Day 3: A Little Pisac Heaven

On the third day of our trip, we arranged with the hotel for a cab driver to take us to Pisac, for a day of shopping and a tour of some ruins. The hotel arranged a wonderful driver, Alfredo--I'm not sure if he's regularly a cab driver or not, because he was driving his brother's car. Either way, Alfredo's English was about as good as my Spanish, so between the two languages we managed to communicate effectively and he took good care of us. Alfredo was especially talented with his use of the horn, cautioning animals to stay out of the road, alerting other cars that we were proceeding through an intersection or around a blind curve, and, in general, letting everyone and everything know to stay out of the way.

I was completely enamored with the little motorcycle cabs, but unfortunately we never had a chance to ride in one.

Aside from all the horn honking, the drive to Pisac was fairly uneventful.
The market, however, was hopping! Here is a slideshow of the Pisac market and the Pisac ruins we visited:

We went a little nuts at the market--alpaca sweaters, watercolor paintings, a llama pendant, shot glasses, scarves, a huge hand-painted wooden plate, and a ceramic vase. I'll post pictures later, I'm thinking my Peruvian loot deserves its own blog entry. About half of the items we purchased came from Pisac.

After visiting Pisac, we returned to the hotel to rest up and enjoy an early dinner. We started with drinks at the bar (wine for me, Peruvian beer for Mr. Y):
Starters at dinner included more rolls with dipping sauce, potato cream soup (best. soup. ever) and beef carpaccio:
Mr. Y had the beef tenderloin
And I had the hen in a gallina sauce served with rice and a fried egg.
We shared a dessert that's kind of hard to describe. The purple item in the back is made of purple corn and filled with a sweetened purple corn filling. Only it tasted kind of like blueberry pie filling.
During dinner, we were treated to a performance by Felix Luna, a blind musician who plays and sells CDs to help support his family. The CD was way over-priced, but I'm a sucker like that. I used some of Mr. Luna's songs as background music for the slide shows.