Viaje-Puno

Our bus ride from Arequipa to Puno was around 8 hours of absolute horrible driving.  We first arrive in Juliaca, a city around 45 minutes away from Puno.  We ate some food there and got on a chombi to Puno.  When we got there we spent a good while searching for our hotel in the pouring rain.  It rains so hard there that the streets literally become rivers.  That night we went with some of Gabriel's friends to the club and had a pretty wild night coming back home around 4 or 5 am.  The next day we went to the lake Titicaca which was absolutely beautiful (unfortunately my camera got stolen the next day and the pictures aren't here.)  We were there for quite a while and returned in the afternoon to buy our tickets for seats at the festival the next day.  After running some errands to the bus empresa we sent the girls home and hit the bar.  For quite a while we played dice at the bar with huge vases full of rum&coke.  We met some girls and hit the club, we partied super hard: whiskey getting fed to me upside down on a bar, and dancing for 7 hours.  The details of the rest of the night are rather obscure ;) but all in all it was an extremely crazy night.  The next day we woke up rather early (impressively so) and went to the street where our seats were waiting for us.  For the next six hours we watched La Festival Virgen de la Candelaria, it was an absolutely beautiful festival.  People of all ages danced through the street in some of the most well done costumes I have ever seen.  Everyone present was having an apparently endless supply of beer, and other various liquors.  There were many women drinking straight scotch when they were around 80 some odd years old.  Although I have yet to learn exactly what the festival is celebrating, since noone is able to provide a good answer, the best I learned yet was this: "The festival has two main phases. The first is El Dia Pincipal y Su Ritios in which a procession carries the statue of the Virgen around the city, and dancers in lavish costumes from all walks of life join the parade. The dancers, by group, pause in front of the cathedral to be blessed with holy water, after which they are cooled with water thrown from nearby houses."     From then on we continued to dance and party in the street until we finally loaded back into the bus, exhausted from the four days behind us.  All in all Puno was an amazing city with wonderful scenery and amazing people, the truly live up to the name of the  Folkloric Capital of Peru.