Toucans & Hornbills: Travel Bethought: Peru Cards II: Cuzco

A Traveler's Log

Toucans and Hornbills represent the unexpected in travel, wildness, delight, and surprise. Where they live, other wonderful animals and plants flourish.

Travel entails new experiences - new sounds, different smells, surprises, sensations not like those at home. Some ideas, feelings, and impressions must be recorded immediately or they are lost; others are best recollected in tranquility (with a nod to Wordsworth).

Bethought: to think; to remind (oneself); to remember
Images and scenes bethought - evoking the moment and reliving it.
Why in the World? Where in the World?

Tuesday, March 1, 2011

Peru Cards II: Cuzco

A street off the Plaza de las Armas.

Vendor and Tourist (tourist on the right)

Art Sellers, each with a portfolio at the ready.

Cuzco (in Quechua written Qusqu) is full of tourists and vendors. The tourists wander around the Plaza de las Armas; small squat women sell textiles and alpaca skins; young men with portfolios sell art. I don’t know how the art is produced, perhaps some variation of paint by numbers, but there’s a lot of it, and it all looks alike. They depict scenes in and around picturesque Cuzco and the Andes. The subjects are painted to appeal to tourists and are romantic, stereotypical, and garish. So as we strolled, I murmured a nonstop, “no, gracias” until, finally, we came across an artist selling notecards. Somehow the art works when it is small.