"Its Bolivia"

The tittle of my blog is courtesy of a student of mine. We were waiting on all of the forth graders to go by so that our line of students could move. So I was laughing with my kids, talking about how we were suck in traffic during rush hour. Then my little girl says, "Don't worry about it, there's always traffic, its Bolivia" in the sweetest voice. It has been a great joke with all the other new teachers. We have to remind ourselves that things work a little different down here that even eight year olds know to joke about it.

More about school and students next week. I haven't brought my camera to school to get pictures yet.

So now that I am all settled in my house, we have tried exploring the city a little. On the first week we were able to go a coworker's house for dinner and drinks. We all decided to go and watch an indigenous festal/ slowest parade ever! We were there for about an hour and we only saw a few dancing groups go by, nothing like the parades in the states. It was a show of bright colors, sparkles and dancing. The costumes with beautiful with color. We were told that most of them cost about 2,000 US dollars, which is a lot of money down here. There would be men trying to organize the dancing with a large handle in their hands. We were guessing that they weren't making much sense. It was a fun way to see should of the culture in Santa Cruz.

This was one of my favorite costumes. It had so many sparkles :)

The men's costumes were just as colorful!

Amanda, Stephanie, and I have tried a few of the markets around the city. The first one was a smaller one in near the middle of town. It was a craft fair, so I was able to get a few larger earrings. I was having withdraws since I didn't bring that many down here. There were a ton of beautiful wooden crafts and cloth bags. It is the prefect place to get more tourist like things.

On Saturday all of us got on our walking shoes and went to the closet fruit and vegetable market. It was able the size of 3 football fields. I would have loved to take pictures of the market, but our maid told us not to wear any jewelry, so I thought that a camera would be out of the question. There was tons of vegetable (so many different types of potatoes) I guess it is just not fruit season yet. Bolivia has around 30 different types of potatoes I have been told. I can't wait to try them.

One of the strangest things about Saturday is that we avoided the cops like crazy. Down here they can ask you for your visa at anything to make sure that you are allowed in the country. We didn't bring our copies of our passport to the market, so we didn't want to run into trouble. It was strange for me to avoid the police. I have never had to do that before.

I can't believe that I have only been here two and a half weeks. It feels like I have done so much in that time.