Saturday, June 21, 2014

Cusco

      We walked around the city that was once the capital of the Incan Empire. We saw churches that are now half Spanish on top of half destroyed Incan remains. Outside 3 star hotels women wearing traditional colorful clothing sat  selling alpaca gloves and scarves. We stopped to buy from one and across the street from her a young man making jewelry said something to me. He heard me say “mande?”, and said, “ah you're Mexican.” I learned from him that Mexico and Ecuador are the only Spanish-speaking countries that use mande instead of  “excuse me?” He was from Colombia and he was backpacking his way around South America. As we conversed he made me a ring from a piece of wire, he showed us feathers of bird from the jungle and stones he collected from various parts of South America. My cultural interaction didn’t stop there; almost every vendor asked me where I was from. Some asked me where Mexico was while others compared the Incas to the Aztecs. There were people from all over the world shopping in Cusco. I could hear fragments of every language being spoken. It was beautiful to be part of a crowd that was appreciating and taking from a culture.
      We witnessed the surface of a modern globalizing Cusco from a tourist’s point of view; however we later sat down and got the facts on Cusco. We start off with a city that was the center of a once vast, powerful empire, mix in more than 500 years of colonization and the result is a place left with identity and class clash. The consequence of a growing economy is that few are left with the money. The result of tourism is communities losing traditions while trying to acclimate to “western standards.” Cusco is losing original languages while building cultural barriers. We ended with a chilling but true statement; Cusco is a contradiction.

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