And That's When I Got Religion(s)...

Not surprisingly, I woke up Sunday morning (barely in time for the laundry service, which is charged by the kilo, which doesn't seem fair to the big man) with a wicked hangover. I could claim it was the altitude, but I think it might just be my old pal vodka. Anyhow, the guidebook recommended ceviche, but my crusty throbbing brain and oogly-moogly stomach couldn't possibly comprehend ingesting raw fish marinated in lime juice. So I found this second-floor coffee shop with a great view of the Plaza de Armas (all these cities have one, it's like a town square) and ordered something called a club sandwich.




But friends, it was like no club sandwich I'd ever seen in my life. On three slices of white bread was shredded chicken, ham, bacon, AND sausage, cheese, tomato and a fried egg. Oh, and there were fries, too. This is a club I want to join.

Then, as it was Sunday, I went to church.



This is La Catedral, the main cathedral of Cusco. As you might expect, it's all kinds of Baroque, with a giant silver altar and amazing wood carving. As you might also expect, no photos allowed. It's chock full of religious paintings in a style they call Escuela Cusqueña, or Cusco School, which seems to me just like Spanish Renaissance style devotional paintings, only elements of Peruvian life will show up. Like they got this Last Supper where Jesus and the apostles are drinking chicha and eating guinea pig. Nice place to visit if you like Bible paintings designed to convert illiterate indigenous people, which I don't.




This is the Jesuit church kitty-corner to the cathedral. But with a name like Templo de la Compañia de Jesús, I just couldn't bring myself to go inside. I decided instead to visit the Convento de Santa Catalina (because I heard it was built on top of the temple where the Incan emperor stored his virgins) but it's closed for renovation.

One of the most interesting things about Cusco to me is that all these Spanish buildings from after the conquest were built right on top of existing Incan structures. This is mainly because, despite their appetite for destruction, they recognized the value of good stone masonry. Or maybe they just couldn't destroy everything. In any case, the streets of Cusco are full of these Incan walls made from cut stones put together without mortar and locked in place like some kind of giant 3-D jigsaw puzzle. More on that later. (Plus, I figured nobody wants to see a bunch of pictures of rock walls. I swear, though, it's really cool.)

First, a couple of reasons why I don't even bother asking for directions in this town:




Wha?

So one of the most striking examples of this (Spanish buildings with Incan foundations) is Q'oricancha, or the Temple of the Sun (or Santo Domingo).



This place must have been something. It was the main astronomical observatory of the Incas, their biggest and most important temple. Evidently the walls were covered with giant gold panels, the courtyards full of life-size gold statues of people and animals, and at one end was a giant golden disc in the shape of the sun. The sun would shine in and reflect off the sun disc and light up the whole place. The Spanish (of course) melted down all the gold, then used the stone walls to build a Dominican convent.




Thankfully, you can still see the Incan architecture, and they've removed some of the cloister so you can see the other chambers, temples to other celestial natural gods like Venus and the moon.




Check out the symmetry. They loved trapezoids, for some reason. Which to me seems a lot more difficult, especially considering they still don't know exactly how the Incans were able to cut stone, seeing as how they didn't have iron.



This wall is amazingly smooth, perfectly curved, and has withstood earthquake after earthquake (some of which have crumbled the Spanish churches you saw earlier).

Oh, this is cool:



Evidently the Incan concept of constellations was a little different than ours. Instead of connecting the dots of the stars to form pictures, they looked at the Milky Way as this river in the sky that animal gods came and drank at. So the shapes they saw were the blank spaces in between the stars. This is an artist's rendering. See the snake in the upper right, and the llama with a blue eye? Neato.

Anyways, then I walked around the neighborhood of my hostal, an artsy part of town called San Blas.






This is the view from the courtyard of the hostal.

"But enough with the architecture already, Max! We wanna know about the girl!"

All right, all right, you gossip hounds. You're just lucky I have no sense of shame or common decency. So we talked on the phone (I think she was a little surprised that I was calling the day after, but what was I supposed to do? I'm only in Cusco a couple of days!) and made a date to meet at the Plaza at 8. Although it could have been seven. She insisted on speaking English, which she wasn't that good at. Anyways, Peruvians are notoriously late, so I waited the expected half an hour, then another half an hour, then bravely accepted the fact that I got stood up. Or got the time wrong. Both seem perfectly in character for me.

But before you get all weepy and pitying, you should know I then went to dinner and met a charming young Cusqueña named Irma, and we flirted for hours. Yep, I still got it.



Hell yeah.