Puno Blog Post 2 – Jack

Yo, it’s Jack. Puno continues to be the same, old, lakeside, Peruvian, city that it ever was. I can’t really think of all that much new material to write about my life spent in Puno so I think I’m going to try to describe it a little bit. There’s this plaza called Plaza de Armes with a cathedral next to it. If you take a left at this plaza you’re on this strip where you can only walk. This strip is covered in stores that sell the same jackets and alpaca blankets and chocolates filled with vodka and pisco. On the corner there’s the Peruvian Tourist center with a bench outside.  One week ago I saw an old, homeless, lady who wears fifteen hats that have all felted together sit down on that bench. I haven’t seen her move since except last night she got up and walked ten feet to the middle of the street and squatted over a drain to urinate. Other than that the lady has remained immobile. The strip goes on for about three blocks and ends at this other plaza with another church. If you head down the hill a little bit, you’ll get to the central market. The market sells a lot of things: olives, shoes, goat heads. Across from the market there’s a small restaurant called the Snack Café. It calls its self a drive in but I’m pretty sure that’s lost in translation because there’s no where to park and there’s hardly any room inside the Snack Café. If you go to the opposite corner of the market area and head up a road you’ll end up at the salchipaparia. The Salchipaparia only sells salchi papas and salchi papa like things. It’s one of the best places to eat in town because it costs hardly anything and they give you kind of a lot of food.
I just remembered something so I’m going to stop talking about Puno. I have been trying to make worldly friends while on this trip. I haven’t really made any yet because I don’t really like talking to people but I follow groups of tourists around in hopes that they accept me as their own. The other day Jennah and I saw about fifty high school children enter a restaurant called La Casona so naturally we also went to La Casona. La Casona is a lot fancier than I thought it would be. It’s so fancy that they don’t give you a menu and just start feeding you. Jennah and I only had eight dollars with us and we were planning just to get tea and coffee but they put two bowls of soup on our table. We freaked out because we didn’t know how much the soup was and asked for a menu and it turned out that the soup was six dollars each. I faked a trip to the bathroom and went outside to wander Puno in hopes of finding my mother and getting more money. I couldn’t find her so after ten minutes which caused me to freak out even more so after a few more minutes of trying to find money on the ground, I went back inside to join my sister. The whole time this was going on there were fifty high school people feasting on expensive meats and soup. In the end we asked a waited and he told us that our meal of soup would only be six dollars and four cents. The people who work there don’t like us anymore. Jennah and I paid and went outside to find our mother.