Sucre, Bolivia: Week One

It´s the beginning of my second week here and so far, this place has been great. You can eat for like 4 dollars a day and literally buy ANYTHING that you need in the streets....anything. Sucre is beautiful, super tranquilo and I haven´t gotten robbed yet so, to the country of Bolivia, I apologize for all the terrible things I said about you and how dangerous you probably were before I got here. Actually, out of all of South America, I feel the safest in this city. This is my third favorite place after Valparaiso, Chile and Cuzco, Peru.

I´ve been ¨living¨ with a Bolivian family. However, technically I don´t live with them, I live in the same apartment complex as them. The abuela owns the building, I live on the 4th floor and eat lunch with them every afternoon. Everyone is super nice..it´s just not exactly the homestay I was expecting. Either way, I have my own space. Which means that I can leave my things all over the place if I want, eat cookies in bed and play my music as loud as I want.

Classes have been going really well. 6 hours a day is intense but I´m pretty sure I now have the ability to talk someone into letting me take their daughter on a date/buy a gun from them (which I think is something I need to do in preparation for Colombia anyway). I´m speaking nothing but spanish with my teachers. Today, we had an entire 2 hour long conversation about the ills of Bolivia. Sucre, I think is pretty different from the rest of the country. There´s a huge controversy here about which is the capital, La Paz or Sucre.

Both cities lay claim to it but the president, Evo Morales,  lives in La Paz. She was telling me about the Sucreseans fighting in the the plaza with pretty much everybody, state police, a band of what sounds like terrorists called ¨los ponchos rojos¨ and even their own police force (since the city police are funded by the national government and not the city they work in, even sucre´s own police were fighting them) Someone in my family also told me that her husband lost his job because she spoke out against Evo Morales at a rally. It sounded insane. Everyone in the states that know about international affairs considers Evo Morales a blessing because he's the first "indigenous" person elected president here but he's really more of the same: a dictator. I keep forgetting that this is a developing country, these things just kind of happen here and it´s considered normal. 3 people died (mainly students) and it happened 2 year ago. Man.

I'm playing "walley" tonight which is Bolivian volleyball, and you'd have to see it to believe it. First of all, it's played inside....in a squash court. You can use the walls, your head, elbows, feet, basically whatever. There are basically no rules. Kind of like Bolivia in general.