I am still here!

Okay okay, it’s been AGES. Whoops.

I’ll catch you up on as much as I can remember, but my memory is not good enough for leaving things this long! I’m currently sitting on the most orange (orangest?) sofa I’ve ever seen, in our NEW FLAT. The contract ran out on the other one and, since my housemate is staying in Bolivia for another year, we found a nice new place. The landlady showed us literally everything the flat came with, which took quite some time, “This is a can opener, do you know how to use it?” and “This is a broom, you can use it to sweep”, but she’s a lovely lady and I somehow signed myself up to give her niece a tour of London, great. A downside is that apparently there is “no space” for wifi in the building, like that’s a thing, ha, no seriously it is here, so I had to go to different internet providers asking about dongles. The Spanish for ‘dongle’ is ‘dongle’...just in case you were wondering, which I reckon you were. 

Doug came to say hi, we did a bit of travelling and found some dinosaur footprints in Toro Toro (“Mud Mud” in Quechua), one of the most beautiful places I’ve ever been to. The trip involved lots of walking, swimming in fountains, caving, seeing a LOT of goats and donkeys and a couple of little rabbits, picnics in the mountains, and climbing down into and up out of (help us all, so many steps) a canyon. The four hour drive there and back was very scenic, and quite unusual, we picked up a few locals on the way who needed a lift, and had to stop at one point because the exhaust pipe was falling off the car, oh Bolivia. We stayed in a gorgey hotel situation and were the only ones there, we were so well looked after and served SO much food - classic Bolivian dishes with at least three carbs in each meal, what else? The tour guides were great, one asked for some English lessons as we went around and we had a lot of fun. We also went to La Paz, a stunning city, so different to Cochabamba (but Cochy you’re pretty too and you’re still my favourite), to see the sites and enjoy a new city. It’s great how cable cars are used as public transport in the city, wish Birmingham had that, not that it has any mountains. A lot of this trip involved eating lots of food and getting lost looking for food. High up in the city is ‘Valle de la Luna’ (Moon Valley) which was named this because Neil Armstrong went there and said it was the closest thing to what the moon looked like. (I beg to differ, when we were there a Bolivian music video was being filmed with lots of people dressed in costumes with bells attached, it didn’t seem very moon-like to me, but hey, Neil knows best). 

These past few months have also involved a peach festival, my housemate buying a whole chicken and then realising it still had it’s head on and didn’t know how to deal with that (oh how we cried), winter coming so people wearing huge coats and gloves like they’re in Russia (it’s still way warmer than British summer), not getting any diseases, oh wait no I did get parasites again, but only once so let’s celebrate that! (I found out that Cochabamba is the least sanitary city in South America, so I like to think I’m doing pretty well).

In other news, I’M COMING BACK IN JULY, I asked my boss if it would be okay to work from home in the summer and she said yes, so looks like I’ll be seeing you soon - if you are actually my friend and not just someone stalking my blog. This means I have to eat as much Bolivian food as I can before I leave, but only the good stuff of course, so erm, I’ll be eating lots of pastry and meat basically. Joy. 

Thanks for reading,

Lots of love

Liza

Footprints

Bigger footprints

Goats! (Almost as exciting as dinosaurs, right?

Toro Toro

La Paz

La Paz

The Moon!

More Toro Toro

I'm back!

My Nan told me it was about time I wrote another blog…so here it is…

I'm not quite sure how I've already been back for six weeks after a lovely Christmas at home, but apparently I have. Actually, if I'm honest, it felt like it took about six weeks to get back to Cochabamba, and that, my friends, is my first nugget of blog…

So, I'll be honest, I left it a bit late to book my internal flight from Santa Cruz to Cochabamba, but it is a small airline and you can usually buy tickets the same day/at the airport…and "usually" is a keyword in this story. I managed to book a flight, but after a delayed flight from Madrid (I just wrote "fright" by accident, and indeed it was) I missed my connection and was unable to swap onto the next flight out because there had been a landslide on the main road from Santa Cruz to Cochabamba, meaning everyone who would usually drive or take a bus was now flying too…FUN. Long story short, I had to stay overnight in a hotel that a taxi man found for me (not dodgy at all, no) and get a flight back the next evening. But don't worry, all is not lost, I discovered Cinnabon at the airport (about all you can buy there apart from fresh meat, snacks and Alpaca clothing (made out of Alpaca, not for Alpacas) and wow, those cinnamon rolls are YUMMY.

Anyway, I was SO happy to be back after that situation, and probably didn't feel as guilty as I should that my suitcase broke the boot of the taxi, whoops. (When I told the driver that it wouldn't fit, and that maybe I should get a different taxi rather than him driving around with the boot open, he really should have listened!)

The road blocks however, do not end there…It's referendum day today (another no car/no alcohol/no shops open day - a good day for blogging it turns out), and leading up to this there have been many road blocks and other situations as protests etc. meaning getting to work has been a struggle sometimes, talking of struggles, let's just talk about water balloons for a moment…

I just never thought that I'd ever choose getting the bus home instead of walking for any reason other than laziness, but turns out that this month there was a much more important reason… the water balloons. Now I'm all down for a water fight, especially in this warm weather, but when my boss told me that her friend broke her nose a few years back after being hit by a water balloon here, I was slightly concerned.

So,  some context, Carnaval is the biggest festival/parade in Bolivia, and it is celebrated in different cities on different weekends in February (the main one is in Oruro and it is amazing) - in Cochabamba it was last Saturday and it was a lot of fun! It apparently started out as an indigenous religious festival but is now a giant colourful parade, drinking fest and water fight. The lead up to Carnaval is, however, a little less fun. And this is where the water balloons come in…for a good few weeks before the festival young people, especially guys, like to throw water balloons at strangers walking along the street, their main targets are other young people, girls and foreigners, so, well, enough said there…

They throw them from cars, trucks, balconies or just street corners and you never know when you're safe! The first time I got hit I decided it wasn't so bad, just a bit of fun and actually quite refreshing…but a few days later when I was targeted the whole hour-long walk home and hit from all angles, I thought enough was enough… ha. One time I took a taxi somewhere (taxis are super cheap here, it's great!) and the second I stepped out of it I got hit on the shoulder…these youths are seriously on it!

And then there was the foam…you think there is no harm to be done when it's just cute little children spraying pink foam at you when you walk past…but then you get home looking like Mr. Blobby and realise it is not so easy to get off your skin/clothes as you hoped. Oh Bolivia. But overall it has been a lot of fun, if not slightly putting me on edge whenever I see a group of youths, or even when a car goes past slowly.

It's been so nice being back and settling back to everything I got used to here, and although I still have some language barrier situations, all is mostly well. An example of that 'mostly' is when a friend was describing someone to me and I asked whether she had a curly horse, rather than curly hair…I was trying to use some South American Spanish and it definitely didn't work out so well at that moment!

I feel like there are probably other stories from over this time, but the blog is getting quite lengthy so we'll leave it here for now, scroll down for some parade photos though :)

Lots of love,
Liza x

The bus got all dressed up for carnaval!

Just a little flamingo

Even the people dancing in the parade got covered in foam!