Now that I'm back among the living....

Boy, my stamina just ain't what it used to be. I'm blaming my sciatica flare for the uncomfortable ride in the plane for 8 hours, as the seats themselves were pretty good. They had more padding than the Delta jets do. But it took a while to find a comfortable position for me to sleep once we got into the hotel room at 2:30. Tom, on the other hand, was out like a light before I even finished brushing my teeth.

So after a short night's sleep we got up, had a late breakfast, and then were free to unpack before we met everyone at 11. We have a nice group of 16 people, of which 2/3 are teachers or educators. Our guide is named Fredy, and he is very experienced and it seems he will be very good. Fredy is Incan, and even speaks the language, so we will have some interesting cultural discussions, too. We spent about and hour going over the itinerary and setting expectations, asking questions, and dealing with details like where to change money or get laundry done.

After a huge and delicious lunch at a local restaurant, we started our trek....err...walk....uphill for an hour and a half for what Google Maps tells me is actually 1.62 miles, and did I mention it was uphill, to the pre Incan ruins in the middle of the city. The site is called Huaca Pucllana; and might mean 'sacred or safe place', but it might also just mean '400 foot tall pile of adobe bricks in seven pyramids' because nobody really knows. So, we learned how to make adobes, how to stack adobes, how to cover them with a mud clay coat to protect them. Now, if we didn't already know this from New Mexican adobes, it would have been interesting. But we did and it wasn't. And I was already tired, sore and sweaty. So instead we played camera games and made the photo below.

And we actually did learn something new about adobes. If you stack them vertically, as they did here, they withstand earthquakes far better than if stacked horizontally as we consider normal. So there.

Whatever energy we accumulated overnight has now been exhausted, so we had a lovely taxi ride back to the hotel and an even lovelier cocktail hour in the bar with Pisco Sours. Then we moved across the lobby for dinner at the hotel restaurant, and now we're settling in for a much longer sleep tonight.

I am not sure why I cannot post pictures in the middle of the text right now, but I am sure it is something I am doing inadvertently. So here are the photos:

Kennedy Park where the cats are protected from harassment.

You can see how thrilled I am to be learning about adobe making.
So instead we made the photo below. Look Ma! Time travel, or I have a twin.

Yep, it's a big pile of vertical adobes.

That's Tom waving from the top of the Big Pile of Adobes.

Dinner....

And some strange sweet fruit with black seeds that nobody knew the name of, including Fredy.