Sacrifice to the Sun

A friend of mine recently sent me an email saying "You´re lucky you escaped the winter in Canberra"... Just so no one gets the wrong idea, Cusco isn´t exactly escaping the winter in Canberra. Yes, the days are mostly clear and sunny, but in the evenings it gets to at least zero degrees, the houses have no heating, my bathroom has a window that has no glass - just a hole straight to the outside... It´s VERY COLD!!! At night I sleep with 5 blankets and my sleeping bag. Just the other day I was thinking how happy I was about some of the items I bought. These being my thermals and sleeping bag. Ironically enough, the next day I took stuff to the laundromat and it came back minus my thermal top. Pachamama, my old friend the earth, was good to me again and when I went back the next day they immediately handed me my top.

I think I¨ve already written that there is only water in the morning where I live. Luckily I have a ´warm´shower that works by electricity heating it directly at the showerhead. The other day I happened to put my hand up near the showerhead and got a zap!! EEEP!!!

Right so back to the sun. Yesterday was the day of Inti Raymi - the big festival to the sun god that everyone comes to Cusco to see. Kristina, Raffaella and I managed to drag ourselves out of bed Sunday morning after a rather LARGE night of drinking Cuba Libre´s followed by mojitos (more detail later) and still very very green we walked up to claim our spot on the ground. You can buy tickets for US$80 and get a proper seat or you can sit in the cheap seats (hill and rocks). We went for the free option but even with the free option people try to sell you space to sit blankets on the ground. Still we went for the free option and planted ourselves on a patch of grass and settled down from a looooong wait. 4 hours or more. I´d taken up my spanish homework but in the severly hungover state I was I think I managed to do about 2 pages over several hours and that took a lot of brain power.

So, we waited and waited and talked with other tourists, watched locals have heated arguements about their seating and how their blanket space had been on sold to others and now they couldn´t see but you know what, it was all for nothing. When the action started people started standing up, only to be shouted at from the people at the back. So they´d sit down and someone else would stand up. This went on and on, until orange peal was thrown, bananas, dirts, bags of rubbish and even rocks. What happened was that eventually everyone ended up standing but people from the back pushed to the front. Afraid of a human landslide I kept edging back and back and back . The result was that after so many hours of waiting I saw barely anything, including the cutting out of a llamas heart which I´m still not sure if it´s really done or just a representation with a tied up animal and a heart from another that´s already dead.

I have to say though, the day was mostly cloudy and it apparently doesn´t really rain in winter here but we got a few drops. This apparently happens every year. It never rains on Sundays either (apparently) and yesterday was a sunday. At particular significant points in the ceremony the sun came out too and it was eerie. So apart from the fact that I saw little, it was still an experience to have.

Ok, that´s about all for now. I will probably do another post soon with other random stuff.

Chau!

Photos are:

- us waiting and me doing my homework
- a view of the people behind us while they were still sitting
- the crowd of people on the other hill
- part of the festival happening on the hill opposite us when we could still see a little bit.
- some locals not even trying to see in festivities and just having the picnic lunch
- some of the festival happening below us. I couldn´t actually see this, this is me just holding the camera above my head.
- Rafaella dancing for us in since we had to make our own entertainment and Kristina looking on, enthralled.