To market to market

I bet you wouldn´t think that people traveling on public transportation to a town with a market 4 hours from where they live would buy large things like washing machines, TVs or 9 different comforters. But you´re wrong. In Bolivia they do. The day didn´t start off so great as I was tired. Not only was it 4:20 in the morning, but I hadn´t gotten home until 1:30 or so...I called a Peace Corps volunteer a teacher had given me the number for, and went to his house to watch a movie. There was another PC vol there. At first I wasn´t sure about them...they were very California, but in the end they were super nice. Then we went to a place called High Class Bar that was decidedly not high class, where 3 other volunteers came too. It was fun to be social. The next day my mother told me she was delighted I had gone out - why does everyone in South america seem more concerned with my social life than I am?

I tried to sleep on the 4 hour bus ride but wasn´t sucessful. We got to the town around 9 am and took a trufi - a minivan that serves as a bus - to the market. As for the market imagine a town with maybe 4 streets, 6 blocks long each, that are essentially the contents of a Wal-Mart outside the store. It wasn´t touristy, which was nice, but there wasn´t much I personally had interest in buying. My sister bought backpacks, tents, hiking boots and sleeping bags for her camping/travel store. The mom and the neighbor bought about 10 sets of sheets for either family members or "customers" plus the aforementioned comforters. I did a lot of standing around waiting for them. We ate some typical dish of the city that I think included mutton and various things I have no idea what they are...there were these black things in the dish I thought might be dried llama meat, and I only ate one, but it turns out they may have been potatoe. I really couldnt identify the susbstance from the flavor. The daughter and I then went to the main square while the parents did I dont know what, and then got lost in a trufi that was supposed to go to the terminal but didnt. When we did get to the terminal, loading up the bus was madness because so many people had bought huge boxes worth of stuff and seemed desperate to load it underneath the bus ASAP. Then when we got to the bus station in Cochabamba, outside it was madness as well, trying to get a taxi. FYI apparently in Bolivia a red light doesn´t mean that you don´t go through the intersection...its really treated like a stop sign in the US.

When we got to the house 2 American college girls, friends of the daughter´s boyfriend, were there to stay for a few days while they looked for an apartment while they volunteer for 2 months. Now they´re going to stay the whole time, which I´m not excited about and it might mean I leave earlier than I would otherwise...we´ll see. They each spent a semester in Chile and are pretty fluent in Spanish, maybe I´m just annoyed because I hate every American that speaks better Spanish than I do. Saturday night I was happy to get to sleep and sleep without an alarm on Sunday morning.

Sunday was the birthday of the father. And apparently even though it isn´t a popular dish in Bolivia, he really likes cuy (guinea pig). It was even worse this time, not roasted on a spit but sort of boiled...the meat was ok but I wasn´t going to go near the slimy skin. You know something is extremely odd when I don´t enjoy eating a food, especially meat. There was also the possible potatoes from the previous day´s dish with the cuy, but at that point I was still thinking it was dried llama meat, and I really couldn´t eat them.

I´m getting tired of feeling awkward so until about 8 at night, when the party/dinner finally started, I sat in my room reading. After the dinner, which included something called oca, a sweet-ish root that I thought was delicious, there was dancing. I get a little bored of constant dancing and was happy whenever I felt like I could take a seat. At this point, attending a party in South America is no big whoop so I have no more to say about it. Except that the surprise for the father was a marachi band - I guess he really likes them.