Pinch me pinch me...

Hello readers

Pinch me pinch me... I just can not believe it!! Guess where I am writing to you from? Any suggestions? Which continent? Which Country? Which city? Which historical treasure? Doing what? And… reviving which delicious memories?

The answers to the above questions are as follows:
- South America
- Peru
- Cuzco & Macchu Picchu
- Inca Culture
- for a photographic workshop
- a memorable trip with Alice 15 years ago

It all happened so fast, so last minute that I keep pinching myself to make sure it's really happening. By the end of today, I guess I'll all bruised, due to all the many pinching, ha ha ha.

Our Peruvian friend P, who also lives in Panama City, is not only from Peru as well as from Cuzco!! What a CV of life... just imagine... from all the million cities in this world of ours, being from Cuzco is so wow... your whereabouts around the city can't help but be surrounded by a colonial Spanish city settled right on top (literally) of Inca ruins... so involved in mystery... so marvelous!

Anyway, let me not deviate and get back to us here in Cuzco and Macchu Picchu. So, as I was saying, P is from here and is also a photography lover. Putting one and one together what do you get? A photographic workshop here! He invited the two of us, put together an itinerary, organized the train up to Macchu Picchu, suggested a specific hotel chain for us to choose the one we preferred, to which Joel did the cozy job of choosing the most boutique of the chain and voila, here we are.

The workshop will only start on Tuesday, but Joel and I came a bit early for the weekend, because one, Joel has never been here before and two, Cuzco sits nothing less than 3,300 meters (10,800 ft) above sea level... ouch Joel and I are more towards the oldie side of life rather than the younger side of things, therefore lack of air has been abundant.

We already knew this was going to happen, because it happens to everyone who comes from sea level, so they have coca leaf tea everywhere for tourist to drink freely.

Revivals are dangerous, I think. More often than not, we go for revivals, whatever type of revivals it might be and it's only normal that we take expectations with us and most usually, expectations are not fulfilled, right? But this time, this is not happening. It’s all working out just as planned! Oba!

Alice and I were here in Cuzco and Macchu Picchu 15 years ago and that was an absolutely remarkable trip. She was a W O N D E R F U L traveling companion, enjoyed all the ruins, asked her questions, chewed coca leaf with that naughty look as someone who was doing something wrong, how gorgeous, I remember well her eyes kind of asking me if it were ok to chew coca leaf to help with altitude sickness, how cute!

Anyway, Alice was not only all the above as well as a savior. Can you believe that back in 1995, after clicking my second or third photo here, my camera gave up on me and completely stopped working?? That was so not in the script of our trip! Then Alice, who had saved money to buy herself a camera in the US (our next stop), offered to buy it here in Cuzco. Poor thing... Cuzco is internationally well known for many things in life, but surely not as a camera buying paradise. At the time, we didn’t have many options and ended up getting one that worked very well. Those pictures are till this day comfortably sitting in our albums, showing evidences of the great time we had together and the camera sitting in my small camera museum. Thank you Mumu (her nickname)!