A relaxing weekend

This is me at ¨Christo¨in Cochambama, apparently higher than the one well know in Rio.

This is my friend Sam and I in Sucre.

Last Thursday was the day of Bolivia which I celebrated in a very mature way by going to the main street to watch the parade with my host mum, sister and her kids. It seems that all the kids in school here learn how to do baton twirling and nearly all of them play some sort of brass instrument, some of them in tune and some of them not so much. They were all actually pretty talented, but it was a fairly boring parade and Sam and I soon wandered off to eat some Pastels, our absolute favorite street food and probably one of the only things that we don´t get ill from.

We headed off to the Bus station on Wednesday night to buy Bus tickets to travel to Sucre the next morning only to find out that buses only leave in the evening, so it looked like our 4 day weekend was going to become 3. So after a relaxing day on Thursday we headed off on our Semi-cama bus in the evening. Now people had told us that the road to Sucre wasn´t the nicest and to be fair it was probably one of the bumpiest and winey roads of been on but I was well impressed with the bus and even managed to get a few hours sleep. So we arrived in Sucre and immediately noticed the difference of how much cleaner the streets of Sucre are compared to Cochabamba. Its meant to be the place you go for some culture in this country and the place is full of Museums and important buildings so that’s basically what we did for the weekend. I know it doesn´t make for very interesting reading so I wont bore you with too many details. But it was nice to spend the weekend in and out of cafes and museums and the Recoleta had an amazing view of the city that we walked up to each day.

Probably the most interesting place that visited was a place just out of town where they found Dinosaur footprints roughly 20years ago and was confirmed by Paleontologists in the 90s. Its basically a massive big wall that they were mining for whatever it is that they use to make cement when they came across these footprints. I don’t think that photos do it justice as the lookout makes them look a lot smaller than they really are and it’s a bit sad that they still don’t have the money to protect the wall from the effects of nature.

So anyway, in short the weekend was super relaxing and was great to get away, we headed off to the airport and as some of you know, luck isn´t always on my side when it comes to transport . I mean the whole time I was in London, very rarely did my flights and trains leave on time so I ´m used to things running behind schedule, but for once I was a good hour or so earlier to the airport than necessary and what should happen, the plane left 2 hours early!!! I mean what the??? Since when does that happen, apparently in Bolivia, so we´ve been told they often overbook flights and when its ready to go it just goes. Luckily there was a really lovely guy at the airport (a local) who helped explain the situation to us and kindly drove us with mum, grandma and the 2 kids to the bus station which was a good 15kms away. They helped us to buy a ticket for a floata bus (the only buses left) which is a normal bus but on the road to Sucre overnight its not the form of transport you want to take. So filling up the backseat of the bus was a young guy, Sam, myself, a mum with a sick baby, and the dad with the 4 year old, yep it was a tight squeeze. And to make it worse the poor baby vomited as soon as we got on the bus and left a nice odour for the trip, but the father of the baby was lovely as attempted to speak to me for most of the trip which is always welcome practice for me. Needless to say it was a difficult morning at work on Monday with arriving in Cochabamba at the wee hour of 5am. But mow I´m back in the swing of things and ready for another week of work!