Puno: Anniversary celebrations and Saturday market

We arrived in the evening to Puno and for our pleasure, it was the weekend of Puno's anniversary. This meant parades every now and then on different days and especially on the 5 of November when the actual anniversary was. On our night of arrival there were only adults in the parades and we noticed it was rather similar to the Finnish 'vappu': bottles went around and everyone in the parade enjoyed their drinks.

Festive shoes

A lot of people enjoyed the parade on 3 November night

As mentioned in our previous post, Edda was quite ill in Cahuita. Well, then it was Markus' turn to get a flu in Puno. We decided to stay one more day just to take it easy. We stayed at Cantuta Inn, which was rather close to the market. The hotel was quite nice and the staff really friendly. Some of them didn't speak any English but we always got our message through and understood what they meant. Edda's toes didn't enjoy the hike down to Colca Canyon - this we noticed in Puno when both big toes had blue nails :o Let's see how long it will take until they come off, yuck...

Our room at Cantuta Inn was nice :) A bit cold, but nice.

 

Edda's beautiful toes... Sorry, didn't have time for pedicure before taking the picture :p

On Saturdays Puno has a big market in the harbor area. We had read about it online and decided that it was an activity we could explore even with a bit of a flu. It was a large market covering many streets, people walking around in traditional clothes and just a colorful sight. We thought it was lovely. There were so many food products we would have wanted to buy but of course, they wouldn't last until we would be back home. So we left all black corns and different fruits and veggies behind. We bought some beans and lentils, though. :) but their cheap price will be not-that-cheap once we post them to Finland... :O We bought some churros, though! The boys making them in the morning made them nice and thick and they were really delicious. We wanted more and went back in the afternoon but we guess the boys' parents were selling at that point and the churros had become thinner :p

Black corn looks so interesting! :D

They say Peru has around 4000 different types of potatoes!!!

 

Careful, careful!!!

We saw some children preparing for something because they had all different costumes on. We asked a guard what it was about and understood that there would be a parade later on going around the city. We were going anyhow to the direction of the centrum so that suited us. At 12pm small children started to walk in small groups. Some of the groups had traditional clothes, some went with a theme and some had, well, clothes and make-up we didn't find really appropriate for small children. You know the toddler competitions in USA? Well, they looked close to that. We don't think small kids should be wearing tons of make-up or a dress revealing one's butt. We tried to google from which cultural part these dresses are from but couldn't find. Also, small kids dressed as some type of freedom fighters seemed a bit odd to us. But most of the groups were happy and colorful and we really enjoyed watching the parade. The parade took over the entire day so we went for a walk in between and when we came back it was the adults in the parade. All of them were dancing and there was a lot of music. The andean music is really difficult to repeat for us. You can hear the rhythm and the melody in your head but if you try to repeat it, it feels impossible :D

I guess you ask why we didn't visit Uros - the floating island on lake Titicaca. Well, we thought first we would but then read more reviews on it and found out it was extremely touristic. We didn't feel that it would be very authentic if we were on a small floating island in Peru and the locals would sing songs in English and German for us... So we decided to skip it. Instead we just walked around. Puno is quite high up (3860 m) and one can feel the altitude when walking up a street or stairs. There is really little to do if there is no such thing as 'Puno Anniversary' or similar. The Saturday market was nice, though!