The end of the road

So after about 2 months of thinking about it and researching the internet about traveling here, I am finally in Bolivia. And I´m not sure what I think. I really like the family here - they have two daughters about my age, and all seem very warm. And two of my friends from Cuzco both spoke Spanish really well (granted they had been living in South America for 9 months each), inspiring me to study hard once I got to Peru so I could be as comfortable speaking the language as they were ( a little bit of competitiveness: If they can do it, so can I!). So sometimes, I´m counting backwards the days I need to travel back from Bolivia to Quito in time to make my flight, maximizing my time here. While the school barely has any students and doesnt have activities the way my other schools do, there is a little more of an ex-pat community here so if I take some initiative I can find people to hang out with, and there´s places I could talk to about volunteering. And I just like the idea of living with a family for almost 2 months, because while there´ll be other chances in my life to travel in Bolivia, Ecuador etc (maybe with one of more of you?) I won´t have the time again to live with a family and experience "immersion."

But I am not really enjoying being in classes this week. I have two teachers, each for an hour and a half a day, and while I think one is good, I´m not sure I like her. The other one I like. I think part of it is that its hard to go from a week for vacation, mostly speaking English, being social, and speaking Spanish when I felt like it, to being in classes and studying subjunctive, which is really hard to begin with, requires a lot of memorization and feels like it won´t be mastered no matter how hard I try. And if I´m not going to be really good in two months, maybe I might as well leave it now. We´ll see.

The bus from Cuzco to La Paz was relatively painless, except that I found it rather freezing during the night (I had read this was the case). I lost my hat at some point the night before so wrapped my scarf around my head. I also had an inflatable neck pillow from Israir (that and the slippers were the only good thing about that flight), along with an eye mask, so was pretty much in my old world. I have no idea whether or not I slept. Another girl on the bus said she was really hot overnight so maybe the heating didnt reach the front seat. We arrived at the border at 6:20 even though it didn´t open until 8. And then at 6:40 am, after I paid 10 cents to use a really disgusting bathroom - such is life in South America sometimes, but I prefer the African way - just find a spot behind a bush by the side of the road - the bus drivers told us to get in line for the police, which opened at 7:30. We had to go there first for them to make sure we still had our entry card...then across the street to immigration, than walked across the bridge to Bolivia. Neither town was attractive, but how many border towns are? We left about 8:15 and they put a movie on, but I wanted to sleep more. More quickly than I though, maybe 2 hours later, we were in the outskirts of La Paz. When we got to the bus station, the bus next to ours had a sign for Cochabamba, my destination. And lucky for me, even though it was supposed to leave at 11:30, it waited to find more passengers, and I had time to get money from the ATM, buy my ticket, pay the bus station exit tax (which they have in Ecuador and Peru too, ranging from 10 cents to 33 cents in Peru), and get on the bus. I sat behind two guys from Israel (of course, I think 50% of their under 30 population is currently traveling in South America) and chatted with them, and we stayed in a hostel on Sunday night. There was another girl there from Israel who was happy to find more Israelis. The guys are traveling with a little stove to make Turkish coffee, along with these sprinkle-size crackers that they put in soup in Israel...the Israeli girl was so excited to eat some, and they made me have some even though I insisted that I´d eaten them before (which was true, and I´m not sure I understand the fuss. Yes every now and again I crave Chinese food or look forward to having New York pizza, but there´s no food from home I´d go to the effort of carrying around, or would pay a lot of money to eat. And I think I like food just as much as anybody else. Maybe it´s that I am less discriminating).

So I´m again thinking about the stay-or-go scenario, although I have a few weeks that I could still stay here and have enough time for the traveling I want to do in Bolivia and in Ecuador. Or I could decide to move to Sucre, a city that also has a language school that is supposed to be good, but I´d be taking a chance again on the family. I think I should spend the rest of the week studying (although I have said that before) and see how I feel after I feel like I´ve done enough studying - am I still frustrated? And maybe at this point, it is less about the Spanish than it is about being in another country and learning about it. There´s a great library at the school and I took out a dry looking book about the history of Bolivia. I might as well learn something while I am here if it isn´t Spanish.