Travelin´ thru...

I have left Bolivia. Which is sad because it was really cool there. I am now in Arequipa, Peru, just fo one day before I begin the most arduous part of my trip; at least 2, and possibly 3, nights on a bus. In a row. At least in Peru the buses are nice. At least when you pay for a better company. Yesterday I took the cheapest bus I found from Puno, near the border of Bolivia, to Arequipa, and we ended up waiting 1.5 hours to try to find more passengers, and then 30 minutes at some checkpoint for Go-knows-why (I had decided at that point that I just didn´t care, there was nothing I coul do, and that was what I got for saving $1.60 on the trip). I didn´t need to get to Arequipa at any specific time so it wasn´t a big deal.

Its actually amazing I got to Arequipa at all. For the past 2 weeks apparently there´d been a lot of bus blockades and the road I needed to take from Puno to Arequipa (Also the route from Puno to Lima) had been blocked. Thank god I didn´t know that until I had boarded my tourist bus in Copacobana, Bolivia, that would take us over the Bolivian border to Puno in Peru. Because I would have been stressing over my travel plans if I had known, and in the end it all worked out. In South America, blockades are a way of life. They are actually even more common in Bolivia, usually done by the indiginous people (and according to my host sister, with little result). The week I left my family in Cochabamba, there were lots of blockades, althought never on the route that I took...although that is a blog entry for another time. I hve most of my experiences written down in my diary - its the first time I´m actually keeping a good one of a trip, but I have no time to use the internet, or at times not access! Maybe tomorrow when I´m in Lima waiting to change buses for my 2 miserable bus trip days.

As for the blockades, we had to wait about 15 minutes in town midway between the Peru/Bolivia border and Puno. Teachers were marching becacause the government is asking them to take a test to continue to be teachers, even ones who have been teachers fo a long time. Once the march was over, traffic started moving, and we passed rocks and big bricks of mud that had been placed on the road to stop traffi. We were just really lucky we didn´t have to wait long there, and yesterday the government talked with whoever about whatever, and all the roads are fine. Can you imagine if all the highways in the US were blocked for weeks?

From what I´ve seen of Arequipa, it is very beautiful, but much more modern than what I am used to after 6 weeks in Bolivia. There´s a big, famous monstery here I´m excited to visit. I think that I might have been happy studying or volunteering here, but at the same time its a little less comfortable than the other places I´ve stayed because its bigge, and because Peru just feels a little sketchier than Ecuador or Bolivia. Of course, whenever you are used to a place you like it more (or, you get bored sick of the place and hate it). In any case I probably could have stayed another day or two here, but I already bought my bus tickets out. Which took forever because...because its South America. The company I am going with has a computer system in its huge, separate terminal, but the one window that could sell me a ticket from Lima (remember, I´m in Arequipa) was closed, so after I waited and looked bored and frustrated, a really nice guyat the window next door used his cell phone for like 20 minutes to call the main office and hand wrote me my ticket...then we had to go to another building so I could use my credit card (the first time in 7 weeks I´ve been able to use it!)...the whole thing took far longer than it should have. But I am excited about what I have planned to do in Ecuador...which changes daily, as I sit on one bus or another and write out different itineraries for the 2 weeks I will have. I actuall ejoy all the plnning, it would drive other people crazy. That is the benefit of traveling alone - I can be as crazy as I want about how much I am squeezing in a minumum amount of time.

I´ve been sitting here for 2 hours trying to make reservations and plans for the next few weeks so its time to get moving (my fingers are cold, which happens to me when I´m home and sit at the computer all day).

A Very Bolivian Fourth of July

Just like many of you, I ate burgers and corn-on-the-cob for the 4th of July, and drank beer. Only it was Taquina rather than Budweiser, the burgers were Bolvian style (which doesn´t mean they were that dfferent) and the corn was white, with bigger kernals and not as good as genetically modified, 50% articificial, whatever-they-do-to-American-corn yellow corn. We had a lot of people over to the house for the 4th...all in all, 3 Bolvians, 7 Americans, 3 Germans, and some represenatives of various other countries. My host sister has more international friends than Bolivian friends. I was alone in the house until about 6:30 and was worried that preparation of the apple pie was going to be up to me - and I obviously had no idea what to do. Luckily, the other American girls soon arrived home, and then Rommy, my host sister. We had a little hickup when the girl who had the grill was too tired to come, and her new boyfriend was too nervous about "bothering" her to be willing to go to her house to pick it up...but in the end she, and the grill arrived. We grilled on the roof, which is where the other girls sleep in a tent. It took a long time to get thegrill going so in the end the Goerge Foreman-like grill was reverted to. The best parts of the mean in the end were apple crisp and a guacamole Rommy made. There were no fireworks (although we did have sparklers) but it was a fun evening all the same. The weather made it feel not like Jluy 4th (it is pretty cool at night, maybe 60 degrees). I actually have to keep reminding myself that it is in fact the summer in the US, since I left at a non-vacation time from the states and am sort of stuck in that mindset.

Tomorrow is my last day of Spanish classes here, and I am taking an overnight bus tomorrow night. My last class can´t come soon enough! I´m not sure I´m excited about speaking Spanish ever again...its not Spanish specifically or course, its the whole process of learning a language. What is even more amazing is that young kids don´t have to go through the process - they just absorb and replicate.

A random assortment of photos from Bolivia

In no particular order...
A picture of me looking quite uncool on "The Worlds Most Dangerous Road¨
A capybara
A squirrel monkey
The largest pizza I´ve ever seen
Watching the sun rise at the Winter Solstice in Tiwanaku
A flag for the indiginous people of Bolivia over the ruins of Tiwanaku
The mountains on "The World´s Most Dangerous Road
In Chapare, a region near Cochabama famous for rainforest and growing coca, the plant used to make cocaine

Before and after

So, I did it. I got a haircut. I have curly hair again. And I don´t like it. Never have, never will, I think. I have to say, though, for a $4 haircut it isn´t that bad.

Overdue

Sorry I haven´t been good about writing. Its partly because I no longer have free internet and partly because once I fall behind, its a little overwhelming to catch up. Since I last wrote, I´ve mountain biked down "The World´s Most Dangerous Road," gone to the jungle where I saw anacondas, caimans, capybaras (the worlds largest rodent, and so cute), and a president, landed on a grass airstrip, felt like I was on the set of Lost, played a German card game, visited a wild animal reserve and seen nocturnal birds. And that´s all been in one week. And the fun hasn´t really started yet, because I am going to start traveling "for real" (as in all my posessions on my back, no stopping until I´m back in New York) on Friday. I´ve set out an incredible tight - and therefore totally unrealistic considering the variability of Bolivian public transport and roads - for the next month, which allows me to do pretty much everything in Bolivia and Ecuador that I really want to do. I also might just avoid traveling through Peru during the national holiday, which would be nice. And if the traveling gets too exhausting and I just want to stay put for a few days (since my style of travel doesn´t really allow for any stopping to smell the roses or staying in one place for more than I think 2 nights), I can always sign up for another week of classes somewhere in Ecuador.

Sometimes though, I am very content here and think about scraping the travel plans to stay with the family longer. I have friends, its safe, and its an experience I won´t have a chance to repeat any time in the near future. Like last night, when we all sat around watching Grey´s Anatomy and Lost and the other american girls make cookies. But then I realize that I could sit around in NY and watch Grey´s and Lost, maybe not with Spanish subtitles, but that another week won´t add to my experience immeasurably. And I´m sick of Spanish. The teacher I found is really good but tough and sometimes I just want to say "forget it! I dont REALLY need to know this language anyway." I´m sure thats natural when learning a language, and if I ever have kids they will definitely have a nanny who speaks another language, go to a bilingual school and only be allowed to watch TV in Spanish. So I think that in the end, after 5 weeks in Cochabamba, I will be ready to go. And one day maybe I´ll come back to Bolivia for my host ssiter´s wedding - she was saying its at the point where all her maids of honor will be foreigners!

If I get more time I´ll fill in the details of my adventures. Its amazing how with only 2 hours of classes a day i still dont have time to do everything I want to do, like study, read books on Bolivia, watch TV in Spanish, hang out with the family and get a decent amount of sleep.

Happy New Year!

iNo, I´m not crazy. It was the first day of winter here and to the Quechua and Amyara (probably spelled that wrong) people, a new year. I was in Tinhuanacu for the famous winter solctice celebration there. And my verdict is: no vale la pena (not worth it).

The trip almost didn´t happen for us. We wanted to leave for La Paz (a 7 hour bus ride) at about 6, but the person who went to buy the tickets found out there was supposed to be a road blockade so there werent any buses leaving between 4:30 and 9:30, so we had tickets for the 4:30 bus. And at 4:25 we were sitting in traffic in a cab for a 4:30 bus. I was annoyed because my sister, and the other girls in the house, had been taking there sweet time getting ready to live the sister´s store. I know its Bolivia and things never go on time, but I thought that maybe we could have left a little sooner than about 4:20. And then each block took a few minutes to cross (have I mentioned how here, red lights are treated as stop signs, not red lights like in the US? People just go right on through if there´s no car coming from the other street). Part of the problem was just afternoon traffic, but it was also because there was a march taking up the whole street. People here seem to march a lot, like the road blockade. According to my sister, its usually ingiginous people, because they´re the ones living along the highway, and their protests aren´t really helpful in getting anything done (although Bolivia does have an idiginous president, the first in South America). Anyway, we were meeting people at the station who had already bought tickets for us. One is German, so I figured he´d be even more worried about the fact that we werent there than I was. But I asked my sister if he worked on German time or Bolivia time, and she said he was more Bolivian than she was! But at 4:25 he and his girlfriend were calling to ask where we were! Finally we got out a half block from the bus station and ran...and of course the bus wasn´t even loading yet, although it was past 4:30. We finally left at 4:47. The ride was pretty uneventful - only one time did the bus pull off the road and turn the motor off, which had us all worried and had other passengers yelling ¨lets go!¨´Fortunately maybe my bad bus karma is over, because after only a minute or two with the motor off, we got going again. And I only saw 2 cockroaches - my sister had taken the line to La Paz another time and there was a ¨rainfall of cockroaches!¨along with a breakdown, and waited 3 hours for the next bus. One of my favorite parts was seeing a "dont throw trash on the road" sign and maybe 20 meters later all kinds of trash on the road - it literally looked like someone had taken their kitchen wastebasket and dumped on the ground. After our food stop, they put on a horrible movie. My host sister knew what it was "Freddy versus Jason." Just as I was maybe starting to fall asleep, we arrived in La Paz. At midnight.

There was 10 of us, and my sister knew of a hostel downhill of the bus station, and someone else knew of one uphill...we stood on the side of the street debating what to do for about 10 minutes while about 15 taxis (ok, 5) stopped on the street waiting for us - a baunch of people with backpacks at midnight is usually a jackpot. But we decided to split up and all walk. The first two places we went didn´t have space, and I was a little perturbed at the absuridty of walking around La Paz at midnight looking for space for 10 people. But the next place, Inn of the Witches (right near the witch´s market, where they sell, among other things, llama fetuses for people to sacrifice when they open a new business). We just put our stuff down since we wanted to go right to the Solstice Festival. It turned out that the inn (I use the word losely, if you´re thinking hearty breakfasts in the morning, claw foot tubs and florar walls, you´re dead wrong. This is Bolivia and it costs $3 a night a person for a room with its own bath, cable TV and 4 beds) was right next to the Hard Rock Cafe. They actually have one in La Paz! As we waited outside for the rest of our group, about 10 Israelis left. Of course. Its getting to the point where whenever I see people with darker skin who aren´t speaking Spanish, I assume they´re Israeli. The inn is also around the corner from what I have dubbed "The Israelito (I think the Spanish word for Israeli, but I didn´t pay much attention to the lesson that day) street." The signs at practically every store from internet to hair salons to a dry cleaners have Hebrew.

At about 2 am we all got into a trufi to take us about an hour to Tihuanaco. To make a long story short, we got there at 3, the gates opened at 5, and we spent the time in between either in a restaurant, walking down the street with sleeping bags wrapped around us, or on the line to get in. When the gates didn´t open at 5, people were yelling for them to open, and when they finally did there was extensive pushing. I think Americans are often considered to live in a rude culture, but I just dont think that would have happened - people understand that it takes time to check tickets and let people in. Once inside (it was still completely dark) we sat in a place to overlook the temple, where some torches were burning. My sister and I huddled together under a sleeping bag, and I just wanted to be sleeping! I think if I´d had my own sleeping bag, I would have lain down on the ground and tried...although the point of being there was to watch the sun rise. At around 7 am people down in the temple (which is completely open air) started talking on a microphone, but I wasn´t that interested in what they said. From about 6 it started getting progessively lighter behind the mountains, at some point the sun finally peaked out and everyone turned towards it and held their hands out towards the rays. When it had risen completely above the line of the mountain, everyone clapped, it got slightly warmer, and it was pretty much over. The other American girls said "it was so worth it when the sun finally came out and warmed us up" but I wasn´t that impressed. It happens every day without fail. Today it just happened later than it does any other day. After walking around the site a little bit and watching some traditional dancing and music, we were ready to go. some of us, at least. Traveling in a group of 10 people kind of sucks. Especially when you´re from New York and don´t have too much patience.

We took a cab back and I sat in the front, and was slightly worried that we werent going to make it back to La Paz because we stopped twice for gas without getting it. Then to console myself I told myself that maybe he was just trying to fill up outside the city because gas is cheaper than in La Paz. That was the Lee in me talking, but I needed some way to assure myself that we weren´t going to b sitting on the side of the road for an indefinite amount of time. When we passed another gas station without stopping, I assured myself that we weren´t in dire need of gas, and finally we did get some, although we weren´t stopped long enough for the tank to have been filled.

Coming in and out of La Paz you need to go through El Alto, a growing city with mostly indiginous people from the country coming to the city to find work. It is essentially filled with red brick 1960s communist apartment buildings. Not exactly charming. An interesting thing about La Paz is that even though its so high (something like 4000 meters - that´s meters, not feet), it is actually situated at the BOTTOM of a canyon, so Al Alto (where the airport is) is even higher.

After getting back to the city, we headed out for some food and to check out artesenal shops (like knit alpaca stuff). We ended up eating in a delicious Cuban place, and had a discussion about the inability of Americans to travel to Cuba, ways around it, and the punishment if caught (I´d heard a story of a $10,000 fine per person). Then I walked around the city, which has some part thats are nice, like one plaza, and others that are not at all attractive, like another huge plaza that has a market right next to it. I actually find La Paz a lot more appealing than I thought I would, but its probably because right near the hostel are tons of restraurants of all kinds of food and super cheap.

Plans for tomorrow TBD. Saturday morning my plane leaves for the jungle, although planes to this destination are notorious for not taking off on time or at all during the rainy season (Which this isnt).

And, we´re back

If any of you have been using Gmail and gotten disconnected from the internet, you might have noticed google chat on the left hand side saying that the internet connection had been lost. And then when it is restored, it says: "And...we´re back." That is sort of how I feel sometimes here. Things are frustrating, at least the not understanding Spanish part of life, and then things get better and there´s nowhere I´d rather be.

I was annoyed with myself on Saturday morning because I hadn´t gone to an animal refuge that I should have just planned to go to, instead of hoping that tentative plans to go to nearby thermal swimming pools, which didn´t interest me much any way, would pan out (they didn´t). But after a huge lunch, I was hanging out with the family, reading a book, and was happy. At night one sister, Rommy, and I went out to meet up with some of her friends (Bolivian and German) who are goingto La Paz with us tomorrow for a winter solstice festival in a place with ruins, I can never remember the name. Because the world, or at least Cochabamba, is small, the Peace Corps guy who I met the week before was at the cafe we went to, along with in the end about 10 other Peace Corps people. It was nice to speak English for a little while guilt-free, but then I returned to Rommy and her friends. We went to this circus-like party, but decided not to go inside because it was so crowded, and returned to a bar across the street from the cafe. We spoke Spanish all night and I guess because I was either with Spanish-as-a-second language (or in the case of the Germans, probably fourth) speakers, or Bolivians used to being with foreigners, I actually understood most of what people said.

Sunday, being a weekend day, meant of course: fiestas! There were 2 birthday parties in the family, and the sisters and I headed to the house of the mother´s sister first, for her birthday. We had to take 2 trufis to get there. The house itself was huge but looked like what most Americans would consider unfinished...no balconies on some of the porches, concrete floors, broken windows. I think that is what makes Bolivia very different from a developed country. The aunt has been divorced from her husband for 4 or 5 years but he still lives there because neither wanted to sell the house. So he, the daugher and the exwife all have their own floor, but I don´t think there´s more than one kitchen or bathroom so its not like a department building. After eating my millionth soup in Bolivia, the sisters and I hung out in the cousin´s room (shes about our age). She is the equivalent of an Avon or Mary Kaye lady in Bolivia, so we had fun smelling different trial sized vials of perfume that she had. I felt like I understood a little more of the conversation than I have been. Then we left the party, returned home and picked up the father to go to his niece´s birthday party.

That party was at the home/restuarant of the father´s sister and her daughter, who is married with kids. We ate fish, played a popular dice game that is very similar to Yatzee, and then ate another meal, or a rice with cheese that isn´t as good as you might think, some kind of dry-ish root vegetable, and chicken. Even for me it was too much food in one day (the sisters and I ate a big breakfast with french toast and eggs). We also drank chicha, a fermented maize drink that used to be made with saliva and I hope isn´t any more, and I drank some kind of an alcohol made from grapes but it isnt exactly wine. The sisters and I left around 7, before the dancing. Waiting outside for the taxis, I noticed a dummy hanging on the electricity pole. On it was written: "Neighbors, help us hang all theives." The sisters asked the aunt who had put it up, and she replied without any shame, "Me!" She said there were five overall. I think the sisters thought it was as strange as I did...

This week I´m two-timing when it comes to teachers. Monday and today I had classes with 2 different teachers in two different places...a little tiring getting from one to another! I just have one teacher tomorrow and will probably continue with him when I get back. He´s got a whole system going and there´s lots of drills. I´m back to being frustrated with things...11 weeks of classes and I still have tons of trouble deciding between the two verbs for "to be." Why do there have to be two verbs for to be???

Yesterday morning my first class was at 8 am, and its a 45 minute walk to the profesor´s house. But I couldn´t take a taxi or trufi because I only had a 50 bolivano bill. Thats only about 6 dollars, but with costs in Bolivia what they are, its the equivalent of having a 50 dollar bill in the states and wanting to takea $1.50 bus ride (trufis cost B1.50). So I walked all the way there, and then to my next class with only a half hour in between. It felt great to go to the bank and get some cambio....I felt richer than I´d been in the morning, even though I had exactly the same amount of money. Ah, the ceaseless fight in South America for cambio (change).

In the afternoon my sister and I went to a women´s weaving cooperative in a little town 50 minutes from Cochabamba. They use alpaca, which is warmer than wool. Rommy´s boyfriend knows of a store in Maine that wants to sell their goods, but Rommy wants more modern sweaters, not the traditional thick ones with kind of ugly designs. The stuff the women showed us was more for 60 year olds than 20 year olds, and we´re both not sure they can do what Rommy wants (really thin alpaca "wool" is really expensive). For me the visit was interesting because there´s a Peace Corp volunteer working with the women, so I got to see a tiny bit of what its like to be a PCV. And Maggie, I take my hat off to you for having done it. Yes, her rent is 100 bolivianos a month (about 13 dollars) but I just don´t think I could live in a really small place for two years. She said she´s there until November 08. I know I won´t be graduating from law school until long after that, but its one thing to be in NY and studying for 3 years. And another to live in a place with 50 other people for 2 years. And she´s lucky to be only 50 minutes from a "big" city - some volunteers are much further.

Tomorrow to La Paz and then probably a few days in the jungle after that, which should make for much more interesting pictures than I have right now.