Busy busy busy!

This week has been filled up with Spanish. Imagine that. I´ve been in my classes as usual, plus the homework from them (no more than 30 minutes a night), plus trying to cram vocabulary into my head, and on top of that, the US university I´m getting university credit through has given me a bunch of quizzes and assignments to do as well. Yay, vacation!

I´ve also gotten a few fun things in, of course. (Not that learning Spanish isn´t fun!) I managed to get to the Tarabuco market, where they sell a lot of locally made textiles. It´s pretty touristy, of course, but touristy here feels a lot less fake than it did in Africa. And an "expensive" handmade alpaca wool sweater is B$90, which is equivalent to about US$13. Out of sheer laziness, and the fact that I need to get to a cooking class, I´m going to quote what I wrote Jeff about the experience:

"I went to Tarabuco today. Quite the experience, but the taxi there was the weirdest part. My friend from school had booked a tour through a company here, but this morning we were informed that there weren´t enough people to make the tour happen, so it was cancelled. Instead, we and another guy who was supposed to be on the tour shared a taxi. It was B$70 each, instead of B$40 for the tour, or B$30-40 for a bus, but it was easy. The driver was very animated on the way there, and let us stop to take pictures (although I´d heard so much about Tarabuco having lots of pickpockets that I didn´t bring my camera, but my friend brought hers, so either I can get some of her pictures or we can go again when you get here - it´s not as nervewracking to have stuff with you as all that, you just have to pay attention). He drove a little crazy, though. When we got there, he said we needed to give him B$15 for lunch, which my friend was really mad about, since she had asked several times over if the price he had quoted at first was the total price and he had insisted that we wouldn´t pay more. He said the lunch money "wasn´t for him, it was for lunch." And he was much less animated on the way back, since he had a big wad of coca leaves in his cheek. He still drove like crazy, though. The market was touristy, but not in a really irritating way -Bolivia is so much more tranquilo than Tanzania."

So yeah, that´s a bit of what´s up. I´ll write more later, of course, but with all of the craziness going on, it might be a few days. Hope you´re all well, and enjoying summer!