Tips on Cusco Eating and shopping

One of the most important things you will need to know about Cusco is where you should eat and where you should shop. We spent our first couple days spending more money than we should have, before learning a few ways to save our money.

Something that is common to do (and we did it!), is to try converting the prices of Peruvian items into our US dollar and applying that to our standard of living.

Eating

Take for example our first meal that we bought in Cusco. We had arrived in Lima the night before, slept in the airport, then caught a 5 a.m. flight to Cusco, went to our hostel, slept then woke up hungry and ready to eat ethnic cooking. We found this nice poleria (chicken restaraunt) and sat down and ordered "their meal." As you can see by the picture, the meal was excellent and it definately more than fills you up!

Visit Cusco on the Orient-Express in Peru. Book online.

We really enjoyed Peruvian cooking and found some of the best of it in Cusco. A restaraunt that we really enjoyed because of the ambience and food was called Pachamama. It is located on Maruri St. a one way street that turns into Afligadas St. before running into Avenue del Sol (the main street in Cusco). We ordered a pizza here-just to try a Peruvian pizza! It was really good and came with some cheese sticks and a litre of Coca Cola-all this for only 25 soles. Now just a word of caution: If you plan to order a pizza, you should know what you are actually getting. A family size, the largest size, is only about 14 inches and thin crust. In fact all pizzas we saw were thin crust, therefore, if you have a family of 4, you may want to order 2 pizzas.

when you are eating, it is a good rule of thumb to never drink any tap water or have ice in your drink, unless the waitress says the water has been filtered. We avoided this altogether by either drinking bottled water or having a soft drink. You don't want to get ill on your family vacation getaway and watching over your health is important. Before we travelled, we consulted a doctor about taking any supplements to boost our immune system and they recommended using a good multi-vitamin. We found this good multi-vitamin that we highly recommend since it kept us healthy and free from the colds many of the other travelers had.

The tourist in this picture to the left is holding an Inca Kola. This bubble gum/banana flavor soda is the national soda and really quite good. There is a good chance your kids will like it more than you, however!

Shopping

Cusco is one of the best places to do your souvenir shopping. we found the prices here, were better than Machu Pichu, Lima, Arequipa and any other major tourist attraction we visited. You can find numerous vendors around the Plaza de Armas, but these vendors tend to charge higher prices. After doing a little searching, we found that if you take the alleyways north and southeast of the Plaza, you will find numerous small shops that sell their wares at significantly lower prices than the "big boys." These shops can be hard to find, but don't be afraid to wander and go through the shops until you find what you want. You can bargain more in these shops and get far better prices. To give you a comparison, my wife bought a stone parrot that was carved out of 10 different stone varieties and artfully glued together for only 75 soles. This same parrot in Machu Pichu was running around 200 soles!

Another tip to keep in mind is to consider doing your shopping in the evening when stores are getting ready to close up. If the vendor has had a slow day, they are more willing to sell at a much lower price and go home with any money at all, as opposed to not selling anything. Again, remember that in your bargaining, you don't have to get the best price possible. These people are much worse off economically than we are and therefore you would do better to overpay a little, than get the best deal.