Around Cusco and a few more museums

Me and Moroni or something like that.

Another pretty plaza.

And this fancy place, it's the North Face Store. Seriously.

I loved all the balconies and doors painted blue!!!





We went to Pikillacta later, but this was in a museum in Cusco, I forgot which one.



This is how they melted metal to make weapons.  Pretty clever.

The Last Supper with cuy (guinea pig) as the main course.

This was my favorite of the religious artwork of which there was a ton.  There was a whole room of just St. James (Santiago) killing Muslims and killing Inka.   Apparently an apparition of him appeared at a crucial battle where the Spaniards fought Inkans and caused a victory for the Spaniards,  thus he was highly celebrated in Cusco.  Anyway I like this one because she's wearing contemporary clothing and is so nonchalant about the sword she has sticking out of the guy's head.



So again way too many photos of something no one else will care about, but I found this guy fascinating.  His mother was an Inkan princess and his father a Spaniard, and so as a child he was taught all the Inkan history, language, etc and given a royal Inkan education.  But his father also had him educated extremely well too and spared no expense on him.  So then at 19 or 21 or something he went back to Spain where he was already better educated than most people in Spain at that time, and his uncle practically adopted him and loved him like a son.  He was already fabulously wealthy from his father but his uncle left him everything of his too when he died (it was a lot as well). He also joined the Spanish army for a bit and fought against Muslims--so he was the first native born American to fight in an European war.  Anyway, he ended up as a scholar and writer and wrote a lot of what he was taught as a child and thus is extremely famous.  What a fascinating life.

And this was my favorite store in all of Cusco-- it was the Tienda Museo Textiles and they sold antique weavings.  I loved them!!! Just being in there was amazing looking at them all.  I couldn't afford anything, but that's okay.



This was the store front on the Plaza de Armas.  

Another couple of views of the store

 And again in the basement where I danced a happy dance.

There are also a lot of extremely expensive clothing stores in Cusco too.  All selling alpaca wool goods.  A lot of beautiful clothing that was very expensive.







This was another museum we went to that celebrated Pachakuteq--the emperor who made the Inkan empire.



The view from the top.

And one lowly stature of Hiram Bingham.