Cusco wasn’t built for modernity. But, like any older city, that has not stopped it from eating it up: chewing, swallowing and digesting some confused mixture of narrow cobbled streets and 50-seat luxury tourist busses, Incan stonewalls housing McDonalds’ selling Inca Cola Lite and McPollos. It is vast and expansive, divided into lots of different barrios (neighborhoods) that, just like in New York, have different connotations and stories to go along with them. I live in Santa Ursula, a quiet, middle class neighborhood, about a ten-minute taxi ride or 20-minute combi ride from the center of the city.
But the part that I’ve recently found most interesting it the Plaza de Armas, which is the tourist center and oldest part of the city. From there you can see the Andes tumbling around you on all sides, and, because of the way it’s laid out—with two huge churches towering over the square and the rest adjoining two story buildings running the length of all sides, and very small side streets leading away from it as if they’re almost just barely escaping—you feel almost trapped. Outside this idyllic snow globe scene it looks like someone has just spilled civilization all around you, because the pattern of development that is built into the sides of the mountains is so random: large swaths of green cut into expanses of streetlights and red-roofed houses, and you can see streets abruptly ending for no reason. But the view from the second floor balcony of the restaurant doesn’t allow for much thought other than how lucky you are to be sitting there.
The Plaza de Armas is so beautiful that is almost doesn’t seem real. There is no trash anywhere, and armed policemen are dissipated all around so as to assure that nothing gets too stirred up in this tourist nerve center. (I was sitting on the steps of the square’s overpowering and awe inspiring Cathedral one day drinking a soda, and a trash collector dressed in a blue uniform wearing a painters mask over her mouth came up to me with a plastic bag and motioned for me to throw my cup away. I hadn’t even finished yet! It reminded me of the October at Columbia, where they actually hire people to sweep up the leaves that blanket College Walk.) In the middle of the square lies a huge fountain, green marble and decorated with white relief sculpture, and four bronze mermaid sculptures at the base. It is surrounded by slate paths that cut into the gardens teeming with flowers that are vibrantly colored and never so much as droop their heads. People sit on the benches watching the children who are trying to sell them finger puppets for one sol, and the artists who just want you to look at their portfolios, and, conveniently, accept both Visa and MasterCard.
Surrounding the central park/garden are two level shops and restaurants, most of which have a second floor balcony that looks out onto the city. The two towering buildings were originally built as churches, and I think both still are used for that purpose, although the larger of the two now doubles as a museum. I have yet to enter into it, but I have peered in and it looks exactly like the kind of beautifully ornate Catholic Church that one would expect in one of the bigger cities in a Latin American country. The other Church I haven’t seen open its doors, save for Sunday, so I’m not sure about the interior. (The exterior, I promise, is quite beautiful.) The shops and restaurants are what one would expect from the kernel of tourism: that is, they’re mostly overpriced alpaca sweater stores and real Incan Gold jewelry shops. It’s an odd scene on an average afternoon, because they sit about 15 or 20 yards back from the street that runs around the square, with a beautiful slate sidewalk separating them. Walk along the sidewalk and you’ll be accosted by small children, no older than 6 or 7, who are belligerently trying to sell you finger puppets, “only un sol, por favor,” or candies. And when I say belligerently, I mean it. They grab you and hit you and skitter away because they expect that, if you originally felt bad for them, the fact that they’ve just hit you means that you’re no longer feeling bad and are just annoyed. (I was walking out of a store the other day, holding a soda, and a boy ran up to me and tried to grab my cup from me. When I protested he tried to reach into the pocket of my jacket, so I just wriggled a bit and began to walk quickly. He was unfazed and moved onto the next person wearing NorthFace.) The Cusqeñans I’ve talked to don’t empathize with the children at all, and just assume that their parents are standing a ways off, either peddling alpaca hats or else hoping that their son or daughter will extract enough sympathy to make a few soles. But whatever you felt when the child tried to reach into your pocket quickly dissipates, as you cross the cobblestone street and walk into the park, looking at all the flowers and happy people, allowing this oasis to seep into their pores for just a second more.
The sterility and cleanliness of it surely doesn’t take anything away from the beauty of the Plaza, but just prompts you to think for a second about the disparity between this oasis and the rest of the city. Maybe that’s why it’s nice to go there when you have the luxury, like I do, of living in a different, non-tourist part of the city. Are Santa Ursula or Wanchaq, two neighborhoods with working class Cusqeñans, any more authentic than the Plaza de Armas? In one way, of course they are. (And, how am I defining that word, authentic, anyway?) They are the reality of living in the city, and don’t provide the frills of instant trash collection or police eager to pounce on anyone who dares to stir up anything that even closely resembles trouble, with a capital T. They are where the people who are selling the paintings go at the end of the night, when all the tourists have gone into their hotels or are eating Italian food.
But in another way, it is just a different reality, one that is sometimes hard for gringos like me to swallow. Tourism is a huge part of the Cusqeñan economy, and the Plaza de Armas is the reality of the need to exploit it, expressly so they can go back to Santa Ursula and put food on their table. I don’t judge my host brother Fernando, a salesman for a line of dietary supplements called HerbaLife, for trying to sell a healthier lifestyle to people; why should I judge the woman in the plaza who, wearing brightly colored “indigenous” style clothes, try to charge me one sol to take a picture of her and her alpaca that she leads on a string? She is only trying to sell me an image of Cusco, just like Fernando is trying to sell me an image of a vitamin filled life.
In one of the classes I’m taking we have talked a lot about conscientious tourism, and what it means to be a mindful visitor. It is uncomfortable to watch people dressing themselves up for you, selling their culture to you for 30 cents. Maybe it’s because I’m just more accustomed, but I actually prefer the belligerent man who stands outside the Chipotle on Broadway between 110th and 111th streets, asking if “someone can help me get something for dinner tonight,” to the Quechua speaking woman who wants me to take a picture with her. But then, who am I to feel bad for her, if she is making her choice to make her living that way? A bit of neocolonialist guilt, I suppose.
Well, I clearly don’t have any answers. I am hoping a few more trips to the Plaza de Armas, and a few more discussions with taxi drivers will help me figure it out. For now, just an indulgent blog post.

And now, to bed.