This is...mi vida

Sucre, Bolivia´s best city

I arrived in Surce with a group of Isreali´s I´d hung out with in the ¨lay over¨ in the town on the way, I uncomfortably didn´t understand anything they said because it was in Hebrew, but at least my stuff didn´t get stolen. We also picked up another Isreali girl Hadass, who has now been my fantastic traveling companion for a week.

We pack muled it over to the cleanest, most gorgeous hostel I´ve stayed in yet. Hadass wanted to ditch the isreali´s so after we got our room, we went for pizza. One of the ¨supposedly¨ safe foods in Bolivia (nothing is really safe). At some point during dinner we agreed to go to see the dinosaur footprints together the next day and after Hadass´s speech about wanting to see ¨the real Bolivia¨ again by going back to the dumpy town of Potosi for a tour of the mines I had a change of heart and eventually ended up going with her.

The next day we discovered a bright, sunny butterfly filled garden in the back of our hostel where we ate breakfast and toke off to see the dinosaur footprints.

To get to the footprints, you take a bus from the center of town. Bus is a term that should be used loosely, because we were actually taken in the back of a truck on wooden benches. The center plaza was beautiful, green, surrounded by colonial buildings and crawling with shoeshine boys. Although I was wearing canvas shoes they were relentless, but humorous, because when I told one of the boys I was from the states he told me her was George Bush´s cousin.

The ¨bus¨ to the footprints was a good tour of town, the later of which seemed to be owned by the French mining company that has control of the footprints. The company has also, as of 9 months ago, opened a new tourist park for the footprints. Extremely disappointing.

The disappointment is because now instead of walking down, touching the footprints etc. you are forced to see them from 500 meters away with binoculars. Granted the park is spotless, has toilet paper and soap (the holy grail here), and some of the worlds biggest dinosaurs statues, but I really wanted to stick my hand in a dinsaur footprint. Damn progress.

The reason the area around the prints is restricted is not because they are trying to preserve the area but because they are dynamiting around it. I believed this only because opposite the park the quarry is in full operating order.

Back in town after our tour, some of which i thought was complete bullshit- Yeah, I´m sure that a water dinosaur swallowed rocks and spit them out to sink and rise, we went for Chinese. Hadass isn´t the kind of person who fears food poisoning, so I reluctantly went, only because the owners were actually Chinese. Turned out to be the best Chinese food I´ve had in South America, good show Bolivia.

Actually so good, we had it reheated for dinner, where I met this other Israeli girl, an ex-officer in the army. From her I got a history-culture lesson on Israeli and being in the army. After this lesson the receptionist tried to give me a lesson in Bolivian wine, but fortunately I escaped to a gingo bar with Hadass for the evening.

Her conclusion about the evening - The army and American college are strikingly similar minus the the binge drinking.

My conclusion - The world is united by celebrity gossip, Israeli´s were devastated by Brad and Jeniffer´s break-up too.

entrada de Stacey @ 17:50