Musical Instruments and Adorable Children

5-17 10:30p
Another long but exciting day. After breakfast, went to the bus terminal and bought a 2pm ticket for Copacabana. Packed up the huge mess I had made (it’s hard to live out of a backpack, have to dig through everything to find what you want!), checked out of the room, and left my big bag at the desk while I spent the morning around La Paz. I managed not to get lost, I finally knew which direction was which and was oriented to the city… just in time to leave!
Started out at a set of museums grouped into one on Calle Jaen in this old colonial house. The first was about Japanese migration to Bolivia and because it was mostly just long write ups in Spanish that would have taken tons of effort to interpret, I went through there pretty quickly. Next came the museum full of masks. Again, most everything was written in Spanish, though there were a few literal translations into English, done very literally so they were quite ridiculous to read. I read through some of the Spanish blurbs and looked around a bit, a lot of the masks were really scary and strange, all used for different festivals and celebrations. Their version of a clown is much, much worse than ours! The last museum was my favorite of the group – it had a room of gold pieces, and another area with silver and other metals. I was excited for the gold room because I had seen a gold exhibit in Peru that was amazing, but this didn’t really compare and there weren’t any descriptions on anything. The other metals section, though, had some pretty cool pieces, from masks that were found at the ruins I visited yesterday, to full body armor and tools and jewelry.
I walked down the hill a bit to the museum of musical instruments, which was by far my favorite of what I’ve seen so far in Bolivia. There were rooms upon rooms of collections of Bolivian instruments, as well as an international room. Took tons of pictures, which I hadn’t been allowed to do at other museums. Interestingly shaped guitars and percussion pieces, a dozen kinds of flutes, creative designs everywhere. There were also several interactive areas where it said ‘se puede tocar’ – you can touch – so I got to play with different percussion instruments. I’m blanking out now, there was so much to say, but pictures later will help bring it back. I can’t believe that was just this morning!!
I walked further downhill, deciding to spend the little time I had left going to a folklore museum, but it had just closed – most museums here tend to close for lunch from 12:30 till 3! So I went instead to the other vegetarian buffet in La Paz, which was just a few blocks further down the hill. They nicely put stairs as the sidewalk to make it nice and easy, though the altitude was definitely still getting to me. Lunch was delicious, the best big meal I’ve had here. I have no idea what kind of juice I had, some fruit I’d never heard of and couldn’t pinpoint to anything, but it was good. There was an interesting side made of onions (though a bit too strong on that end), purple olives, and cheese chunks, all fully coated in guacamole. I dipped bread in creamy green vegetable soup topped with cheese. Boiled yuccas, or something of the sort, and broccoli, yay veggies! For the second course, you got a choice between soy meatballs with rice and this cornbread looking thing, and I chose the cornbread. It was really, really good, and definitely had a corn base to it, but was kind of casserole-ish and very moist and filling. For dessert, there was a good sweet fried plantain and this chunk of raspberry moose. Hm, I guess I write a ton about food on here! It was really nice to be able to go to a fully vegetarian restaurant and be able to get anything at all and not worry about what was in it. This place won best restaurant in Bolivia several years back and it’s very popular and a decent price for the amount of good food you get, just under 4 dollars, which is a lot here but was worth it.
After lunch, retrieved my back and headed back to the bus station. The bus had seats jammed so closely together that when one person leaned their seat back, everyone had to to avoid being smashed, so we all had our seats fully back. They were hard to move back to their original position, so getting in and out and also reaching my backpack involved some contortionism. I’m glad I don’t have long legs! On the bus I was again surrounded by Israelis, several different groups this time, they are everywhere! After the army and before going to school, tons of them take really long travel breaks, though I don’t understand where they get the money since they make about $150 per month in the army! The ride to Copacabana was four hours of gorgeousness, with rolling hills, the Cordillera range in the distance, different views of the lake as we wound around and around. At one point, we all had to get off the bus and take little boats to cross the lake. They put about two dozen of us on a little covered motor boat and we rocked our way across the lake. Our bus went on its own mini ferry, which was barely bigger than it was and pretty scary to watch since it was so low to the water. Back on the bus for another hour and then we arrived. I checked into a hostel and then began to wander the town. My hostel was just a few minutes walk from the water and I found a rocky pier, so I shakily made my way to the end of that and watched the sun set over Lake Titicaca with the mountains of Southern Peru in the distance. Tomorrow night, I’ll climb up for about half an hour to a viewpoint that is supposed to have a really good sunset view.
I was going to go grab food and then go back to the hostel because that’s what I had done in La Paz, a huge city where it wasn’t safe to walk alone at night. But this was a tiny town with cobbled roads and very few cars, everyone walking around in the street, kids running and playing on their own. So I started walking around and was drawn to a building with loud cheering. Turned out it was a women’s soccer game, most of the women wearing jersey tops and traditional flowy skirts over tights – those definitely interfered with their game and caused a few stumbles. The gym was packed to the brim with what was probably most of the town. Many of the players were middle aged women and no one ran very quickly, so it was a fairly slow-paced game and no points were scored during the time I was there, but it was still fun to watch, not for the soccer but for the culture and atmosphere.
Outside, I stopped to watch some children play in the plaza, and was soon approached by several children and a little girl named Maya asked my name. Soon I had a huge group of kids around me, very excited to play with a gringa. The kids ranged from three or four to eleven or so and there were definitely a few, including Maya and another little one, who constantly needed to be hugging me or holding my hand. I spent about three hours with them, leaving for a bit in between to grab a quick dinner across the road. They of course were in love with my camera and had tons of fun taking pictures and videos of each other, squealing with laughter and delight. I have some pretty cute pictures on my camera, but the lighting isn’t great because it was dark outside. After my battery died, we moved on to playing games, some where I had no clue what we were doing but tried to follow along. There was one that was kind of like a version of freeze tag, where all the boys were the snow and the girls were the sun, and if we were tagged, we had to freeze until another sun tagged us. Almost immediately, we were all frozen except for one, who had quite the chase with the boys before she somehow managed to free us, and then all the kids collapsed in a big pile of laughter. Then came duck duck goose, similar to ours except they used a ball and when you were tagged as goose, the previous goose dropped the ball and you had to grab it and use it to tag the person in order to get them out – you could also throw the ball and hit them for the tag. After my dinner break, we got into a little bit of the kids asking about me, being amazed at how much my plane ticket cost, and wanting to learn random words in English. Kept being begged to stay, but eventually left with promises that I would come back tomorrow night at around the same time. Speaking Spanish with kids is definitely easier than with adults, and the older girls helped try to guess what I was meaning to say when I couldn’t think of it. I sometimes couldn’t understand what they were saying, but they were good about showing me or saying it another way, so it was definitely good Spanish practice.
Used the internet for a bit, though it was ridiculously slow and expensive, so I’m just typing this on my computer and I’ll move it over later. Then back to the hostel to take a nice hot shower, which I was very excited for – yesterday’s shower was icy cold and quite painful, so my hair didn’t get washed. I had chosen this hostel here partly because of promises of hot water 24/7. Eh, it was barely luke warm, so my hair remains gross. I need to be less of a wimp with the cold water, this is going to keep happening, but it’s kind of hard when my skin and is already purple and I’m trembling from the cold before even stepping into the shower! Okay this is ridiculously long and I should try to get some sleep, the altitude here is even worse than La Paz and the headache is not fun! Cookies if you actually sat through and read all of this! I think by the end of this trip I will have quite the long novel.