La Paz

Flying over Bolivia the thing that strikes you is how brown it is. Light, medium, dark brown and gray must of been the only available colors the day the goddesses painted this land. There are jungles here but you couldn't see them from the plane. It was almost depressing for a second but then my sheer giddiness overcame me.

La Paz is also the highest capital in the world at 12,000 feet. Catching your breath here is hard, just a few stairs will take the breath out of you and the hostel has me accommodated on the 3rd floor. So far no altitude sickness though! Upon arrival at the hostel, a cup of instant coffee inhand(welcome to South America!), I climbed to the roof for a gander at this marvelous city. While staring at La Valle de la Luna, in the distance, a beautiful Siamese cat danced along the roof, dark paws padding along the rusty tin roof and cream colored body contrasted beautifully against it's background. The cat didn't heed my call, no shock there, and dashed off to chase a bug and disappear amongst the rows of tin.

On the flight to La Paz I sat next to a woman who is going to be shadowing pediatricians in La Paz all summer through Children's Health International. Their programs looked interesting during my research but were too expensive, not interaction based, lacked a practical focus and were devoid of the commitment to strengthening the community that Awamaki prides itself in does. The biggest question bouncing around my head is how is Awamaki going to shape up compared to their promises and my expectations? The later can be checked but the former is out of my hands.

La Paz rests inside a perfect half circle atop this mountain as if Pachamama finished her soup and walked off without her bowl. The walls are lined with red brick houses and winding cobblestone roads that drift down to the center of town. At night they light up with white and blue lights. The city was originally divided by the Rio Choqueyapu, the Colonialist Spaniards settled on one side and the indigenous people were forced to the other. I explored the indigenous part today, checking out Catedral San Francisco, originally built in 1567, the Museo de Coca, which gave a fascinating cultural history of coca and then the Witch Market, where Llama fetuses were available for purchase.

Grandmas from South and Central America are my favorite people in the world. The grannies selling veggies at the market today were shocked that 1. Spoke Spanish and 2. was buying vegetables and 3. knew how to cook them. The produce was beautiful. Purple, white, yellow and pink potatoes, chard, carrots, quinoa along with a picante chile went into a soup for the next few days. And where there is milk there is cheese, in this case queso criollo, farmer's cheese, salty and moist, delicious spread on bread or crumbled in pasta or atop a soup. They had hard cheese, queso para freir, too but I'm not the largest fan of fried cheese. Those grannies had a pretty solid laugh at and with me and they'll definitely have my return business if more veggies are needed this week.