Meandering Our Way to Somewhere: Pictures of Sucre and Potosí

As I promised, here are some of the pictures that started from over a week ago before we left Sucre. I´ll keep the text concise since I wrote so much on the last post. We took a tour of the cathedral, which was very pretty:

We went to the famous dinosaur footprints, which were found when a cement factory excavated a hillside near Sucre. The little splotches on the vertical wall face are all gigantic dinosaur footprints:

There´s a whole dinosaur museum focused around the footprints, with lots of statues of dinosaurs and a beautiful view of Sucre:

Here´s a picture of Sucre´s plaza at nighttime. It´s always full of action with kids running around stuff happening. There are also a few kids running after you trying to polish your shoes, whether you have black leather shoes, tennis shoes, or even sandals. We took part in Dave´s economic stimulus plan and had some good shoe shines.

We went to a dance performance where they showed all the different kinds of bolivian dances. Traditional dance is really big here:

Here´s a picture of me and Kate eating salteñas on our last day in class in Sucre:

Kate tries using the dinosaur phone. One of many in the streets of Sucre:

Here I demonstrate the steepness of some of the roads. It´s kind of a trick picture, of course, since the houses are level and I and the camera are leaning with the street:

Then we arrived in Potosí after not being able to get a bus (against the advice of our travel book which stated that you can always get a bus to Potosí; we had to take a shared taxi instead). Anyway, it´s incredibly high altitude, and Kate was starting to feel sick as we went on this really long tour of the national mint museum. But it was interesting, as Potosí was the main source of silver during the Spanish imperial times, and many of the worlds coins were minted here in the past. The mask on the doorway is famous for having a kind of strange smile; it´s hard to tell if he´s grinning or grimacing due to the riches or the death caused by the mining:

Potosí was filled with narrow and steep streets. In the background, towering over everything is the mountain called Cerro Rico, or rich hill. It is heavily mined and stands out among the other mountains:

Oh, we also had a wonderful dinner that night of Quinoa and Llama meat. But since we don´t have any pictures of that, instead I will share a picture of South American electrical work: