You Know You´re in Bolivia When....

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You Know You´re in Bolivia When....

1) The lakes are red, green, white or purple. Any colour in fact but blue.

2) Living at an altitude above most of Western Europe or the United States does not seem unusual.

3) The roads are flooded - but this does not matter because the buses are on strike again. All drivers who break the strike are dragged from their cabs and beaten with sticks.

4) You get electrocuted by the hot water attachment on the shower.

5) Bags of rubbish are burned in the street.

6) It is socially acceptable for old ladies to hitch up their skirts and urinate in the street.

7) Making a living by growing coca leaves is not only legal but encouraged by the government.

8) Your jeep driver spends more time using his hands to put these coca leaves in his mouth than to hold the steering wheel.

9) Vehicles generally drive on the side of the road with the least potholes. When two vehicles approach it is a case of quien es mas macho (who is most macho) to decide where the vehicles pass each other.

10) Your bus stops for over an hour to change a tyre than has no discernable fault. After another hour the bus stops for a second time, and exchanges the spare for the original once again.

11) You are served a litre of beer in a restaurant by an 8 year old girl. You are however unable to drink it because she does not have a bottle opener.

12) Time is an illusion - bus times doubly so.

13) Everyone carries their own toilet paper - because there is none in the restaurants, hotels or public toilets of any kind.

14) There seems to be nothing strange about being unable to flush the toilet automatically. It begins to feel perfectly logically that you should use the barrel of water and the scoop outside to achieve the same ends.

15) Everything is decorated in some kind of flowers or ribbons - including llamas, lamp-posts, telephone boxes and the interior of buses.

16) Everyone thinks the government is incompetent but the president is a hero.

17) You are woken at 6am by the sound of the army marching and chanting in the street.

18) Every motorcycle has at least 3 people on it. Dad at the back, mum in the middle, and a small child draped across the petrol tank at the front.

19) The easiest way to explore out of town is on a horse.

20) You are unable to find an internet terminal, because all the cafes are over run by 10 year old boys playing games online.

21) All health and safety appears to be entirely optional or completely non existent.

22) The streets are patrolled by the "tourist police".

23) Women newsreaders on television look as though they are dressed for a day lying on the beach.

24) Old ladies walk the street carrying at least 4 large bags.

25) You can find nothing to eat in the restaurants but pizza.

26) It is impossible to arrange anything more than a day in advance.

27) Trains run twice a week, in the middle of the night, and several hours late. The ticket office at the train station is never open.

28) A loud siren wakes up everyone in the town at 7:30am to let them know it is time for the day to start.

29) All of a town´s rubbish is dumped out of sight a few kilometres beyond the outskirts in the desert.

30) Everyone seems entirely willing to accept all of the above as the perfectly natural and inevitable state of affairs.

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