Spanglish in Sucre

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Our last day in La Paz was spent watching the Wimbledon final and eating a proper dinner, as all Sundays should be spent. That afternoon we headed to the bus station in a cab driven my a man wearing a rather fetching all in one Addisdas tracksuit. We were just about to comment when he splurted out some amazing English. Phew!

We jumped on an overnight bus to Sucre, the real capital of Bolivia, where Nic and I would be enrolling in Spanish school for the last time.

We arrived early the next morning and after a snooze headed out to find a suitable Spanish school and some voluntary work teaching English. Thankfully we found both. Spanish school from 8.30am until 12.30pm and teaching English to 10-12 year olds in the afternoons.

Classes started the next day and I had forgotten how tiring they were. We ran through everything we had learnt so far and then moved onto all types of past and future tenses and managed to confuse ourselves even further. For part of our lessons we would head into town, to a museum or to have lunch. Good practice for the old Espanol.

In the afternoons we taught around 4-5 kids. We worked with a local Bolivian teacher, who (through no fault of her own) could barely talk English herself, let alone teach it. We found ourselves correcting some quite amusing mistakes! However, it did become a little frustrating that these kids were paying for lessons and not actually learning anything. By the end of the first week we introduced Charades e.g acting out playing football, dancing, washing the dishes and by the second week we had a great game of Pictionary drawing all types of animals. I think we enjoyed it as much as they did.

We were quite occupied the rest of our two weeks in Sucre. We spent one evening at the most intense aerobics class we´ve ever been too. It was kind of aerobics combined with Salsa combined with using a step. Coordination was a little difficult! Another night we spent watching a fountain / light show. Exactly what it says on the tin. Pretty lights and a pretty fountain and plenty of people selling glow sticks, glow ears, glow anything. Just like Bonfire night. Another night we had dinner at the school, a traditional Pacena, potatos, beans and cheese and headed out with the teachers afterwards to the local discoteca.

The thing with South America is there is always some sort of celebration wherever you go. It just so happened that whilst we were there they were celebrating annual feria called Feria de la Alisitas - a 10 day festival where minature versions of pretty much everything are sold. You buy the minature version of your wish and by midday on a certain date your wish comes true. You can buy anything, some slightly weirder than others. Fake money, marriage certificates, small houses, children, passports, licenses to work, food, shops, anything. We all walked away with a little suitcases as a wish to travel more in the future.

Sucre also has an amazing market! They have the biggest fruit and vegetables I´ve seen. We become regulars at one fruit stall after the woman was amazed at English and American coins that she had seen in my purse. We actually managed to pay for our fruit using them! Another day she was hugely interested in Russel Brand´s biography and started asking what all types of words meant. We omitted some. Other purchases included delicious fruit smoothies for about 30p and the whole upstairs is run by women cooking home cooked delicacies; pollo de picante, sopa de mani y mas. Again, you could grab a hearty meal for about a pound. If you fancied it, you could even buy your own cow head, fully furred, with teeth and tongue..... not really on our menu for dinner.

Sucre is a very cultural city filled with white colonial buidings. It also has a collection of very good museums explaining Bolivian history. Whilst we were there, Bolivia was celebrating it´s 200 years of independence and one museo, la casa de libertad, perfectly described Bolivia´s history in detail, it´s creation and the long line of presidents that it´s had. Extremely interesting and scary. We learnt a lot about Chile and Bolivia´s rivalry, especially since Bolivia lost all access to it´s coast in the 1800s (predominately the reason Bolivia is as poor as it is now). The division between the rich and poor in Bolivia is also perhaps the largest I saw anywhere and the number of people that approach you for money, young and old is astonishing! Very sad. During one of our lessons, a group of about 50 indigenous people were stood outside a lawyers office, our school´s neighbour. Apparently the government are selling their land from under their feet and the lawyer was somehow involved. There were a number of huge bangs during our lesson but apparently it was a safe protest. Later in the week however, the group turned violent and smashed most of the windows of the building. Luckily for us, the protest was in the afternoon when we weren´t at school.

Whilst we were in Sucre we also attempted to go to Potosi - the highest city in the world renowned for silver mining. We watched a film ´la mina del diablo´ which documents a 14 year old boy who works in the mine and the dangers he encounters. It´s pretty horrific as most of the miners die early in their 40s due to dust on the lungs or accidents in the mine. Depsite that, Bolivia has a weird taste for tours and one tour allows you to enter the mines, meet some of the workers and also hold and throw some dynamite. We decided it would be interesting to see but after sitting on a bus for three hours we got stuck in a road blockade (the cause of this one we´re not sure of) so erring on the side of caution we decided to turn around and head back to Sucre.

We stayed in a great hostal for the two weeks called Dolce Vita, meeting some lovely people and enjoying the luxury of just a room for the two of us. It even had a little table to do our homework on!

I left Sucre on Thursday afternoon with a couple from London we had met and headed back up to La Paz. A slightly longer route but what with road blockades and oh yeah, Swine flu closing down borders it was the safest option. After 9 hours on a bus, 4 hours off, I caught another another 11 hour bus to Arica, North Chile where I am now. And tomorrow, I catch my last bus in South America to Santiago to meet a friend :o) and to fly out :o( There will definitely be a few cocktails drunk to celebrate an amazing 6 months!

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