our valentines day was spent in la paz, bolivia and had almost nothing valentines-y in it, but that is okay with us. we´ll have an extra cheese valentine´s day next year or something.
it´s carnival here and craziness.
frankly, we are kinda over carnival. this is our 3rd city in a row celebrating their version of carnival, which equals a week´s worth of being places where people are out of their minds! it also means being on guard every second we are anywhere of being hit with a water balloon, or a squirt gun, or sprayed in the face with foam (like shaving cream – but made specifically for carnival rediculousness).
it´s a really weirdly passive aggressive thing. everyone acts like it´s all fun and games but they will literally put a can of foam IN your face and spray you in the eyes. or throw a water balloon at your head from 4 stories up. its so not safe and really not fun for more than an hour a day and then you just want to be able to walk out of your home without being paranoid about every passing person and car.
but, we are really trying to see the fun in it and keep our annoyance at bay as best we can. afterall, this is likely the only time in our life we will be in bolivia for carnival and we might as well try our best to enjoy the good parts (and there are good parts too)!
buuut back to the annoying parts… there seem to be very few rules. you can be hit by a three year old or a 30 year old and we´ve seen vendors get foamed (which seem like they should be off-limits). today a woman in a passing car rolled down the window and covered a little old bolivian woman selling sweet potatoes on the side of the street with foam. so rude if you ask me!!!
anyways, the day after valentines day we went to the movies and saw the valentine´s day movie (aka – dia de los enamorados) in a nice movie theater. or rather, a theater that will one day be nice, but for now is only half built, but for some reason open to the public. it´s like walking into a construction site to see a movie. hah. pretty funny/weird. the movie was pretty much exactly as we expected (fluffy and light hearted and predictable and fine) and was a nice way to escape the bolivian mayhem for a couple of hours and eat popcorn – which is always my favorite part of going to the movies.
we leave tomorrow morning (assuming the plane actually leaves, since they are canceled and rescheduled allll the time) to a small town named rurrenabaque where we´ll leave for a 3 day tour of the pampas. we are supposed to get to see caiman crocs, anacondas, monkeys, a bunch of other animals, and PINK DOLPHINS. can you tell which i´m most excited about?
i´m a little nervous about the flight. i´m not a nervous flier at ALL, but it´s a small plane that goes through the mountains and lands in a grassy field – so this isn´t a typical delta flight and i hope everything goes as planned!
we had a bus last week where the steering column BROKE while we were MOVING and was then ¨fixed¨ with a piece of RUBBER they found in the luggage compartment and a WIRE HANGER they found on the side of the road. then, we proceeded to drive for 5 more hours with this ghetto-rigged steering column along twisty-turn-y roads on the edge of a mountain. frankly, i really thought we might die. if the steering broke again while we were midturn, there was no doubt we´d be tumbling down the cliff. so, hence, the nervousness about the plane. i mean, i´m SURE it will be fine… but hopefully none of it´s crucial parts are being held together by found odds-n-ends.
on that note, if all goes as expected, i´ll be away from the internet until we get back on the 20th. but i have written a bunch of blog posts to keep going up while we´re gone!! so keep checking back!
you have to see the pictures from our four day jeep trip last week across the salt flats. it was incredible.
tomorrow is a post on salta, and then the next day on crossing into bolivia, and then finally, onto that amazing trip. 🙂
also, for anyone wondering, so far our baby dog mckinley has been doing great after her surgery!
here she celebrating valentine´s day in tampa at my mom´s house with her little doughnut on to keep her from messing with her incision site.
much cuter than a cone, don´t you think?
(thanks to my uncle davian for posting this picture for us on facebook!)
