Well the journey started out fine enough, but then our flight out of Miami was delayed over 5 hours. This put us in the La Paz airport about 12:30 at night, and getting to our hotel about 2am. The taxi ride there gave us (by us I mean me and Bee Shuman, a classmate of mine) our first taste of Bolivian driving...a bit scary:)
Our hotel was really nice though, although they didn´t have a record of our reservation. But they were able to get us rooms for both nights.
The next day we ventured a little around La Paz. The altitud got to us a little, but not too bad. I was light-headed and a little nauseous. We went to the ¨witches market¨which was pretty interesting. There they sell things for putting on alters or things to bring luck in certain situations. One example is that they sell llama fetuses that are then buried under new buildings to protect the building.
We also went through a bunch of shops of different things, art clothes etc.
We walked around the city some more and went to the museum of musical instruments which was really cool because you can actually play a lot of them.
I tried the coca tea, which is supposed to help with altitud sickness. There are some issues surrounding this tea because it´s made out of the same plant as cocaine, so some people are trying to ban the plant altogether, although the leaves don´t have any of the affects of cocaine. I liked the tea about as much as I like any other tea:)
The next morning we left for Cochabamba and again had some troubles. In short, the airline took our luggagge but wouldn´t take us. So we had to take a bus after all and pick up our luggage at the airport later that night! But the bus ride was actually pretty nice, none of the stereotypes of chickens on the bus and such. And we got to see a lot of the countryside without having to worry about guarding our luggage:)
So I finally arrived at my family´s house later that night. My roommate, Ian, had already been there for a few days so, as he predicted, the family had time to like him better:)
But the family is great. There is the mom (Maritza), dad (Luis but called Lucho), and 3 kids- two girls (Carlina and Maritza (Estrella)) and a boy (Luis (Andrès)). Also the grandma lives there as well (abuelita :) ) They have a dog (Chilaver), a cat (Luqui) and a turtle (Mike). None of them are allowed in the house except the cat always rushes in doors when they are opened. The father is a taxi driver and then there is a store that they run out of the house. (yard and view below)
Classes are going well. We go until 12:30 and then go home for lunch. I have gotten to see some of the city of some afternoons, but I haven´t been to the market (la Cancha) yet. We did go on a bus tour of the city on Thursday. We drove through the cancha as well as several parts of town, and by the lake. Then they drove us up the hill to see El cristo de la concordancia which is the tallest statue of Christ in the world. Ian and I were able to see our house from up there.
Saturday we went on an excursion to see some Incan ruins. That was really great. It was only a few of us, so a guide from our school took us in his Land Rover. To get there and back we took different routes so we were able to see a lot of Cochabamba (the municipality). The countryside is really interesting to see. There is no electricity or plumbing in many places and the majority of the people are farmers. They grow a lot of potatoes. There are a lot of sheep and you see shepards (they were all women or children and generally in typical indigenous clothing) out there with them.
