Cuzco Times

After 5 days of eating miso soup, potatoes au gratin, Italian pizza and Thai green curry, we decided to deny ouselves the culinary feast that is Cuzco and head to the land of the cold shower, bland food, and uncomfortable bed. Yep we´re back staying with a local family, zapping ourselves on electric showers and making Spanish smalltalk about how many kangaroos we Australians eat in one year. This time we´re staying with an older family, our host mother is a slightly younger ZZar Zar Gabor look a like who works in beauty parlour and wants to travel to the Miami for 6 months so she can earn more money than in her entire lifetime.
We´re doing a week of Spanish School as well, 4 hours a day, one on one instruction, in a lovely little school in one of the trendiest areas of Cuzco. In the afternoons we´ve also been playing with street kids in a school that has been set up as a sort of homework club where westerners can volunteer. So Kate and I are real do gooders at the moment. Can you believe I couldn´t even beat the little girl below in a simple memory card again...Cuzco is the most beautiful Spanish colonial city I have seen in all of the America´s. Most of the buildings have an Incan base and then Spanish buildings on top of this. Cobblestone streets, amazing restaurants, and every kind of badly dressed tourist you can imagine. Do notice the Cuzco flag behind me in top picture, you may recognise the gay pride colours. This is pure coincidence and our family assures us that any homesexuals here have the piss taken out of them and their families. If you don´t mind saying "no gracias" every 5 minutes, Cuzco is the kind of place you could really live in. (Except that it is really cold here and I wouldn't recommend it for marathon runners or surfers being 3300 metres above sea leve)l.
We´ve also met up with Carmen a friend of my sisters from Sydney who aside from starting up Cuzco ghost tours is teaching the latinos how to dance. Being one of the featured dancers in the olympics opening ceremony she is having a ball putting the machistas in their place on the dancefloor.
Monday we start doing our tourist thing again and head off to the Sacred Valley to view a few old buildings and purchase some silly coloured cotton things to put around our ankles. Oh yeah we thought we might go to Machu Pichu as well.... by train of course, The Inca Trail is so last century... what with all that rubbish and us being Spanish learning, charity working, clean living make you sick pain in the arse smug, superior travellers...