Dec 14: Chaos in Cuzco

I'm so frustrated and confused right now I don't even know where to start. After landing in Lima, Tara and I decided to continue on to Cuzco, which was a 22-hour bus ride.

We had heard a lot of bad things about Lima, but felt like we had been lied to once we saw the city ourselves. We were only there for a few hours and only saw limited parts of the city, but the city appeared to be a modern city by all accounts. We even ate at Pizza Hut, one of many American franchises we saw there. The crust actually tasted like Pizza Hut. I was so pleased to taste something so familiar, I ate my share of the pizza and part of Tara's. I had to talk myself out of going to the adjacent KFC just to keep eating American food.

Once we were on the bus, it didn't take long to see the other side of Peru as we drove by the buildings that appeared to be apartments made out of the same red dirt clay that matches the earth's soil. All the houses are small and most look to be falling apart and most of the roads aren't paved.

The only word I can think of to describe what I saw is "poor." Just poor. And what stood out the most is that all the houses appeared to be the same, there weren't any "nice" house along the way. Like the entire population is poor or something.

I wasn't able to see the entire country side as it got dark pretty quick on the trip and I slept though some of it, but this appeared to be true throughout the country. Just a short way out of Lima, I realized this, that the entire country lives this way.

When I first saw Cuzco, my first thoughts were I was right, the entire city looked like chaos. Our room has a balcony overlooking the city my thoughts were the same when I first saw the city from there.

However, when walking in the city, I found it to be beautiful, or at least it's architecture. But outside of the tourist spots, it's back to shambles. I just don't understand why people would want to live like this.

I know most individuals who live here are poor, but you would think as a society they would stand up as one and say we don't want to live like this anymore. I'm sure it's easier said than done and there are probably 1,000 reasons why it hasn't happened, but I don't understand how people could live among the Inca ruins in homes that would be difficult to tell apart from the ruins if the Inca's building methods weren't superior.

I'm incredibly homesick at the moment, I just want to be surrounded by things that are familiar to me. I talked to my mom tonight, that helped some. I bought some peanut M&Ms from a street vendor tonight just to get a taste of home.

You only have to walk the streets, or view it from above, to realize churches dominate Cuzco's landscape. I had wondered out loud as to why there were so many churches in the city. Earlier tonight, Tara helped explain why there are so many. She often has legitimate answers to questions I wonder about that I don't think have answers to.

Anyways, Cuzco was the center of the Inca Empire. They built a plaza in the middle of the city with temples around the plaza. When the Spanish conquered the Inca's on a quest for gold, they demolished the temples and put up Catholic cathedrals where temples once stood. (Which begs the question, why did the Incas have so many temples?)

It's amazing what has been done in the name of God throughout history.

As I listened to Tara explain this, I felt like I was listening to a story that was half myth, half true, but I walked though the plaza today and could see it from the window as she spoke.