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
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| Footprints |
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| Bigger footprints |
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| Goats! (Almost as exciting as dinosaurs, right? |
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| Toro Toro |
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| La Paz |
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| La Paz |
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| The Moon! |
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| More Toro Toro |
