Sneezing My Way to South America

I woke up with a cold the morning before my flight, and braced myself for the trip from San Francisco to San Salvador to Lima to La Paz. People looked at me in horror when I sneezed and spread my germs around our circulating air supply. However, apart from feeling sorry for the sniffling mess that I had become by the end of it, the trip down here actually went really smoothly. I made all of my connections, and didn´t have to check a bag.

La Paz felt familiar. It reminded me of Ayacucho, the city up in the Andes in Peru where I spent the summer after my high school graduation. I had a bizarre moment of feeling like I was 18 again breathing in air thinned out by the altitude and clogged up with the city´s smog. The spaces beneath my fingernails had turned black after my first day wandering around the streets. I enjoyed trying to make my way through the chaos of the city, and am still struggling to wrap my mind around just how enormous it is. Beyond La Paz is El Alto, a settlement that sprouted up in the mountains and grew into a city of nearly one million people . Activists and political leaders in El Alto hold a lot of power in this country, and they can use the strategic location of the city outside of La Paz to block the way to Bolivia´s capital in protest.

La Paz was essentially a layover for me, I know I'll return and explore it more. After two days in a hostel packed full of people just backpacking from place to place, it felt good to know that I would be living somewhere for a bit. I'll have more Spanish and a better grasp of the culture before traveling more. I met a few too many people that would actually say things like "Obviously Bolivians are dumb, I don't see anyone doing anything besides selling gum on the streets to make money." I can't resist engaging with people when they say things like that. I can think of so many examples of Bolivians doing more than selling gum, and reasons why poverty isn't an indication of stupidity.

I took a night bus to Cochabamba after my third day in La Paz, a double decker with reclining seats that appear to have been designed in the early 90's. I thoroughly enjoyed the geometric print seats and aqua green foot rests. When I arrived on a Sunday, the city was subdued and shut down. I spent a couple of hours looking for breakfast with some Dutch girls also waiting in the plaza for some indication of business starting up. Monday, the city woke up and I started Spanish classes and living with a family. As much progress as I know I´ll eventually make, I feel overwhelmed with how much time and patience it takes to really make substantive progress in a language.

However, living with a family is definitely helping in terms of immersion, as well as in cultivating the guts to speak more freely, errors and all. My family is also incredible. The mother is so caring, and they have hosted enough others that she is not too overbearing. The parents have two daughters, aged 23 and 25. Living with a Boilvian family adds a lot of warmth to my day to day life. The house is a little ways up into the mountains, a fifteen minute ride in a micro bus (imagine a school bus chopped in half and decorated with cartoon characters and a few crucifixes).

Although I only know a fraction of what goes on in this city, I can tell that there is a lot of richness to life here (not the financial kind). Cochabamba is famous for the Water Wars, a mass movement against water privitization that was critical in setting the stage for the last decade of Bolivian politics. It is a very comfortable city to live in, and I feel as if I have basically everything here. I am itching to visit some smaller towns and explore more of the country. It is a good starting point, though, and we´ll see what kind of life I make here and where I go next.

My biggest problem so far is crossing the street. After a week in Bolivia, it seems pretty obvious that that cars have the right of way. They are bigger, they can run you over, you stop for them. In La Paz, where the traffic was wilder, I would wait for a critical mass of Bolivians and then make the mad dash across the road in the relative security of a small crowd. Here, I am getting more proficient in how to wiggle through the traffic, but I still don´t walk around with the fearlessness everyone else around me seems to possess.

It feels really good to be in Latin America again, and I´m feeling grateful to be at the edge of a new adventure.