La Paz Te Amo

I know I blogged recently, and to blog again is something new. Since internet is not going to be a guanteed thing in the near future, I decided to update you guys on La Paz, the capital (or one of the capitals) of Bolivia.
After the hotel from where I blogged last time, we took a ten hour bus ride (can you believe it?) to La Paz. I fell instantly in love. Through the window of the taxi cab, I saw the myriad amounts of shops and stands on the streets that sold woven handbags and tapistries and gloves and hats and a bunch of amazing things that I wanted to buy. Money was not the issue in this case, but the idea that whatever I bought here I would have to carry with me for four months. I decided to leave the products where they were.
Upon closer inspection, I found out that the stores sold many things that were unexpected. The best example of this would be the many many many skeletal llama babies that we sitting in a bowl on every other street corner. Apparently these things are used for witchcraft. Whatever they were being used for, the we giving me the jibblies. I decided to leave them alone. There were other things however. Along with the lead baby llamas, I can across dead bats, fetal llamas, and ocelot hides. My original starry-eyed opinions of these stores began to deteriorate quickly.
The rest of La Paz was amazing though. Our hotel has free wifi along with a little internet cafe that i can go to if my parents and brothers are hogging all of the computers. The food is amazing too. I am currently writing this with an aching stomach because of all the Indian that I ate. To top that, La Paz is undoubtedly the most beautiful city I have ever seen. Situated in a valley, none of the buildings are more than about three stories high, so if you go to the top of one of the few skyscrapes in downtoan, you can see just a pattern of little tiny brown buildings bustling with native people. I forgot to mention, about 60% of the people living in La Paz are natives, wearing intricate clothes and carrying babies on the back. The best part is the bowler hats that the women wear, that seem to serve no purpouse, and that look like a butterfly flapping its wings the wrong way would blow it off.
Today we visited the coca museum. This museum is the history of coca leaves in the Bolivian culture, and the escalation of the production of cocain too. The english translated packet that I received was very specific in how it was made and what it does and the legality of it in certain countries. Unlike the rest of my family, I quickly became uncomfortable in the museum after the offer of coca leaves to chew on, and stepped outside. Then my dad offered me some Coca Cola.
Anway, that is pretty much it. I would reply to comments and all that jazz, but I am really tired, and my stomach hurts a lot. I am going to go read a book and sleep a lot. Don´t have high expectations on when the next post is going to be.

A Tardy Guide to Chilean Cities

Once again (and I’m thinking about setting a new standard) I am a little too late with my blog. Once comments stopped coming in about two weeks ago, I should have taken a hint. Internet is a real problem here (when is it not) and will continue to be that way for the next two weeks. So… don’t get your hopes up for a lot of blog posts.

            Here is a link for all of those who wanted to see pictures.

http://sites.google.com/site/jensontrip2009/chile

 

This is the blog that my mom writes for my family, and you don’t have to (in fact, I would prefer if you didn’t for my own personal reasons) read it. You will get to see some great pictures of what we have been doing, along with an occasional video.

            Another thing I am going to say before I get into what I have been doing,  is that if you thought that valentine’s day thing was completely original, and thus I was a completely funny guy and you just hadn’t noticed it until then, it was… not that way. I took a good 80% of that stuff from this guy called ze frank, and I was going to credit him with it until I forgot. He is a pretty great guy though. Tell your friends.

            Anyway

            Last time I blogged, I was in Pucon residing in a quite cozy cabin thing with internet. This town is mostly known for its insane amount tourism. It has pretty much everything you can do, including rafting, which I already told y’all about. Another thing we did (which comes in a close second to rafting) was our ascent to the top of this volcano that I can’t remember the name of. Beginning with a chairlift, we put on our packs complete with snow gear and weird plastic discs that we shaped kind of like a telly-tubby’s severed head, you know, with the weird hoop thing on top? We discovered what that thing was for a little later. Then we began our ascent, with our heavy boots and seemingly useless pick-axes. As we climbed the gravely rock, we used the axes as if they were walking sticks, but they were a little to short, so our hope of looking like we knew what we were doing was lost at about minute five. At our thirty-minute mark, we all sat down and ate almost all our candy. About thirty minutes after that, we ran into our first piece of snow, where we were instructed to place our pick-axes vertically into the snow on our uphill side, and kick our shoes into the side of the hill to make foot holds. This worked about as much as a submarine screen door, and by the time we had taken five steps, we were back on gravel, after an apparently useless lesson. Several minutes later, however, we were confronted by a wall of ice and snow. Sighing, we got to work, taking the closely placed steps that were carved into the snow. After another two hours and several breaks, we reached the summit of the volcano. As excited as I was, the unbearable stench of brimstone caused me to have a cough attack, and dampened the moment a tad. What I hoped to be a scalding pot of jumping lava was a steamy hole. Although they view was beyond spectacular, I covered my face with my arm, and trudged into the wind back down the hill. I wasn’t looking forward to the decent.

            But I should have. As soon as we made it off the poisonous peak, our guides told us to take out our severed heads and clip them to our belts. Together, we awkwardly clipped on the discs, nervously glancing at each other to make sure they looked as ridiculous as us. Then we walked about fifty feet to  a slide. A slide. On a mountain. It was awesome. Using our feet as breaks and our pick-axe as a rudder, we went down the hill in style. It took us fifteen minutes to sled down the mountain that took us 4 hours to climb up. All in all, a day well spent.

            After that, we took another very long bus ride. This time: 10 hours.  Awful. I did make some good progress in my book, and did get to play some quality Boggle. When the bus finally came to a stop, we were in Santiago, the capital of Chile. This city is huge, and when I say huge I mean HUGE. When gazing at it from atop a hill, it filled up pretty much all that you could see. It was like downtown Minneapolis x20. I felt pretty okay about it.

            Santiago was our first time staying with a host family. We dragged our suitcases into a dark home where we were warmly greeted my a middle aged couple and their 24 year old daughter. Only when my brothers and I hauled our stuff up the uneven staircase did we encounter the other sibling. This guy I don’t think ever leaves his room. Ever. On the occasions where I did see him over the next two weeks of our home stay, he was either playing guitar in his room, or opening our door without knocking at 11:30 at night and being inquisitive in the middle of our movie. He was nice, he just… had bad timing.

            The following day, we began our charity project, where we go to a women’s shelter, where mothers go if they’re husbands are aggressive or abusive. Our job is not a difficult one, which is just to occupy the kids from 10:30 a.m. until 3:30 p.m. The kids ranged from ages of 1 year olds to one 13 year old. The kids were absolutely adorable, and a good about my time with them was either tickling them, or telling them that dirt is not something that should be eaten. If you follow the link at the beginning of the blog, you will get to see their cuteness, along with a video that my mom made of the women’s shelter with really lame background music.

As for the older kids, we made up great activities for them to do, such as building bridges out of popsicle sticks or giving them English classes. I must admit, school is a lot more fun when you get to tell them that they were wrong, and not vice versa.

            Over the next couple weeks we got to know kids extremely well. On the last day, as we played Red Rover (a game that we introduced that became an instant favorite), I became a little to aggressive, and too several people down into the dust along with me as I tried to break their defense. Instead of crying, the little girls jumped on top of me, and we began to wrestle. It was a pretty epic moment.

            Since this post is getting a tad too long, I will be concise for the remainder.

            We flew out of Santiago to this town in northern Chile. This place is at a high altitude. This means it is hard to breath. We went sand boarding. It is like snowboarding, except with sand. We got to climb big sharp rocks and watch sun sets and read Kurt Vonnegut. We stayed there for two days, and then jumped on another bus (I’m getting kind of tired of them) and rode for 10 hours, and tried to catch a couple winks (and failed). We ended up in a beach-side city where I am currently residing. It is getting a tad late for me, and I’ll try to write another post soon. Unfortunately, we will be traveling non-stop for the next couple of weeks, so Internet might be a little scarce. Be cool, we’ll be 100% in a bit. Comment comment comment!