I love Bolivia! Did you know that?

I realize that my last three posts were focused on Peru, and really, given that my life is in Bolivia, I really should talk more about it, especially about La Paz. Well turns out that today I have a real genuine happy love for this country because it once again surprised me in an awesome way. This morning, as I was leaving the gym next to my house to go grocery shopping (at 8:30am, not to brag or anything), I saw that there was yet again some big commotion in the park at the corner. Last week was a huge festival with musicians on a stage for the "get your pet vaccinated" campaign. There has been some pro-Evo parties there too, and a Bolivian comic book fair. This time, it was a huge, gigantic, awesome farmer's market. As I'm going grocery shopping! One lady explained to me that they are commissioned by ... not sure... the government? the city? ... to go in different plazas and sell their really fresh produce at a lower price than the local markets. And they have everything there. I saw a lady selling brussel sprouts (not that I would buy any, but its rare here), there was a couple of fish stands and chicken ones, I bought fresh altiplano eggs (therefore not factory farms), olives, an eggplant, cereals. I swear they have everything there. I understand that it might not sound that awesome to some of you, but it's the surprise and spontaneity of it all that makes it awesome. You get to chat with the ladies, see the whole neighborhood and their dog (literally) shop around, there are toys for kids (although that's always there). It's just so festive as you are about to go do some boring errands like grocery shopping. Anyways, I just got there for the second time today, and this time I had a camera.

This first photo is a general view of the park, but most importantly, you can see my building in the background: it's the second one to the right of the picture, with some orangy brownish colors on it.
The second picture is of the carrousel (which is always there) and a few stalls with ladies selling stuff. Bear in mind that this place was really crowded, and I had my hands full of green onions, eggs, and avocadoes so I had to find a quiet, non-crowded place to put my stuff down and get my expensive camera out. I couldn't just whip it out in the middle of the action because that would be dumb and asking for trouble, so the photos are never quite as busy as they should be...

Here's a baby apparently selling a mountain of garlic (or is it onions?)

So there you have it, a slice of life in La Paz. Since we are on the subject of my life in La Paz, I figured I'd post a few pictures of our appartment, now that it is lived in and all.

Here's my messy room, although I did select the angle to show the less messy side... on the right of the picture, out of frame, is a huge pile of laundry:
Here's our living room with pretty flowers bought by Mary yesterday:
As for news, well first, most of you probably know that Wes left Bolivia last tuesday, leaving me here all aloooooooone for the next 4 months. And by alone I mean surrounded by friends, but you know, I like to be melodramatic. He told me to tell bye to people on the blog, not that any of his friends were ever warned this existed (not that I'm bitter) and my friends will, hopefully, continue to read it. But anyways, Wes says bye.

Also in the news, I am finally in the process of closing up the house and the lab in Tiwanaku and move my analysis to La Paz! I can't wait. Daily showers, access to the gym, internet whenever I want to, and surprise markets in the park. The big move is tuesday night. Then, the living room will look different because I'm bringing back another work table and a bookshelf so I'll guess this picture I just posted will be obsolete. Oups. Sorry.

And an update on the weather, it is now actually hot here. Not heat wave hot, but hot. T-shirt hot in the afternoon. When we got back from Arequipa and went to Tiwanaku, it actually snowed for two days... I'll wait while you laugh... ok? But Cesar and Delia, the couple who own the house we live in, told us it was good news because that meant that the cold was gone and the summer was starting soon. Kinda like when the groundhog sees (or doesn't see?) its shadow. We obviously didn't believe it as we were being attacked by snowflakes, but see? Two weeks later and it's really hot, even in Tiwanaku! It feels a little like spring in Montreal.

On that note, I'll leave to go have fun in the sun. Those of you in Montreal, please take care of my Wesley for me!

Nevermind, I'll tell you anyway...

I'm a little bummed out that no one tried to write funny captions to my pictures, but I'll go with the assumption that some of you at least tried to figure out what's what in your head.

The first picture is the "laundry room" of the nuns who have lived in the Santa Catalina convent, in Arequipa, since around 1540. The convent is one of the biggest attraction of Arequipa, in part because it is sooooo huge! It has 5 streets in it, with apartments that belonged to the daughters of some of the richest families of Spain and New Spain. Women were sent there with dowries that would be the equivalent of up to 50 000$ nowadays. They had servants that lived with them, but were cloistered from the rest of the world. The laundry room consists of a stream that you have to block with your hand for the water to rise and be funneled into those huge ceramic vessels cut in half. We heard a guide say that they would block the draining hole with carrots wrapped in fabric. Kinda funny. The rest of the convent is really beautiful and interesting. You get to walk in history pretty much. Like most south american architecture, it mostly consists of rooms around patios such as the one on our new profile picture and this one:
Here's a picture of the streets within the walled monastery:


The whole downtown area of Arequipa is a UNESCO protected site because it is all preserved colonial architecture. It is obviously beautiful. It is known as the "white city" because a lot of the building are built with sillar, a volcanic rock that is white. The whole Plaza de Armas is made of building of that material. The cathedral in the plaza the armas is the building behind Jonah's head in the second picture. Here's a clearer picture of it:


It is in that cathedral that we have encountered the devil. Yes, the devil is in the church, being crushed by the pulpit. That's picture number 3. Jonah and I were trying to make faces pretending to be scared of the devil, but to be honest, at least I wasn't faking it that much. That sculpture is great and really, really creepy.

Another good point about Arequipa, other than the architecture, is the weather. For people who have seen snow about a month ago, to be able to tan your legs is the most amazing feeling! And the surrounding landscape is beautiful. Basically you are warm and surrounded by palm trees, yet you can see snow peeked mountains and volcanoes in the distance. Here's the view from the roof of the monastery:

I don't have tons of stories to tell about our trip there because we mostly walked around, and drank beer and sangria on rooftop terraces. It was so great, I can't even tell you. We did take a little side trip to colder mountain areas to go see the Canyon del Colca. I had been there years before and knew it was worth a trip and feeling a little cold. Basically, it is a canyon in the mountain ranges nearby that is almost completely terraced. Terracing is the way most Andean people managed to improve agriculture in steep mountain environment by basically flattening one area and putting a buttress wall at the end so you end up having what looks like a giant staircase rather than a hill. Here's a picture of lots of terracing in the Canyon, I hope a picture explains it better than the rambling I wrote:


To get to the Canyon, we took a 3 hours bus ride from Arequipa to the town of Chivay, at the entrance of the Canyon. One of the main attraction in Chivay is the hot springs, that is, an outdoor pool filled with sulfuric super hot water. It's better than I make it sound. Basically, you get to freeze to death being outside in the mountains, in near freezing temperature, in your bikini. But then you run to the pool and get warmed up instantly. We even got to drink in the pool! Now, I'm a bit of a weirdo and never take baths because they bore me to death. After 30 minutes in the pool, I was bored to death. Yeah, it's pretty outside with the stars, and yeah it's nice to be warm when you've been so cold, but then what? Well then what is that, thankfully for me, the pool was closing.

The next day, we woke up early-ish (around 7am) and had breakfast, then went to the bus station where we had to make a decision. The ultimate goal of this vacation was to visit the archaeological site where our friend Tony was working, in the Canyon del Colca. However, when we got to Arequipa we realized that they were done excavating and did mostly analysis in Arequipa. When we went to the Canyon del Colca, we thought we might try to find the site ourselves and go visit it but no one we met in Chivay knew where the tiny town closest to it was, and we were told by Tony that to find it we'd have to 1) rent a cab for about 60 soles (20$), make the cabbie wait for us while we take a 30 minutes walk into nothingness to find this site, and then walk back 30 minutes and get our taxi back to Chivay. At 8:30am in the bus station, we decided it was so much easier to just take a bus to the Cruz del Condor (cross of the condors) and do some sightseeing instead. The bus ride is about 2 hours, and stunning. But when we got there, there was not the huge amount of tourists we expected. Instead, we were told by the ladies selling stuff there that we were too late, condors only show up around 8 am so we would have needed to take a 6am bus or something like that. Quite frankly, I didn't care that much, I'd much rather sleep. As I said to the lady, at least the Canyon is still here. I mean, it's really pretty there, and that's picture number 4 on the last blog. I did put that one picture there because I thought it was funny/weird how Wes was holding my arm. I really can't remember why he was doing that. Anyways, turns out that after taking a million pictures of the canyon, as we're preparing to go, we hear all the ladies screaming "Condor! Condor!", and there you had it, a young condor was just cruising over our head, as you can see here:

They said it was a young one because it was brown, unlike the black and white adults, and because it was small. It was probably about one meter wide, and yes, that was small. We were impressed nonetheless.

After this trip we went back to Arequipa, and Wes and I moved from our decent but boring youth hostel to a fancy shmancy hotel in front of the monastery! We enjoyed the use of the tv, ate in their nice sunny green patio, and just marveled at the colonial architecture again. Then on sunday we needed to go back to Bolivia, meaning long bus rides with loud annoying music and crying children. We did get to use our passports with our shiny new bolivian resident visa though! Which meant we had to pay 91 bs to get out of the country, but whatever, we're residents.

We are now staying in La Paz until thursday because wednesday is Bolivia day and we want to see the celebrations. We will then go to Tiwanaku and spend the weekend there. On sunday, there is some really important elections going on including a confidence vote for the president which could out him. The shit may potentially hit the fan as they say. We think Tiwanaku will be a safer place to wait it out than La Paz where protests could go on. But that's only if the president get outed which I doubt will happen. Anyways, we have friends everywhere here so we're not worried. We are just aware and ready.

Oh, and the last picture I took was of some kids dressed up for the preparations of Peru Day. It was just cute, but not an everyday occurrence as far as I can tell.