hello dalai, farewell friends

cusco

never too far from home. ventura represent on the back of an old van in the streets of cusco. home sweet home.

morning on machu picchu. we hiked up to the top of wayna picchu (big mountain in the background).
i seriously love llamas.
the other lama, the dalai lama...whoa
team lawrence
fun with hats!

alright!! it has been quite awhile and sadly enough, we lost kieran to colombia this morning so i can no longer rely on his blog to do all the talking.
where to begin.
well. i guess i´ll start with what is on my mind and that is the parting of ways that happened only a few hours ago. kieran, who traveled with us for a month and who became an integral and beloved part of our team, jumped on a plane destined for colombia and i sadly surrendered liv and mack to a bus headed for some peruvian mountains. our chapter together in south america has closed and i haven´t entirely wrapped my head around it and probably won´t be able to for awhile so i´ll have to leave it at that. sewn together by experience.

but new chapters are opening for all of us. kieran continuing on his around the world adventure. mack and liv trekking in the peruvian mountains for a week and then back to bolivia. me in cuzco for a couple more days before flying up to panama to meet mei mei (!!!) and then dad (!!!). woohoo.

sheesh. so much has happened that i haven´t commented on (please refer to kieran´s blog). a week ago we had the great pleasure of joining forces with Team Lawrence: alexis and her sis stephanie. alexis spent all of april in quito doing a med program and steph decided to ditch school for a week to hang out in peru with us. being with them recharged our batteries. meeting up with friends is just plain awesome. we just couldn´t get over the "dude. we´re like in peru together. crazy" factor. (only a few days mei....)

machu picchu was incredible. people warned us that it is touristy, etc but it did not fail in completely blowing our minds. it is such a surreal place. it hit me far harder than i imagined it would.

other than that, well, obscene amounts of shopping. it might even be on the verge of reckless. getting everything home is going to be interesting. we did have a crazy experience the other day however whilst hunting for tapestries. we just so happened to be in the plaza where the dalai lama was scheduled arrive for a conference. sure enough we watched his car pull up and then out he came all smiles and waves. um, did that just happen? are you serious? it was like when we were in bolivia and the hostel owner told us to go stand on the balcony because the president was walking by in a parade.

oh yeah, parades. hmm. let me just say, south americans looooooove their parades....to a more-than-slightly irritating degree. there is no escape. at first you think, "oh. now isn´t that nice. what a lovely tradition. the music, the marching". you think that until you are awoken from the sound of a marching band outside your window at 3am playing the same song they have been playing for the last four days straight. or until you have suffered your third cardiac arrest from the unexpected and deafening explosion of fireworks. ah, parades. who doesn´t love a parade.