Finally had some guinea pig. Good travel.

I've rapidly latched onto Patricia's inside joke with her sister, whenever they vacation together. If one makes a solid move, like taking a screenshot of gelato translation, or asking a waiter how he spices his own meal before loading up yourself, the other uses the best new compliment you can get: "good travel."

Today was a day of smart decisions -- many good travels. First off, I ate some guinea pig at Gaston Acurio's local restaurant. But I think I'll soon blog about my food adventures, so I'll let that marinate for awhile. Back to the day.

Despite a late night of schedule-making (more on that later), an early morning start was key. It got us to Cuzco's cathedral with plenty of time to spare for our tour guide, Gorky. Yes, like the Russian political activist. He didn't explain, and we didn't ask. What he did do is show us the most famous painting in Cuzco, which appears next to the altar. In it, Jesus is clearly celebrating the Last Supper, although a few things are different. Instead of fruit, there's a stack of potatoes. Instead of bread, there's a guinea pig, feet obediently up in the air. And clutching a sack of silver is Judas...whose face looks suspiciously like the feared conquistador, Francisco Pizarro. Even the affable Gorky couldn't find a nice thing to say about Pizarro: "he's...not a very good person," he admitted reluctantly.

Our next good travel was grabbing a cab to Saqsaywaman, which lies only half a kilometer away, but over 1,000 feet above the Plaza. And with two of us, cabs costs are cut in half! Good travel. After serving as a stand-in tour guide, and after sliding down some big rock formations like slides, and after getting unnecessarily close to some alpacas and their shaggier cousins, huanacas, we were able to quickly walk down the path back home.

While we saw a few more sites -- the slightly smaller yet far prettier church on the Plaza, the Qorikancha museum of precolonial artifacts -- the best find of the day was an outdoor basketball arena, tucked away in a courtyard and complete with stone bleachers and soccer-style bench covers. In the afternoon, some basic after-school coaching was going on -- boys and girls, having a total blast. But our best travel of the day was returning to the courts after a bizarre Peruvian dance show (here's a link, but it doesn't include the dance where dudes act like alpacas mating), was sticking our head back in the stadium at night. A game was going on. We found seats next to a woman anxiously watching by herself. I asked who she was rooting for.

"The blue team is winning," she said, glancing at the scoreboard, which read 14-3. "But I cheer for the yellow."

The yellow, it turned out, were a local club team that included her sister, a 25 year-old Cuzqueno. She was currently riding the bench, watching her team get annihilated by a much taller, more skilled team of university students.

According to Patricia, a former basketball player, they were very decent. "Great passing, good vision," she said. "But will someone please teach these girls to shoot." It was true. The girls could juke each other into the popcorn machine, but would then throw the ball at the basket in manners reminiscent of chest passes or discus throwers. Before she could go down to center court and offer the coaches her services, our neighbor grabbed our arm.

"There she is," she said excitedly. "Numero quince." Number fifteen was Paula, our friend's younger sister. She barked into her phone. "Que tal? Donde estas?" she demanded. Paula strode on the court, the arena silent except for her one fan. "Vamanos, Pau!" it rang.

We joined in the cheers -- a rebound here, a nice defensive read there. "Nice rotation. Up to the high post," Patricia observed as Paula moved up to the top of the key. Suddenly, for the first time, someone passed Pau the ball. She turned, and shot.

Swish.

After a night of worry about the state of Peruvian shooting skills, Paula had put them to rest with a beautiful jumpshot. The ball rolled off her fingers, effortlessly, as it should. We freaked out -- screaming, fist pumping. When I say "we," I mean all three of us. The rest of the stadium was still bored with its 25-8 blowout. Good travel.

Brad gets excited about history.

I began my education in Qorikancha, just off the town square. Qorikancha, or "golden temple" in the native language of the Quechua, was one of a handful of the Inca's most celebrated religious sites -- and since gold was always used to signify the sun, it was certainly the best decorated.

To understand the whole gold thing, you have understand a few things about the Incas, and a few things about the Spanish conquistadors. Peruvians didn't have a monetary system in the 1500's. People grew surplus crops, and traded them. There was no gold standard. Spain, on the other hand, had a carefully codified system for gold -- a certain weight was worth one peso, more was two pesos, and so on. A certain amount of gold would take care of you for a month, or a year. So when the Spanish took the Inca king, Atahualpa, hostage, his promise was music to their ears:give me my freedom, he said, and I'll give you a room full of gold. Not decorated with gold. Filled to the brim. He even specified the measurements of the room. If he can offer us this much gold off the top of his head, the Spanish thought, how much do these people have?

When Pizarro, the head hauncho, sent three of his men to travel to Qorikancha to expedite the gold gathering, they figured it out. The temple was covered – from floor to ceiling – with gold. Solid gold fountains. Solid gold llama replicas. Even the walls were covered in over 700 squares of gold leafs, that measured two inches thick.

What you see of Qorikancha now is the result of that day. The Spaniards quickly set to work, stripping the gold off the walls, as confused worshippers entered and whispered to each other – some of their first thoughts were that, perhaps, these men who wore beards and rode horses actually ate gold, and needed it for survival. Imagine aliens entering the Vatican and getting really excited over fresco paint, ripping hunks out of walls by the barrel. The Incas saw these walls as a beautiful homage to the rays of the sun. The soldiers saw their retirement funds.

In addition to the colorful story, my tour guide, Caterina, had loads of interesting tidbits about the architecture of the temple. I’ll spare you all of them and hit you with my two favorites.

First: The city of Cuzco was purposefully designed in the shape of a puma, the most powerful animal the Incans knew. The head was the site of the military quarters. The heart was the town square. The tail was where the roads left Cuzco and ran off to other villages. “This temple,” she said delicately, with its tribute to the male and female deities of sun and moon, along with its power to spring the seed of the Incan culture throughout the empire, “is located where the genitals of the puma would be.”

Second: The Spanish were freaking amazed, as I am today, by the Incan’s grip on architecture. They routinely wrote home to their families, describing the stone masonry as unlike anything they had ever seen: every stone, no matter how massive, fit perfectly with those around it. No mortar was used. And miraculously, though the new Spanish churches and markets fell down with every passing earthquake, the Inca structures still stand today.

My dad, a structural engineer who gives lectures on seismically-sound design, would probably be able to point to the thing that the Incas got, and the Spanish didn’t – arches. The Incan architects understood that a trapezoid was stronger than a rectangle. Add that to the fact that trapezoids fit the religion well – they pointed to the heavens, they ran along the earth towards the edges of the empire – and the shape begins reappearing everywhere. Niches to hold bodies are in trapezoidal shape. Walls are built on a slight angle, bracing themselves against quakes. Coolest of all, they build trapezoidal windows in which you could see a hundred yards.

These people knew what the eff they were doing. So did Caterina. She kept calling me Brad Pitt.