Each place has it’s own groove, and this week’s challenge from Ailsa at Where’s my Backpack is to try to capture that rhythm on film (or SD card, as the case may be).
These photos were taken during my trip to Peru, last November. It was a whirlwind trip of two weeks, and we (Isaac, my friend Ashley, and I) saw and did as much as we could during that short time. We focused out trip primarily on Cusco, with a few days in Lima, and a few days in Aguas Calientes & Machu Picchu.
One hostel we stayed at in Cusco, called Hostel Frankenstein, was owned and run by a German expatriate who, when we asked if he knew what all the decorations being set up in the nearby plaza were for, told us that the people of Peru “like to celebrate themselves” and that they have celebrations everyday for some saint or another. He said he’d long ago given up trying to keep track of all the celebrations. I think he was being funny, he had that kind of sense of humor, but who knows.
Anyway, he wasn’t too far wrong in his evaluation. There was one big nighttime parade the first night we were there, then, over the next few days we ran into several more parades and marches. One Sunday there was a big morning-long celebration.
The colors, the music, the dancing, the shouting. It seemed endless!
You can see from up on the nearby hill that the parade continued down in the plaza
And then, on the other hand, the city was low-key and chill also. People hung out on church steps for hours, and the little colorfully-dressed Incan women and their llamas quietly wandered the streets asking all the tourists “you take a photo?”
Ashley: “What fainting feels like”
You take a photo?
hanging out in the plaza and along the narrow roads nearby is a popular pastime, as well as football (that’s Isaac playing a pickup game with a local boy in a shop)
A llama hanging out on a hillside above Cusco
The rain chases everyone indoors or under the eaves on all the buildings. It doesn’t last long though, and as soon as it stops people are back out in the plaza.
