Sunday
Okay, Sundays are just bad days to be in cities. Everything is shut -- shops, restaurants, churches (except for services), museums... in short, everything you might want to actually do. Hmm. Anyway. I did go to Tarabuco today, and I caught local transport in the end instead of taking a tour. The trip was not too bad, despite the 17 people in the minibus and the fact that said minibus did not leave from the part of town the Lonely Planet suggested it should, but in fact required taking another local bus to get to the minibus. Nonetheless, people were very good about helping me and I managed to get there without too much difficulty.
Tarabuco is tiny. The streets are mostly cobbled with fieldstone, though the main square was paved. They have a truly graphic statue of an indigenous warrior standing over a Spanish soldier, with the soldier´s bloody heart in his hand and dripping onto his trousers (with the open bloody wound and chest cavity of the soldier shown in surprising detail as well) crowning their main plaza. Interesting.
Most of the streets of the town are filled with the market on Sundays. Mostly it is little tiendas or stalls with stuff for local people -- piles of soaps, baskets of noodles, piles of seed corn big enough for kids to play in like it was snow or a sandbox, veg and meat, clothing, a whole street filled with the sandals that the indigenous women wear (there are only about three variations and they all wear one of the three kinds). And then there is the part for tourists, which mostly consisted of stores and stalls with woven goods from all over Bolivia (and some stuff that looked awfully familiar from Peru), acquired by traders and sold to us. They did have quite a bit of the local weaving too, but I didn´t buy any, in part because I didn´t really like the style, and in part because the stuff I could afford were knock-offs of the real thing, which was way out of my price range. Ah well. I did have chicken and chips in the market for lunch, and it was pretty tasty. And I don´t (at least not yet) seem to have picked up anything nasty from the decidedly unsanitary conditions in which it was cooked. The general system is to have some coals, with an angled pan on top. The bottom part is filled with grease to deep fry the chips and chicken in. So far so good. Less great is the raw chicken storage facility (a bucket with a plate and a cloth covering it), and the dish-washing system (dip plates in bucket of water, rub dry with dirty cloth, give to next customer). Ah well, it was tasty and it was worth it just to see the looks that all the tour-group people gave me as they came through the market...
The afternoon was taken up with a long nap, as I seem to be exhausted right now, from a combination of a lingering cold and also all the night travel. I´m going to head out into this very quiet town to see if I can scrounge up some dinner. But before I do that, here are some more rainforest pics. Well, there were going to be rainforest pics, but blogger keeps stalling out and half an hour later they´re still not uploaded. I´ll try again another day.
Tarabuco is tiny. The streets are mostly cobbled with fieldstone, though the main square was paved. They have a truly graphic statue of an indigenous warrior standing over a Spanish soldier, with the soldier´s bloody heart in his hand and dripping onto his trousers (with the open bloody wound and chest cavity of the soldier shown in surprising detail as well) crowning their main plaza. Interesting.
Most of the streets of the town are filled with the market on Sundays. Mostly it is little tiendas or stalls with stuff for local people -- piles of soaps, baskets of noodles, piles of seed corn big enough for kids to play in like it was snow or a sandbox, veg and meat, clothing, a whole street filled with the sandals that the indigenous women wear (there are only about three variations and they all wear one of the three kinds). And then there is the part for tourists, which mostly consisted of stores and stalls with woven goods from all over Bolivia (and some stuff that looked awfully familiar from Peru), acquired by traders and sold to us. They did have quite a bit of the local weaving too, but I didn´t buy any, in part because I didn´t really like the style, and in part because the stuff I could afford were knock-offs of the real thing, which was way out of my price range. Ah well. I did have chicken and chips in the market for lunch, and it was pretty tasty. And I don´t (at least not yet) seem to have picked up anything nasty from the decidedly unsanitary conditions in which it was cooked. The general system is to have some coals, with an angled pan on top. The bottom part is filled with grease to deep fry the chips and chicken in. So far so good. Less great is the raw chicken storage facility (a bucket with a plate and a cloth covering it), and the dish-washing system (dip plates in bucket of water, rub dry with dirty cloth, give to next customer). Ah well, it was tasty and it was worth it just to see the looks that all the tour-group people gave me as they came through the market...
The afternoon was taken up with a long nap, as I seem to be exhausted right now, from a combination of a lingering cold and also all the night travel. I´m going to head out into this very quiet town to see if I can scrounge up some dinner. But before I do that, here are some more rainforest pics. Well, there were going to be rainforest pics, but blogger keeps stalling out and half an hour later they´re still not uploaded. I´ll try again another day.
Comments
We've become accustomed to looking for your writings and photos around here, so we'll be looking forward to when the technical difficulties subside.
I love you tonnes,
Nicola