The city that never sleeps

On Thursday I got to move out of my tiny hostel room and into an apartment. It was a great accomplishment. I'll be living there with two other people who work at Natura with me - one Bolivian and one other intern from the US. When we moved in we had no stove, fridge (hmm... I've done this before...), beds, or anything, and only two of the three rooms are ready so two of us are sharing until the third room is ready. It sort of feels like camping. But I did get a mattress last night, and it has changed my life.

We bought a fridge on Saturday - here you buy fridges (and washing machines and flat-screen TVs) on the street, just like anything else, and put in the back of a taxi to get it home. Here we are moving the fridge into the kitchen. In the picture with me is Bryn, one of my two roommates.

On Friday we got to experience a Bolivian style birthday party. Our apartment is above our landlord's house, and they invited us to party it up with them. Birthdays here are celebrated with a churrasco, which is basically a huge meaty barbeque. They really really like meat here in Santa Cruz. And of course, there was dancing. What a trade off - there seems to be a correlation between places that like to dance and places that like to eat meat. Does that mean I'd be a better dancer if I traded in my tofu for a steak? I think I may find out this summer.

Here are a couple of pictures. Behind the dancers you can see the churrasco, but it's hard to capture just how much meat there was.



At about 1am we left the birthday party to go dancing. Yes, leaving the house at 1. Me. When we got home from dancing at 3:30, the party was still going strong. And these weren't college kids. The whole family was up. Maybe it's the meat.

On Saturday there was a second churrasco at the house - do they do this every night? - and we fell asleep to the sounds of reggaeton from one side (the party next door) and cumbia on the other. Fortunately on Sunday they took the night off so we got a quiet night.

On Sunday we had a completely different kind of adventure which I'll have to tell you about next time. As a preview, it involves me behind the wheel...