La Paz- part 1

Hey guys!

I'm going to tell the La Paz trip story in two parts, that way I won't get lazy by the end, and it'll also be painless to read! Hopefully.

Since I've been here I've continuously heard about this Aymara new year celebration that takes place just outside La Paz at sunrise on June 21st. This is a very short article explaining it: http://www.google.com/hostednews/afp/article/ALeqM5jKbCwUkGnBBNY-GiytdvGNzHiCJA

All I knew about it was that everyone stays up all night to celebrate and that a llama is sacrificed at sunrise. I also knew it was really cold, as June 23rd is known as the coldest night of the year in Bolivia. My plan was to possibly attend the smaller ceremony in Cochabamba so I could sleep more and escape if the cold was too much to handle. After an invite from my new roommate to accompany her and a couple of others to La Paz, my plans changed. I didn't want to regret not going on an adventure. It turned out to be an awesome and interesting trip, and here's how it started:

Friday:

After a quick run to the ATM, and some fast but careful packing to include all my warmest clothing, I was on my way with my roommate Sarah to her Capoeira class, which was performing in a main plaza in Cochabamba and meeting at 7pm. After the performance we'd be catching a 11:00pm bus to La Paz, due in at 6:00am. Capoeira is an art form from Brazil that looks like a cross between karate and breakdance, and it is performed in pairs. It was a cool show that went a little too long but two of the three girls that I went to La Paz with are in the group and it was fun to watch them. The next two pictures are from the performance. They start in a small huddle and pair off to perform in the circle to represent what seemed like story-telling from the musicians.

For the rest of the show the circle is widened and everyone takes turns "fighting" and dancing. They rarely touch each other and those who aren't dancing are singing. The whole thing looks like it came right out of The Matrix.

After I grabbed some pineapple ice cream and a doughnut (ice cream good, doughnut horrible), me and the three other girls made our way over to the bus terminal. Remember how I thought I had gotten close to the bus terminal (an area we are supposed to avoid) last week, and then an angry barking dog lead me away from it, thus saving me from a horrible fate? Well, I wasn't anywhere near the bus terminal then. The closer we got to the terminal the worse it smelled and the sketchier it became. We went in and bought tickets for the 11:00pm bus for $25 bolivianos ($3.50 U.S.) and paid our travel tax of $2 bolivianos. To use the bathroom at the terminal we paid $1 boliviano and received a wad of toilet paper. The bathroom was disgusting and an attendant kept pouring buckets of water into the toilets that wouldn't flush. Oh this reminds me! On a sidenote- there is no soap or toilet paper in the employee bathroom at the health clinic I work at. Ok but back to the story.

Once we found our bus and took our seats in the front row, we settled in for a long ride. Our bus left the station and stopped two minutes later to get gas. We stopped 5 minutes after that to pick up about 6 military men, and a minute or two after that to pick up another passenger from what seemed to be the side of the road. I tried to sleep but only fell asleep twice for about half an hour each time. I did have a dream that I thought Jen Chen cut off half of her hair, then found out she didn't and was relieved. I also dreamt Emily De Witt was scheduling dentist appointments around my free time. LOL. The closer we got to La Paz, the more my ears were popping (because of the altitude difference), and the colder it got. Before I knew it, Elizabeth, who was next to me, was in her sleeping bag still shivering, and I was trying to regain feeling in my toes while wondering how I was going to survive Sunday night.

Saturday:

The bus dropped us off just outside of the terminal, and I was already devising a plan to skip out on the celebration. It was probably 20 degrees outside and none of us were prepared for anything below 50. Sarah didn't want to take a taxi to breakfast, so we walked for about half an hour to a cafe, meanwhile I was taking a mental note of every legit looking hotel I saw that I could check into Sunday night. It was not yet 7:00am and the cafe we found was filled with westerners who were a part of a bike tour called "Death Road," and they were about to leave to bike down one of the most dangerous roads in the world to go visit a winery or cocoa farm or something cool like that. An Israeli girl died on that road just last month. After we informed the tour guide that no, we weren't stragglers who needed to board the bus, he bonded with us over the most recent U.S. soccer game where we were robbed of a goal.

After breakfast we headed up to Maren's friend's apartment, which was actually his parent's place, where we would be staying for the weekend. By the end of the climb up to this apartment, I thought my heart was going to fail, or that I was going to suffocate, or possibly collapse from exhaustion. That's how intense the altitude is in La Paz. All weekend I thought the steep hills combined with the altitude was going to kill me. Also, the apartment is on the 6th floor and there are no elevators. We dropped our things off and headed straight to the markets to buy anything warm that we could find.

This is a picture of a witch vendor's cart, from which you can buy llama fetuses (in the picture below) which come in many different sizes. All of the witch's carts that we passed had llama fetuses. Later in the day I walked right past an assortment of pigs feet laying on a tarp on the ground.

We walked for about two miles uphill to meet Maren's La Paz Capoeira friends at the cemetery, who were gone by the time we got there. The heat in the middle of the day is a strange sort of intense, like it is here in Cochabamba. If you are in the sun it is about 90 degrees, but in the shade you can become chilly. It was in this intense heat that we climbed past countless vendors to reach the cemetery. This picture is from the top. All the hills look like this in La Paz; covered in reddish colored square houses from top to bottom. The city is nestled between mountains and hills on all four sides. It was beautiful and a bit odd- for someone who has always lived near a large body of water, it made me a little claustrophobic.

In total we found a fleece lined coat, tall hand-knit wool socks, knit gloves, a hand-knit wool hat, a warm scarf, and a multi-use scarf for sitting on or using as a blanket. I also bought a fleece-lined sleeping bag. By the end of our shopping spree I felt much more prepared for Sunday night and had no more thoughts of hotels.

We came back to Maren's friend's Javi's house and chatted with his parents and watched 1.5 games of soccer before turning it to VH1's most sexiest people in the 90's. It made me feel really young because the girls I was with were 25, 27, and 28, and half of the people on there I didn't know. For example, did you know Joey Lawrence of the Lawrence brothers and from Brotherly Love was on a show called "Blossom" and had a brief music career?? After relaxing we left to meet up with Javi's younger brother for dinner. At dinner the lack of sleep and full stomachs made all of us really tired. Instead of going back to the house, we hung out with Javi and his two friends at a weird sort of outside slide/staircase/bench area. (That's me in the brown).

We went back to the house and everyone prepared to go out for the night. First, they were going to a party held by some French Canadians volunteering in La Paz who would be meeting us in Tiwakanu for the celebration on Sunday, and then on to a bar called "Gold's." I decided to skip this as it was 10:30pm, and even though they figured they'd be back around 12:30am, I didn't think I could keep my eyes open for another twenty minutes. I went to sleep as soon as they left, and they didn't return until 4:00am.

That's it for now folks! Tomorrow I'll put up part two!

Love,

Hillary