Greetings everyone! We are now in Cusco, and have been for the past five days. Unfortunately, my brain seems to be fixated on one particular experience I had. Namely, the ten kilometre run a few of us went on today. It has taken away any kind of functioning I currently have, so I guess I’ll be writing about that today, as well as other things. Perhaps we’ll go in reverse chronological order.
I barely slept last night, in anticipation of the race that Andree, Gabriel, Cissy, Emily, Anja, and I were going on. In hind-sight, the lack of sleep may have made the experience slightly less pleasant. Nevertheless, we were all up and ready to go by about 6:30. The race started at 9:00, and Anja was my running buddy. (I give full credit to her encouragement for the fact that I got through).
One interesting thing that I got to do through this run was witness some of the less touristy parts of Cusco. Until today, I had only stayed in the general Plaza de Armas area. However, the race started ten kilometres away, somewhere where houses are made of different materials and where the supermarkets are visited only by Cusqueños. I saw more versions of this as we proceeded on our run, until we finally got to the plaza mayor near the hotel. To see the differences between these places brought me back to the question of what the “real” part of an area is. Is the place where we started the race the real part of Cusco, because most people in the city live like how it is there? Is the Plaza de Armas area the real part of Cusco, because that part is what is more internationally represented?
Today was not the only day that I exerted myself. Yesterday, we hiked up the Sacsayhuaman, which was a fair amount of stairs. This activity also made me ask the question of what is real or what is not. Upon speaking with Jon today, he mentioned that the concept of the “hierarchy” we talked about at Sacsayhuaman may not have been necessarily correct, as there are many different interpretations of how this may have looked like. The “real” therefore isn’t totally known. What it truly entails will always be up for interpretation, contradicting the definition of “real” or “fact” itself.
One reply on “Experience Blog 2: Cusco’s Reality”
“What it truly entails will always be up for interpretation, contradicting the definition of “real” or “fact” itself.” Your blog has reminded me that the “Real” can not only be interpreted, but also explored in ways that affect us physically. There is the problem of representation, of course… but what happens when we try different speeds in perception? Is your experience of Cusco different now?