This is day 7 of my time in Cochabamba! I have now lived in Bolivia for one week. Since everything is so new to me, it feels more like one month than one week. This morning I spotted 13 stray dogs on my way to work.
It took an entire day and night, but I was able to download this weeks episode of The Bachelorette off of iTunes! It is probably not normal how happy that made me, or that I was willing to wait that long for it to download.
Moving on- today at work it was a pretty slow day. By ten o'clock most of the patients were gone and I was able to weigh a couple of kids. I also was asked to call patients into the nurses room once it was their turn. You'd think this was easy, but the names here are not easy to say, especially because they do things like pronounce the letter "r" like a "z" about half the time. I kept having to ask the nurses how to say a name before I could turn around and yell it out loud. At 10:30am one of the nurses handed me a mini cooler carrying vaccines, and said "vamanos!" She was really nice and smiley and I followed her across the street. She was still wearing all white and I still had on my medical shirt from the dentist in the clinic with toothbrushes all over it. I asked where we were going and she said the name of something I didn't know, and said it is very far and we have to take two different taxis to get there. We took the 131 which went down the America street (the rich area). I was glad to have the opportunity to learn about a new taxi trufi route, especially through this area that I have become so curious about. After all, it is where I got my frosted flakes! We passed by several trendy looking restaurants, which shocked me because I haven't seen anything trendy since I've been here. All the stores and restaurants we passed looked much more like places I see in the states than anywhere else in Cochabamba.
And then it happened, we passed a clothing store with a logo that was hard to read so I was staring at it trying to make out the word. On the window to the store was a huge picture of Zac Efron wearing a shirt with that logo on it! Other than the 9 year old picture of Britney Spears taped on the inside of a bus, Zac Efron is the first American star I have seen a picture of here, and definitely the first on an advertisement. I realize it could be photoshopped onto his shirt, but who cares! Needless to say I will be returning to this shop...soon.
We made it back to the clinic right as it was time for me to end my shift for the day, and I turned around and came back to my neighborhood to grab a bite to eat and sit down and watch the Bachelorette.
Really quickly I want to explain something I ate yesterday. First of all, the food here is mostly fried stuff and/or chicken or some other kind of meat with white rice. My lunch was fried chicken, fries, and what I believe was a plantain. I usually hate plantains, but I LOVED this one. I found out that in the states people commonly make them with bananas, but here they use plantanos (not to be confused with platanos which are bananas) to make this food. It was served to me without the peel but otherwise a whole banana (well not banana..plantano) and it was baked like a sweet potato. It was salty on the outside and tasted banana-y on the inside. It had the consistency of a potato. It was great!
That's it for today! Love,
Hillary
No comments:
Post a Comment