The Backpacker´s Life

As most of you know, I am not necessarily the backpacking type. So staying in hostals and other $10 a day accomodations is not something I have a lot of experience with. Aside from worrying about not getting what you reserved or paid for, I am not minding it too much. We are out all day anyway so...We´ll see how I feel after tonight though - no accomodations in Cusco have heat and the temp drops into the 30´s at night since we are so high up. Should be interesting.

Peru has been pretty nice so far. Our classmate tooks us around Lima so we had an expert guide and went to some pretty nice places. Despite being told not to have any seafood and especially not to have any ceviche in Peru, it was one of the first things we ate (sorry Mom!) But we went to this very upscale (white tablecloths, everyone wearing suits, right on the ocean) restaurant for lunch and kind of figured they would take the proper precautions there. Over 24 hrs later and everyone seems to be feeling fine.

Cusco is very rural-poor. Everyone is trying to sell us something, the roads are pretty substandard, and the vehicles are even worse. But the people who have interacted with are very nice, except for the punk-woman at the train station who couldn´t process our reservation even though I had a freakin´ print-out of it that I brought just in case. Or the hostal operator who didn´t put us in the hostal I had requested and she had confirmed but instead in her other location a few blocks further away. Sometimes I´m not sure whether it is a good thing or a bad thing that I don´t speak Spanish.

I´m tired - we slept for an hour last night, another hour on the plane, and then 2 or 3 more when we got to Cusco. That isn´t enough. I'll aim to make future posts more interesting.

Beunos dias!