Monday, July 5, 2010

Still busy!

Greetings (again) from Sucre!


I haven´t been updating the blog as I should in the last couple weeks because of all my extra schoolwork, so here´s a little more detail on what´s been happening.

The weekend before Jeff arrived, I went to Tarabuco market via taxi on Sunday, as I mentioned in a previous post. We also had a birthday party for my host father on Saturday, which was an interesting experience. I didn´t realize that we were going to have a party until Saturday morning, when I was awoken early by them baking a cake and so on. Too bad, too, because I had been out a bit late the night before, assuming I could sleep in. Nope! I did some errands in town, and came home to the housework continuing - the place was clean when I arrived the week before, but wow was it clean now! Just like America - make sure that when you have a party, no one realizes that anyone actually lives in the house... The funniest part of the preparations was when they were moving the cars around to make room for the guests´cars. They gave the 13-year-old daughter a driving lesson, at least as far as braking and steering. Everyone else pushed so she wouldn´t have to use the gas pedal. Much hilarity ensued, and fortunatley no one was hurt.

The party was actually extremely boring. The family is fairly well-off, so their friends are too, and they´re fairly proper. They sat around politely discussing whatever they were discussing, drinking whisky and coke. The Spanish was too rapid for me to take part in the conversation, but I sometimes paid enough attention to keep up with what was being said. Other times I´d relax and just listen to the sound of the language. My goodness, but Bolivians do stick -ita on the end of every other word...


It may have been boring for me, but the poor dog got stuck outside in the cold so she wouldn´t bother everyone.


As the whisky bottles emptied, one gentleman came over to the ladies´side of the room and told a naughty joke. Everyone laughed. They´re so much less prudish here than they were in Tanzania.
You know the tradition in Mexican restaurants of getting ice cream on the nose of the birthday boy/girl? Here, they push the birthday boy´s face into the frosting on the cake. As it turns out, there were two birthday boys - my host father is the younger one (on the right in the picture).

The host mom had put a lot of effort into making the cake pretty. Then it had two faceprints. Lovely.


The rest of the week was school, quizzes, homework, blah blah blah. And then, there was Friday. Guess who decided to show up?


I guess his blog post gave it away... The day he got there, we took a little walking tour of Sucre, starting with the best viewpoint of town near our side of the city, Mirador. There´s a nice little cafe there with some of the best juices I´ve ever had.

On Saturday, we checked out the museum of local textile making. It was a great museum, and we did our best to read everything in Spanish and not use the English translation book they gave us. I peeked a couple times, though.
Sunday, we went back to the market in Tarabuco. We were greeted by this happy dude:
The market is known for its textiles, but that´s not the only thing there. It´s still a real farmer´s market. Mmmmmm, veggies.


We bought some of the local textiles, happy that we had an idea of what the different styles were after visiting the museum. Jeff was inspired by a bunch of donkeys to show off a couple purchases.


Today was his first day of school. That has been a bit overwhelming, but he´ll get into the swing of it. I´ve got a different teacher this week, as they switch us around each week. Unfortunately, I seem to have landed the one teacher in the school who is not particularly interested in teaching. Oh well, I´ll get out of it what I can, and we´ll see how much more I can get out of classes in Cuzco in a few weeks.
We´re both loving it here, but we miss you all! Give yourselves hugs for us!
-K

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