Journals
Wednesday,Dec 28 2005, 12:59:24 PMPosted December 28th 2005
Wed 28th of January 2005 9:06 am Santa Cruz
So right now if you look below at the other entry you might think well what happened to the entire month of December. I mean no journal entries or anything. Well the fact of the matter was I was busy. I now have an amazing laptop thanks to my very generous parents who sent it down here and also Ashley’s parents for lugging it all the way from Dallas for me. December has gone well and I am integrating into my site fairly well. I have made lots of friends and am starting to get a feel for the community. I am teaching English to some kids in town and will start teaching economics and business basics to the hight school kids in February when school starts back up. As for my primary project the artisan group work, I am busy preparing a presentation on basic accounting procedures and production assessment. The main thing is that they don’t really know how much they are producing and how much they are making off of each item. So I am busy doing it while I am here in town.
Christmas was interesting and rather calm compared to other holidays here. I spent it in a volunteer’s site near mine in El Carmen, Melissa, she had a friend in from back home and we just cooked and kind of hung out. Christmas here follows the same pattern as other Bolivian holidays, basically they drink a lot, eat pork or if you are really lucky they kill and grill a whole cow, and then they drink some more, maybe dance to some music that is played at volumes way louder than it really should be, and they drink some more. That was how Christmas went, not even many people went to Mass which I though was kind of interesting.
One interesting side note here is speakers in Bolivia, I think that Bolivia has one of the highest speaker per capita ratios out of any country in the world. Anytime there is a birthday in my town, or a graduation party, holiday etc . . . the Bolivians somehow get a hold of speakers that are nearly as large as my room and make sure that everyone in town and probably those far away are aware of the fact that they have huge speakers and are having a good time dancing to music.
Well this is it for today check out the photos and I hope to hear from you soon.
Sunday 26th of November 2005 5:30 A.M. San Antonio de Lomerio
Oh the trips back here to S A if only there was a degree of hatred strong enough to express how much I truly hate you (the micro ride). Ok so yesterday I basically felt horrible. I had a cold combined w/ nausea and hadn’t really eaten anything the night before or for breakfast. So the day pretty much started out bad and got progressively worse from there.
About an hour outside of Santa Cruz is a one way wooden bridge that also shares traffic with the train that comes through. We were stuck there by the bridge for almost 2 hours while they fixed some of the wooden boards that broke on the bridge. Now this bridge is a long bridge, about a mile long and if you get there with bad timing then you are pretty much out of luck.
Well we got passed the bridge after they fixed the planks and I was still coughing and feeling bad. So an hour after that we pop both the right rear tires. After forty five minutes of changing one of the left dual tires out to the right. We were down to 4 out of six tires. I figure a 2/3 ratio still functions within the Bolivian safety ratio but then I notice that between the 4 tires they have about 1 tires worth of tread so the safety ratio is down to 1/5 but still in the questionably range with the Bolivian to American safety ratio.
We stopped about noon in a town called San Julian, now where this Saint Julian was hiding I had no idea because I couldn’t see much that he had helped out in his patron town. We had the tires fixed which took about 2 hours of sitting in this town with lots of safe looking lunch options. For safety purposes I ended up eating some strawberry wafer cookies and some crackers. At this point we are 7 hours into the trip and not even halfway there.
The rest of the trip sucked just as much and we had to push out of the mud twice. Finally we arrived in S A about 8 pm a nice thirteen hours later on the short bus.
While the trip was bad it was enlightening in several ways.
1: The fact that everyone’s English is either non-existent or at a hello how are you level works to my advantage in frustrating short bus rides. I am able to use every vile, foul, disgusting English word I have ever heard and perhaps even invented a few at the same time. That and I even threw in a French mierds and a Dutch kankers “thanks wolter and bas”
2: Some people get as excited about jungle vermin as food as I do about steak (story to follow)
3: They really need to work on the star trek teleportation thing, it would really help me out
So the jungle vermin . . . We were flying along the road between San Ramon and my site at a whopping 12 miles an hour when one of the 7 other passengers shouts out Peji Peji. Of course I have no idea what peji is but the bus comes to a fast stop and homeboy, let’s call him bob for our purposes, well bob jumps off the bus and sprints after this animal into the jungle. After some explanation I figure out that Peji is an armadillo like creature that inhabits this part of Bolivia. Apparently the meat is great although I am still skeptical. Needless to say this guy comes back sans armadillo and looked very disappointed. The next hour of the bus ride was spent switching in forest Gump style conversation of all of the different manners in which armadillo can be prepared
Fried armadillo, smoked armadillo, armadillo picante . . . you get the picture. I laughed uncontrollably for the first time in the day that a public transportation system was stopped due to one mans liking for free range vermin meat.
My real question came in with what this man would have done if he caught the armadillo
A – Caught it and carried it back alive onto the micro with us. Now I don’t really like this option as riding for 3 hours with a captive wild animal of any sort in close quarters doesn’t really appeal to me.
B – Caught it killed it and forced us to ride the rest of the way with an armadillo carcass. Also not my idea of a good idea.
C – Caught it, killed it, skinned it, and have ourselves a good Bolivian style roadside grill. That one not so bad. . . or is it.
All in all I suppose that I really won with the whole situation. I got to see a man get really excited about a free meal, even if it was armadillo, and run like hell after a rodent, I think it is a rodents and if armadillo isn’t it should be. And I realized that some things in Bolivia will never cease to amaze me. I mean think if I truly integrate here one day me and you could be driving down to Austin or Lord forbid up to Lubbock and I yell out stop the car and go pouncing through the undergrowth on the side of the road in pursuit of an Armadillo that I know how to cook in several different tasty fashions.