Rain Days and Zoos

It has been hard find time to do much sightseeing with all of the school activities and after school sports for teachers ;) There has been a lot of eating out though. At least 3 times a week I am finding myself eating out. There are so many different small restaurants in the town and always someone who is willing to take you to their favorite. The food has been pretty good. I have had everything from pizza to sushi to traditional. Everything has been under 20 US with wine at every meal. With those prices I really can't say no to eating out. Well I have trouble with saying no to social times any way.

This cute little monkey would
run around and then wash his hands.

The emus were kinda mean.
They were looking for food, but
they would peck at you as you
walked by.

But I was able to make it to the the zoo last Sunday. I was told not to expect too much, so my mind went straight to the zoo my family went to in Costa Rica. While my family and I were there a monkey got loose and started walking around the zoo it was pretty memorable.

The zoo actually turned out to be a interesting and cheap outing. For a buck fifty we were able to see a lot of the species that are native to Bolivia. Who knew that one country could have so many different types of animals that it could fill a zoo.

I didn't zoom at all for this picture :) You could see him breathing

The best part was that most of the animals were so close that it was almost like seeing them in a new light. Seeing a jaguar only a few feet away from you was such a beautiful sight. There were a lot of strange birds. They would range from the tropical parrots to road runners. but when the country goes from the Andes to the Amazon basin I guess you could see a lot of differeny types of animals.

Me and a hungry Capybara.
Everyone feeds the animals there.
Don't worry we didn't :)

One area that was really hard to swallow was that the people that were at the zoo weren't respectful to the animals. They would shout and yell at them. There was this larger animal (forgot the name). Asleep near the fence and a few guys would pull on the animals ears and spit on him. When we were near the jaguars one of the dad kept throwing stuff at the sleeping jaguar, so luckily our librarian got mad and started to yell at the guy. It is such a bad example for the children that are watching. It was really hard to not yell at all of them. Our teacher sides kept coming out.

Around town there have been some great sights to see. Although it has been strange getting used to it being spring in September down here. There have been some amazing trees. They are all starting to bloom. So as you drive around the city all of sudden there is a great pop of color, yellows, orange, pink, white, and purple (oh yes a purple flowering tree).  This one is on my walk to school every morning.


Speaking of getting to school, today was the most interesting commute to school I have ever had. I was woken up with rain pounding on my roof. At first I was thinking how nice, it hasn't rain since I have been down here. After getting ready for day I started to get a little concerned. My roommates and I normally walk to school every morning, but with the down poor we started looking into the taxi option. Well the none of the taxi's were answering their phones, crap!!! So we called all of the teachers that we knew who got taxi's to school every morning, no of them had gotten their taxi's yet. I started to believe that I would have to make the soaking walk to school. Luckily our neighbor called us saying he waited outside and finally got a taxi. When he pulls up it looks like he had taken a shower with all his clothes on.

The taxi driver starts to head down the street to school, but he can't really see because the windshield is so fog up. All of a sudden we are in a huge puddle. It looks like it is taller than the tires. All that I can think at this moment is don't stop, please don't stop driving, I don't want to be suck. We turned down a side street and wound up getting to school.

Once at school my roommates and I are one of the few teachers that made it to school. We start to planning on having more than our students in our classrooms, but then school got cancelled. So we went on a walk around to see all the flooded streets.