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Published: November 2nd 2010
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Musical Twats
We cooked ourselves up dinner that night in the kitchen and enjoyed a variety of the local beers. Bock, at B$5.50 a can and 7%!a(MISSING)lcohol, was the pick for me but Pacena was good too. The imported Mexican lager wasn’t great and neither was the other local beer Authentica. We ate and played cards with Rod, a French Canadian guy who we’d met the night before and his Japanese girlfriend whose name I never quite got the hang of. The Frenchies (AKA everyone else in the hostel) were also up in the kitchen where they had eaten before everyone else but not cleaned up after themselves, commandeered two of the three tables and were having a jam session with two guys with guitars and a third with a ukulele, a native flute and a harmonica that he had strapped to his mouth Bob Dylan-style but he didn’t play once.
I’m generally of the belief that people playing their musical instruments in a public forum are pests. Unless you’re in a band that people have paid to see, chances are a fair chunk of the people who have to listen to you don’t want to. I’d put this philosophy
La Paz
View to El Alto into practice with a particularly enthusiastic guitar playing guest at WakeUp, my old place of employ. However, outnumbered by the three musicians and their four or so friends who seemed keen on listening to them play, Rod, his girlfriend, the Boss and I kept our opinions to ourselves and played cards. However, as the night grew later, the owners of the hostel came up to the kitchen to tell us that the kitchen would close in half hour and could we keep in down in the meantime.
The musicians kept playing, as did we card players. Then when someone won a hand (or something to that effect) we four card players all had a laugh. The musicians, who had just finished playing a song, turned and shooshed us.
“You’ve got the audacity to tell us to be quiet?” I said incredulously.
“You don’t realize how far the human voice travels,” said the French guy who was playing a guitar, a pan flute and occasionally singing along. I would have been more pissed off but I make it a general rule not to pay any mind to people who dance around like a snake charmer while playing a flute.
Later that
night we went out to a bar called Mungo’s. A B$10 cab ride away, it was a backpacker haunt where the DJ was of the belief that foreigners only listened to Beyonce, Lady GaGa and Rhianna. My personal distaste for these artists aside, (though I will admit to a partiality for “Bad Romance”) hearing five or six of each of their songs at the same club in one night tells you the DJ is lazy or doesn’t exactly have an encyclopaedic knowledge of music.
You'll Find the Shoes on Block 3
Getting back to the hostel at 3AM, the next day was a late rising affair. But we had been told of the markets on the alto (the upper section of La Paz) that happened every Sunday and Thursday and were determined to get to them. We stood at the traffic interchange in front of San Francisco church, asking every passing minibus if they were going to 16 de Julio.
The minibuses in La Paz are a brilliant and cheap way to get around. If you’re looking to get around in the centre of the city you are generally only ever waiting two or so minutes before a minibus
La Paz (3)
View to El Alto comes around. They are generally 14-seaters (not including the driver) and have a person sitting next to the front window yelling out the bus’s destinations. Charging B$1 in the city, they are as quick as a taxi and a fraction of the price.
The markets were not in the city centre but on el alto - the plateau above the city centre where La Paz’s poorer suburbs are situated. As a result we had to wait a good 15 minutes, asking most minibuses that came by and being told no by them, before one of the local shoe-shine boys (who had heard me asking a cabbie how to get to the markets) pointed us to a minibus that was going to the markets. We piled in, payed B$2 each and spent the 15 minute trip to the markets sucking on ice blocks we’d bought from a street vendor for B$1 each.
Getting off the minibus, we had to cross a pedestrian overpass and then walk up a set of stairs, already littered with food and DVD stalls, before reaching the main section of the market. It was huge! Half a dozen city blocks, maybe more were shut off for hundreds
of stalls selling almost anything you could ever hope to buy.
There were clothes stalls with t-shirts selling for as little as B$2 each, shoes stalls selling knock-off Reeboks for B$45, army surplus supplies, car parts, furniture, electronic goods, computer goods (including one with a 20-year-old laptop for B$200), DVDs, CDs (I heard “Barbie Girl” and “Candyman” by Aqua at two different stalls), a tattooist, weapons such as knuckle-dusters, fresh bread, cold drinks and big marquees with tables to eat lunch.
The Boss was in need of a pair of shoes, having been surviving on her Havi’s since Santiago. I was on the lookout for some long sleeved shirts that I could wear without fear of them getting dirty or wrecked, having made the mistake of only bringing my favourite t-shirts with me on the trip. I left the Boss to look at a shoe stall and started rummaging through one of the many tables with cheap shirts on them. I was surprised to find a few Aussie t-shirts in the mix, including one for Cleanaway waste disposal and another celebrating Sydney Opera House’s 25th anniversary. I came away from the tables with a B$4 tie-dye t-shirt and we continued on our way, looking out for some more durable clothes for myself.
After an hour in the baking-hot sun and with no food in our stomachs, the previous evening’s drinking started to get to the Boss. We found a shop and bought a bottle of water each and a hot, fresh cheese-filled roll from a woman selling them from a cart. I still hadn’t found any long-sleeved shirts at a reasonable price (the army surplus stall had come closest but with shirts starting at B$30, I felt I could do better) we decided to start making our way back to the buses.
Then, near the entrance we had come in through, I spotted a stall selling what appeared to be exclusively long sleeved and flannel shirts. A ten minute rummage and I walked away with three new shirts - two flannos and a pop-button Wrangler - for B$30. I had had my eyes on a sweet red flanno with Mickey Mouse on it but the Boss’s “buy whatever makes you happy,” line reached its limit with that particular piece of couture.
The Boss got a handy pair of trainers for B$40 and I had a B$10 lunch of a plate of barbecued chicken and potatoes. Content with our day’s purchases, we caught a minibus back to the city centre and I cursed the fact we had forgot to bring the camera to get some photos of the city from the amazing vantage point provided on el alto.
We arrived back at the hostel a little after 3:30PM and after dropping our purchases off in our room I went down to the tour agency outside the hostel hoping to get a couple of seats for the Cholitas - a Sunday evening event in La Paz where women dressed in traditional clothes wrestle each other. Kind of like WWE but with real blood at times! Anyway, it turned out the sign saying the bus left at 4PM was incorrect and it had left at 3:30 - we’d missed it by a mere 15 minutes. Though a little bummed out, I was secretly glad to have a relaxed evening in and an early night.
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