South America-Day 6- Cusco & Arequipa-"Cuscotopia"

While the altitude sickness has not completely abated, we were in better shape this morning than last night. Trying to take it easy, we ambled back up to the plaza de armes where we planned to visit the Catedral. When we got there, there was a large parade and ceremony underway (for what, we're not sure since we received different answers), that involved all sorts of military and police units as well as several bands etc a large crowd had gathered to watch and we were excited to find something to do on Sunday morning as we had been concerned that everything might be closed.

After watching for a bit, we went into the Catedral and also Santa Catalina. In Santa Catalina, we were able to go to an upper floor and watch the flag- raising from a perch above the square. We figured we had seen enough of the festivities at this point and wandered into the San Blas neighborhood. We happened across the most amazing bakery called Deli Monasterio (next to the Orient Express property) and had a great breakfast-- including a cronut! Side note: cronuts have been this super fad in NYC for the past few months as there is a bakery that makes this croissant/donut hybrid on the lower east so I was ridiculously excited to find one in Cusco of all places!

After our treats, we continued our walk through the San Blas neighborhood including walking through the Incan Passage, which is basically just a place for chotchkes now. We headed back across town to the San Francisco Church and still had time to kill, so we ended up going to the Choco Museo. Yes that right! The chocolate museum-- its basically just a cafe but we did buy two truffles to give peruvian chocolate a try. They're current,y the 13th largest producer in the world but are seeing incredible growth (over 400% year over year) as the push is made to convert coca farms to cacao farms.

We were finally getting hungry again so we went back up a block or two to San Francisco and had a tasty lunch at the food  stalls (split a plate of chicken, relleno, potato etc and finished off with more of our favorite corn drink and a piece of chocolate tres leches which was to die for). The time to leave was approaching so we went back to our hotel then to the airport to catch our third flight of the trip- to Arequipa!

Landed in arequipa without incident, grabbed quick sandwiches then met with the tour operator for our two day hike through colca. Turning in early as 3 am will come too soon!!!