If a tree falls in the forest, does it make a sound?

Hello probably no one. This post is the tree falling in the forest of the internet, which no one will read because I've been incredibly negligent of this blog. I'm sorry. But this is a last ditch effort to post something because if everything goes according to *my* plan, and I manage to fight through Bolivian bureaucracy, I should be out of home internet within the next few hours. No worries though, I'll still check the net about 2 times a day by going to internet places, but I wont be uploading pictures so this is my chance.

So... What happened in the last, what, month and half or two months since I wrote a blog? Well, lots and nothing, as usual. The big thing that happened is that mom and Jacques came to visit for two weeks from October 20th to November 3rd. I was in charge of planning this trip which had to include a few must-sees from Bolivia and Peru. They took all the pictures but my mom sent me a few that I'll post although they might not all illustrate my narrative here...

One thing about coming here to visit is that you lose a bunch of days adjusting the the altitude and generally feeling like crap. And crap-feeling time was spent in La Paz. Then we went to Tiwanaku where the weirdest thing happened. In that village where there is usually no tourists whatsoever staying in the bunch of hotels available, we got there and everything was booked! There was a sculpture festival of some sort happening and all the sculptors had taken the rooms. But never fear, this is my town. I got a hold of Doña Delia and I got us to stay in the house where I usually stay while living in Tiwanaku! Not quite as plush and cosy as the hotel I had planned to put my parents in, but at least it was giving them a taste of my regular life here. Turns out, to my extreme surprise, that house is super warm in the spring!!! I couldn't believe it! I woke up in the middle of the night and walked about in my boxer shorts and t-shirt and felt totally fine. Usually it's close to freezing when I live there. And squatting at Doña Delia's house allowed my parents to have another taste of what my life is here usually: I got Aurora to cook quinua cakes for us! It's my favorite food that our cook (Aurora) makes! So it all turned out fine and apparently I gained some cred in Jacques' eyes by seeing the "conditions" in which I usually live in. I wish everyone could see it then so that people would stop thinking I get "vacations" just because I leave Montreal for months at a time to go to a different country...

Ok, after Tiwanaku, we got to go to Copacabana, a beautiful small town right by Lake Titicaca which is the spot to catch a boat and visit the Island of the Sun (an important place for Inka mythology). Only Jacques got to visit the Island because mom got sick that night and morning so I stayed with her. It's not like I wont get another chance to visit it, while Jacques wont do the trip another time. Instead I stayed at our nice hotel and read in the sun. That was great, and I payed for it later. Contrary to my belief, I *can* get sunburns. Must be getting old... Here's a picture of me and mom sitting at the hotel. In the background you can see a bit of the lake.
After Copacabana, the hellish portion of the trip started. It is a given that you can't go to the Andes without experiencing some sort of unplanable problems, likely related to political unrest. Our problem was that the road from Copacabana to Cuzco was blocked by protesters, and it's not like there's lots of detour roads in the middle of this gigantic mountain chain. We had to take a detour that transformed our supposedly 9 hour bus ride into a 21 hour bus ride... Thankfully, most of it happened at night so we couldn't see where the bus was going because once the sun got up I saw we were on tiny dirt roads transformed into mud because it was raining hard all night all on the edges of mountains with no safeguards on the side of the road to keep the gigantic bus from tumbling down... But we made it, and got to Cuzco and our super cozy and beautiful hotel.The hotel was a block away from Cuzco's main plaza (that you can see in this picture) and made it really easy for us to visit the historic (and pre-historic?) part of Cuzco. Cuzco was the Inka capital and a lot of its most important monuments have been integrated into the Spanish architecture which means you see Inka walls everywhere although you can't really see what the actual building looked like in Inka times. I love Cuzco. It feels like you are walking in hundreds of years of history, most likely because you are actually walking in hundreds of years of history...

Now, if you want to see actual Inka structures you have to leave the city, or go to its outskirts. First stop was Sacsayhuaman, the "Fortress" that isn't one. It's overlooking Cuzco and has GIGANTIC walls with some stones higher than me, and that's where the Inkas retreated to fight off the Spanish so it was thought by the Spanish to be a fortress. But it most likely wasn't. It was more a place of ritual, when the Inkas weren't under attack. Here's me and mom trying to look past century-ish in sepia tones in one of the many doorways of Sacsayhuaman.
We also toured the Sacred Valley where there are lots of old Inka domains you can visit, the most famous one being Machu Picchu. I had never visited the Sacred Valley before, in my last visit I went straight from Cuzco to Machu Picchu. The valley is beautiful and there are lots of amazing sites to visit. I may not have planned enough time to do them all though. My bad. We first stopped at Pisac which I knew was my supervisor's favorite Inka site so I was excited to visit it. What I did not know is that to visit it you needed to walk on narrow paths flanking the mountain with no hand rails to stop you from falling if you tripped. And my mom is terrified of heights. So that proved to be a bit challenging... Here's a picture of us on one of the trails.
Pisac is indeed beautiful, I have no pictures right now of the actual site, but basically you go through these paths and then suddenly you have a bunch of structures to visit, then you continue on the winding roads and hit another bunch of dwellings and such. But we were mostly focused on bringing my mom through it without her having a meltdown. She was a trooper though, and soldiered on even though it was clear she was terrified. I'm glad to report that in a conversation after that she did say that given the opportunity she would do it again and this time focus a bit more on what's around instead of mostly focussing on getting through it. That's what happens when you face your fears (and survive it, tee hee hee!), you realize that it wasn't so bad after all.

After this 2 hour walk through the site, we hopped back into our taxi and continued toward the town of Ollantaytambo. Again, I have no pictures of the town but it is AMAZING. Sadly we were tired from the Pisac adventure so we didn't explore as much as we would have liked to. Part of the town are still actual Inka streets, and there's water canals running through them. It kinda gives a glimpse of what regular folks living under the Inka rule lived like. And there's ruins of a bigger settlement that you can visit but again it flanks a mountain and we were too tired to climb. We did visit everything that was at our level though, which included fountains and just pretty ruins. We slept in a really nice cosy hotel there, right in the train station. There was a huge avocado tree right in front of our room, which made me crave avocadoes but none fell off... boo... We woke up at dawn and hopped on the train to Machu Picchu.

When we got there it was all foggy making it look kinda creepy and outerworldly.
Machu Picchu is huge and rather incredible too. And thankfully doesn't involve tiny paths over ravines. But sometimes, even though there's a wall, you are at the edge of a really steep fall. Mom had to look up, while I dared to look down (even though I do have a fear of heights, though I'm doing better since living in the Andes).
After our visit to Machu Picchu, we took the train back down to Cuzco where we arrived in a bizarre procession... No pictures again, but it made me giggle with glee as I love to randomly stumble upon weird things you'd never see in Canada. Here's what we saw trying to get to our hotel, oh and I should mention this was Halloween: although it was past 9pm, there was tons of kids in costumes, then tons of people all looking at a procession with a giant statue of... the Virgen?... and loud marching bands. Ok, it doesn't sound too crazy when I write this down, but the frenzied crowd and weird colors and lights were quite eery. Why would the Virgen need to come out on Halloween anyway?

So that's it. We relaxed and walked around Cuzco some more the rest of the time, and I splurged on a plane ticket home because I was not about to face the blockades again!

Since then, life has been rather boring. I analyse all day, and lately I've been trying to tie loose ends, and prepare for my departure. I need to do stuff like cut the internet service, pay the rent for the months I wont be there (which is a bitch with the canadian dollar going doooooown - my rent is in US$), stuff like that. And worry about the mountain of bones left to analyse. Summer is definitely here though, which is weird and nice. I don't need a coat out, and usually I'm colder in the apartment than outside so I need to take off some layers before going out. Most of the time it's really sunny and the sun doesn't go down before 7pm so that helps to keep motivated to do analysis - no darkness to make you feel tired. Sometimes though there are these incredible storms with wind, hail, and thunder and lightning. But they never last for long. Ok, when I'm left talking about the weather, I think it means I ran out of things to say and should go do something else.

Sorry for the late post folks!

Land of the grey

Sorry I haven't written in so long, but I've really felt I had nothing to report... Like my title suggests, everything's been kinda grey - but that's not all bad. Case in point, look at that picture from last night!

That's kinda how my life feels right now. A bit on the boring side, I do school work all day, grocery shop, pay the bills. But then again, I do all of that in Bolivia and there's always something interesting popping up (whenever I leave my pretty dungeon) in all the grey, like that pretty rainbow. Look! I'm a poet!

The last few weeks have been really quiet on all fronts. Politically, there seems to be nothing happening. La Paz is still quiet, there are still negotiations that one day are good, the other day bad. It's politics. In Spanish. I can't understand most of it, so I just stay on the look out for huge protests and so far that's been quiet. So, it's been grey. Can't rejoice in finally having peace, but can't really be worried about war. I have been chatting some with local people here who give me their opinion. One lady doing my nails was going on and on about how awesome Vladimir Putin is and how Bolivia and Evo should court him because he's a man of the people and he "looks so good"... I decided not to mention the whole case of Georgia, among others. Anyways, she was mentionning him because of the whole "kicking the US ambassador out" situation. She was quite happy with that. She wants a revolution, but I can't say she really knows what that would entail. On the other hand, the lady at the photocopy place was telling me all about how people in Santa Cruz are so much nicer and warmer than here... She was telling me about how lots of people, particularly business owners, think the referendum was rigged in La Paz because there's no way Evo would have gotten that high of a percentage, especially not in Zona Sur, the rich area of La Paz. I chatted for about 20 minutes with her, and I don't want to repeat everything she said, but it was the first time I met someone opposed to Evo here and it was definitely enlightening. Other than the "people being nicer in Santa Cruz" - she really meant like they say hi to you, not in any overtly racist way - she had good reasons to be against Evo that didn't sound like "we just want to keep our riches".

My daily life is really the most grey of it all, accompanied by the beginning of the rainy season. Looking at bones all day is just dull. I know it's my job, but can all of you say you love every morning waking up and working? So, this is how I feel too. I wish I could go out everyday and walk around and chat with people and buy stuff. But I can't. I have bones to look at. And it's not easy.

I do have social occasions once in a while. Last weekend I went to my friend Dennise's wedding. I was really excited to go to my first Bolivian wedding, but guess what? It's just like a North American wedding. The bride was beautiful and wore white, they got married in church (a catholic wedding which means I could "almost" remember what to say when but it was in spanish so that was an added difficulty), and then we went to the reception in a beautiful social club type of place. I didn't bring my bulky camera so I have no photos for now but my friends should send me theirs soon. One difference is that the food happen after the dancing. Or anyways, the reception was: waiting for bride and groom, montage of their life together (with fake pictures of Leo with the Dalai Lama and Dennise with George Clooney - I'm ashamed to say I was all impressed Leo had met the Dalai Lama...), their arrival followed immediately with their first dance (on Lady in Red), a huge number of toasts, then dancing. THEN, at 10:30pm they started serving the food. Then more dancing. Then cake. And... dancing. People here dance a lot. Everyone. It's quite pleasant actually. So that was one of the rainbow.

Another one will have to go in a next post, but basically, I found out Doña Delia (whose house we rent in Tiwanaku) has a knitting machine. Then found a place where they sell alpaca wool for cheap (comparatively to Canadian prices) in tons of beautiful colors. I got her to make me a shawl, hat, and cut gloves. I'll take pictures soon to show you.

Well, that saved me from looking at bones for about an hour. I should go look at them now...

A bit closer to home, literally

In my last post, I mentioned that La Paz was all nice and quiet even though Bolivia is facing a "political situation". Well today I got to be a little more into the action. As I went grocery shopping, I suddenly realised that right on the other side of the street was a demonstration blocking the street. I went on, wanting to be away from it as all consular memos tell you to. But as I came back from the grocery store about 45 minutes later (thinking they had moved on) I realised that they had only moved about 20 meters, to be on a dead stop in front of my building. They stopped because, right in front of my building, was about 30 cops from the riot police with the big shields. It's not quite a fun sight to see. But I have to say it was really peaceful. The people marching were mostly Aymaras asking for justice for the Pando massacre of a few days ago, but they didn't seem angry, just peacefully marching. And they spread out quickly without a fuss. Nonetheless, after being bombarded with bleak news stories about where Bolivia could be headed, it was a bit disconcerting to see this in front of my home. As an aside, I met a friend of mine at the grocery store who gave me an invitation to her wedding October 4th. It was really weird to hear myself say, totally seriously "Of course I'll go! Well, unless there's a civil war by then" and she answered, "Yeah, I don't think there will be one. I hope not, that would ruin the wedding". I think everyone is rather optimistic that this can be resolved through mediation and talks, which started yesterday and are apparently fruitful. But you only need one idiot to go kill someone and restart hostilities and I believe the proverbial shit will hit the fan... Anyways, I'm rather optimist too, but know that I also am preparing an exit strategy "just in case".

on the political side...

I realize that my posts are of a more personal nature. That's the point of this blog, give friends and family some news and pictures while I'm away for a long time. However, in the slight case that you guys have heard about Bolivia in the news recently (and not just about the US ambassador being kicked out), I guess I should address the recent political developments. There has been increasing violence and conflict in Bolivia, especially in the last week. All of this is happening in the eastern parts of the country where there are movements for autonomy of these provinces. So on a personal note, there is almost no repercussions here. As usual, I hear the noise of people marching outside for one reason or another (that's almost everyday here, and I kinda like to see that people aren't afraid to take the streets for their demands) so I'm assuming that lately it might be some pro-Evo rallies in this time of conflict. I live in Evo's stronghold, and he just received a huge 66% approval rate in the country, so democracy is on his side for now. One problem that could eventually affect me directly is that protesters in the south are blowing up natural gas pipelines or blocking gas transport so there will be (and apparently is right now) a gas shortage even in La Paz. But that doesn't worry me too much. All it will do is make me eat lots of sandwiches because I have a gas stove.

What is more worrisome for the future is if the conflict escalate further instead of running out of steam... It could potentially maybe lead to some sort of civil war. I think the leaders on both camps want to avoid that though, so it's just a matter of controlling the mobs. This obviously isn't a fun prospect, and quite frankly, I am not equipped to fully understand the situation and explaining it to you. Luckily, if you're interested in understanding it further like I am, there are great blogs available like http://gringotambo.wordpress.com/ and http://www.democracyctr.org/blog/index.htm . This is how I get my information about the whole situation. It is well contextualised so you don't need to have lived here for years to understand the ramifications of certain developments (I feel like I'm reading a "fill in the blanks" when I read local newspapers).

Happy (?) reading!

Update: the gringo tambo blog posted the link to this really interesting interview that discusses clearly and simply what are the issues in Bolivia. It's a great introductory course on Bolivia!

Bolivia is weird

As I'm writing here, I am being serenaded very loudly by Mariachis. I'm in my room, they are somewhere outside with microphones and speakers... I actually really enjoy the randomness of this! If they're still playing around midnight I might have to get violent.

This tops a really funny weird day for me. Not really that weird given I've been here often, but still. Today I went back to Tiwanaku because it was the opening of a weekend long festival (the most important one for Tiwanaku given the solstice is a national holiday rather than a local one), in honor of the Señor de la exaltacion which is another name for Jesus. Here he is, pretty similar to regular Jesus:

I went there alone assuming I would know some people. First people I knew I finally encountered were two Bolivian archaeologists that work within the site. However, they looked slightly different than usual...
In typical Tiwanaku fashion, the "entrada" (people dancing and making an entrance I guess) started 3 hours late, which meant I missed most of it. I wanted to leave around 5pm to make sure I could find a bus back and wouldn't be in La Paz too late. I did forget to pack some food and most of what was being sold was "street food" which isn't always to the peak of cleanliness standards. Although I never heard of "listeriose" here... Plus they don't give you cutlery so you have to eat with your hands.

I was going there mostly to see one of my favorite person in the world, our cook Aurora, dancing. Turns out her "help" Eli who has been working with us for two years and is a sweetheart was dancing too! And luckily, they were among the first groups to dance so I actually saw them before leaving. I figured I should introduce them to you since they are so important to me, my belly, and my expanded figure (I'm now going to the gym and eating less because what I cook isn't as good so none of you will see me in the expanded state). Although I wondering if I did post pictures of them before, and I can't go check right now. Anyways, they're good pictures too.

Here is Aurora:
And here's Eli:
On a side note, the mariachis are still playing...

Oh, and as far as introduction goes, I thought I should post a picture of Tiwanaku's mayor because I was shocked the first time I saw her. First of all, it's a "her". Second of all, I think she's my age. She's dressed up in the blue cholita outfit to the far left (although last time I saw her she was wearing jeans so she usually doesn't dress as a cholita). She was signing papers right before doing her walkabout in the plaza.As you may have noticed, I'm a bit tired and don't have much to say. I sort of prefer showing pictures right now, so I think I'll just end with a medley of weird pictures...

For that last picture, I just liked that it was written "coqueto" on the back of their costumes. I'm not sure what it means in spanish, but in french, coquet would be someone who's really careful about their appearances, on a vain and slightly effeminate tangent... Update: after talking with Machi and Tony, sounds like coqueto means pretty much the same thing in spanish although you need to add "flirty" to the list.

And speaking of liking their appearance. This guy asked me to take a picture of him. And he's pimp.

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.