw us at the train station and got us to follow him to what looked like a concrete block building with only two rooms that had 3 beds in them. a joke. he was mad too when we didn´t accept his offer, which could hardly be labeled an offer because there would have had to have been something to give. we left. found a place that charged "35 soles" a night--this ended up being "per person" a minor detail we later found out as we were being forced to pay saturday night but it was nice to have a private bath with hot water and a really comfortable bed, which in fact did have bugs in it. the girls got eaten alive. nasty but definitely authentic (the only thing i´ve decided that counts on this trip)...

we decided to go "get a bite to eat or a coffee or something" and ended up finding a soccer game played on a concrete lot with mini rock cliffs for bleachers. in a field next to it there were people practicing an Incan dance routine complete with drums and a little recorder-looking thing (help me out if you know the name). they all had on skirts and things that slung around when they twisted. also very authentic. the soccer game was awesome. of course libby was having fun (she loves the game) as well as all of the drunk people there. if you closed your eyes it sounded like any highschool football game, there was a cheering section complete with a cowbell, rowdy kids, horns and confetti. the drunk people got upset when their team lost and there was plenty of glass thrown on the field and a few fights broke out. we were told by libby´s friend that she met there that all of the hotels and restaurants have teams and that they are very competitive. obviously.

after that we decided to follow libby´s new friend to a local discoteca. soo much fun. we were all disgusting from traveling but that didn´t stop us from dancing until 2:30 am. i learned how to salsa from this short, 40-something, sweet little man. we had a blast. i saw sebastian break out some German moves which were pretty awesome.

the next morning we slept in till 10 or so and went and ate breakfast. the funny thing that everyone picked up on was that the entire street was filled with restaurants so they are all yelling at you to come eat at their restaurant, but once you did that, they had no idea what to do with you. it was as if they´d never had a customer. it took a while to eat, but we did it and then walked around some to look at the town. it started to downpour and of course we all left our raincoats in the room so we headed back (as a lady is video taping me running soaking wet up the street) and took a 3 hour nap with the porch door open. it felt like we were sleeping outside and because Agua Calientes is sort of the outskirts of the jungle, it was lush, green and muy tropical.

after our naps sebastian and i went to find libby and kathleen who had left 45min earlier and we found them super stressed out about something... cock fights. like, legit roosters with blades attached to the back of their legs in this little ring with 30 people yelling and betting on the winning bird. no doubt there were peruvian mafia there. it was really bloody and none of us cared to stay around that long. we headed back early to go to sleep for the next day...

4 a.m. really isn´t that painful when you know you´re headed towards something as intense as Machu Picchu. we ate bread for breakfast and got in line for the bus down the street from our hotel. God was very generous with our timing all weekend, and we ended up being in the first rows of the second bus. (only the first 200 people in the gate can go up a different mountain, so we made it) it was a little funny because we literally ran straight through machu picchu because the entrance to Huaynapicchu, the other mountain that i was talking about, was at the other side of it. we were numbers 49-54 and were psyched to get to climb early in the morning before it got really hot. the climb, on the otherhand, was not so awesome and all of us nearly wanted to die before we got up there. i was shocked at how unregulated it was for safety. anyone could have fallen off at anytime. i spent about an hour in silence up there, from every angle there were more and more mountains. some where even snow-capped. the clouds were the most brilliant shade of the purest white and the sky an intense blue that contrasted with the green of the mountains with perfection. God showed me the littlest things, like the hairiest fly i´ve ever seen, the pinkest single flower in the middle of hard stones, six oragne butterflies fighting for a plant, rivers so far below they weren´t moving and the intricacy of things living on these huge mountains. it was so cool because on the way up there the song "can you feel the mountains tremble" suddenly popped into my head and i couldn´t stop singing it all day. i mean seriously, if THESE mountains are trembling then how awesome our God must be... because these mountains are enormous.
from where we sat, macchu picchu was smaller than my thumb. chew on that. we were high.

we descended in about a fourth of the time it took to get up and spent some time wandering around MP. there were a ton of llamas roaming around all of the people there. they really are cute animals! (i´ll try to post pictures later) and holy mosquito! i felt like i was in an insect farm or something. ridiculous. we left machu picchu exceptionally parched and payed way too much for water. i don´t think i´ve been that tired in a long time. once we got to the bottom we ate amazing pizza and decided to check out the hot springs at the top of the city. haha NASTY. i will give the people credit for strategic marketing techniques, as false as they may have been... you pay for your ticket about 200 yards down the hill where there are pictures of gorgeous pools and green scenery. once you walk up an incredibly long way you can look over the pools and seriously we all wanted to turn around at that very moment. the pools were just concrete holes in the ground that looked like they were filled with pee water. that, or tea. the dressing rooms were insanely public and not in the least bit clean. once we got enough courage to get in the stagnant murky water it just felt so wrong that we had to leave within 10 minutes. sorry but that just wasn´t on my list of things to do before i died. all there was left to do was to wait for the train to arrive at 6 so we went to a restaurant and got dessert and read books.

on the train ride home libby and i sat across from two brothers from Ireland. it was really cool though because one of them had done the same thing i´m doing after he graduated from college, but he went to Uganda. now he has plans to go for the next 6 months all over South America. the train marked the end of his 5-day trek through the Andes with 12 strangers-turned-friends. my new role model...

we got back to pisac around 9:30 and passed out quickly. sunday was one of the longest days i´ve had in a while and i was glad to be back home...