PERU DAY TWELVE

What a view from our balcony!! We can see almost the whole city, nestles among mountains, houses all colored with homogeneous red Spanish tile roofs.

First things first, we buy the Tourista Boleta. The Bible has instructed us to do so. This allows us to visit several different museums in Cuzco proper, and several archeological sites in the surrounding area. SADLY, the Tourist Boleta is somewhat of a ripoff. The museums are sort of lame. We could have bought a partial Boleta to visit just the ruins. BUT OH WELL. Let me tell you what we ended up seeing in this majestic, ancient city.

• La Compania Church. This church has an extremely ornate golden facade. All the knaves are filled with baroque gold stuff.
• Inka walls
• Santa Catalina Monastary and religious art museum. Extremely boring. So boring that I was positively SHOCKED at the huge baroque alter, which was hidden behind several sets of bars off of a small room. SHOCKED was I, when I turned around after my hundredth ugly picture of some Saint or Archbishop or virginal woman, and there was a creepy locked-off room!! It was like it was a haunted chapel, or something.
• Coricancha ruins and museum. This was a large grass lawn with some square rocks strewn randomly about. Inside this museum were MUMMIES and DEFORMED AND TREPINATED SKULLS. This museum was truly awesome.
• Popular Art Musuem. This was the lamest museum of all. It was one room filled with paper and plastic dolls, mostly posed in nativity scenes. The dolls appeared to have been made by second graders for their final project in religion class. One set was made out of cloth folded up, cloth like a potato sack. Wade called it "napkin art."
• Museo de Historia Regional. This contained a MUMMY IN A GLASS CASE and a historical Peruvian coin collection.
• At a not-totally-touristy shop, we buy the following: Wade: soap, map of Cuzco Valley. Me: erotic pottery playing cards, bag of mint chewy candies. It is almost as if we are on different trips.
• Alpaca wool shop. Here we meet Phillip, the owner, who is from the The OC. I buy an AWESOME fluffy white earmuff hat. When you see it, you will laugh, and then you will say, Only you, Deens, only you would buy such a thing. And then you will remark that only I could pull off such a rediculously fuzzy hat. Just you wait.
• We walk around a souveneir market in a courtyard, me proudly wearing my fluffy (and super warm) hat. Two little girls giggle and point at me. They call me a payaso. We look it up in the dictionary. It means "clown."

We have lunch at an honest-to-goodness real Peruvian restaurant. We have a dinner of quinoa soup and zuchini mush at a vegetarian place. We cafe in the evening and have pisco-and-coffee, cheesecake, and the worst apple pie ever. After interneting, we go to our freezing cold hostel and get mad at each other.

Pulse at rest at dinner, twelve thousand feet:

Wade: 60

Me: 90