Vacation!

The other interns and I thought that we should take advantage of being in Bolivia and go see some sites, and we decided that all those weekends we have been (and will be) working entitled us to a whole week off. It´s fun being a backpacking tourist again, if only for a week.

On Saturday we flew to Sucre, the capital of Bolivia, and also its most beautiful city. As soon as our plane landed I knew I was going to like Sucre better than Santa Cruz. It´s much smaller, and full of beautiful colonial architecture and pretty plazas - it reminds me a lot of Antigua Guatemala for anyone who´s been there, tourists included. After wandering around the city for a while, and buying a little more silver jewelry than I probably should have, we went to a performance of different folk dances from all over Bolivia, each with different music and different costumes. It was incredible, definitely better than the Bolivian version of Cabaret we saw. And at the end they all ran out into the audience and pulled everyone up on stage so we got to dance a little too. And they served Bolivian wine for just over $7 a bottle.

Yesterday we decided to tourist it up and catch a gringo bus to a market town outside of Sucre. It was a fairly standard touristy artesan market, everyone with their textiles spread out on the sidewalk, everyone with kind of the same things, but even though they´re the same they were all beautiful. And they seem to do everything - weaving, knitting, embroidery, crochet, I even saw some felt. So Christmas is almost taken care of.

Last night we arrived in Potosi, the highest city in the world at just over 4,000 meters (13,420 feet). As we were driving in I felt myself breathing deeper and deeper, and walking the one flight upstairs to my hostel room makes my heart beat like crazy. And it´s cold! Like hat and gloves cold. Though we have been told that we ain´t seen nothing yet - we´ve heard between 10 and 25 below zero (celsius) for where we´re going next....