It was the best of times, it was the worst of times

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I´m back at the offices of Los Tiempos this morning for a second week in the ring. My flu, which was pretty virulent, maybe the Bolivian version, is much better today after a long sleep and a fabulous weekend. My boss Maria Julio, the economics editor, isn´t around and I dson´t yet know what she wants me to do, so I´m waiting. I was so busy this weekend I didn´t have a chance to buy Saturday´s Los Tiempos and see if my story was there, and how badly cut it was or not, so I have to wait for her to come and tell me the damage. I filed it on Friday morning after a mad dash to the Travel & Projects Abroad office in the morning to finish the transcription (for which I had like four different individuals help over the week), then jump on a bus and run it up to M-J for the deadline. She had a quick scan over it while I peered at her expectantly, and nodded and smiled, adding that it was good. Then I left straight away to go back to the TPA offices as we are trying to put our June issue to bed and I was expected back to work over lunch with Ximena, and to learn some in-Design. The story I wrote is here before this entry on my Travelblog. in English and Spanish!

As I think I might have intimated in my last entry a few days back, last week was probably one of the most testing and challenging weeks of my life, work-wise. I was having the most fun too but between my raging cold and having to translate everything I said out from English to Spanish in complete sentences in my head before speaking them, them translating the response back into english, and doing the same for this article (which would have been impossible is it wasn´t for the help of Ximena, Daniela, Carmen, my Spanish teacher and my host sister), I felt like I was going slowly insane. To do as you learn, rather than learn and later on do, is head-banging. But for me it is the best way to learn, especially with languages. Most people I meet, especially older people, comment after five minutes of conversation how good my spanish is compared to how little tuition and practise I have had (five days of lessons, about 8 weeks chattering to any south american who is unfortunate enough to be in the vicinity at the time), which is pleasing but funny as it can only mean other foreigners they´ve met had as much spanish as Fawlty Towers´ Manuel had english ("Que? "Ev-en-tualleee"....i love fawlty towers).

So, I had a relaxing but not uneventful weekend. On Friday night I planned only to go home, put my pyjamas on, and watch Spongebob Squarepants with my host sister Andrea. But as I was leaving the TPA office the girls who work there invited me out to dinner with them, which was really nice of them as they didnt invite any other volunteers who were there.... I was so tired but I accepted and we went to a restaurant the name of which escapes me but it is said to be very famous here in CBBA. It is a family owned (of course) pleace where they serve only one dish, which is a huge slab of seasoned meat with a selection of typical vegetables. We eat and drank and I tuned in and out as everyone spoke in Spanish... I caught a conversation about strippers. It was really fun and the food was great. It was really nice to spend some time outside of work with the people who have helped me so much to get this story translated.

On Saturday I had a somewhat momentouS meeting with a friend who I have known for maybe 2-3 years but only ever spoken to online. (Nothing dodgy people, get your jokes about online dating over now!) Daniel Sempertegui is a 27 year old guy from CBBA who works as a website designer and we met when I did a search for photo bloggers based in CBBA through my Flickr photo website (the one I can´t access now since they changed to Yahoo-only email accounts and didnt accept my verification for my new yahoo acount... so I cant log in and the behemoth Yahoo Incorporated wont answer my emails) and Dan came up. I was looking to find out what life is liie in CBBA, to see if I might like to do this project and live here for a month or two. I emailed him in English not knowing if he´d understand, but he answered and we became friends. We kept in touch as I investigated the possibility of coming here (which by the way first started over five years ago, when my life was 100% different! long term boyfriend, flat, stable job, no debt, hmm no life either... but lots of dreams), the cost, the kind of opportunity that was on offer etc. When last year circumstances (read: when my mental as fuck ex boyfriend dumped me in darkest Sweden on new years eve, and then started harassing me when I didnt want him back, all in all causing me to take a real look at my life and take control of my dreams not just keep dreaming... thank you JP) helped things along, and I quit my job and started putting funding together for this trip, I let Dan know and he told me to get in touch when I got here. Seven months later I got here tO CBBA and last Saturday evening we finally met. It was so great. We went to his parent´s house and chatted for a bit with them and his brother, looked through some of my photos of my trip, then went over to his girfriends house where we had tea with her mum and they picked my brains about lots of stuff. Dan and his Peruvian gf Alicia (I think thats her name, I´m crap with names) want to emigrate to Oz as they are both educated professionals - Alicia will be a qualified medical pracitioner by the time they go and she wants to be a pharmacist - so they wanted to ask me everything about the place, lifestyle, jobs, weather, and so on. I think they will do very well there but how will they live without empanadas and saltenas, pasteles and 2 hour lunch breaks every day! Im not sure how I will go without when I go home. We watched a movie (Mikey!! - it was Euro Trip - I gave in) and then they very kindly rang me a cab, explained to the driver where to drop me, and even made the cabbie take full payment before I got in just in case they added gringa tax! They were really a lovely couple and I had such a nice time with them. They are having a party for a friend´s birthday this Friday so I´ll see them there. I much prefer to hang out with Bolivians than the other volunteers at TPA because, while they´re nice too, they´re much younger and I don´t feel like I have that much in common with them really. And I have the rest of my life to chat to my countryfolk. Bolivians are really nice people, they´re fun, they are sweet and kind, and maybe best of all, they´re so curious: when they meet foreigners who can speak a little bit of Spanish I think they like that, plus I they are very intelligent people who think a lot about the outside world (outside of BOL) and want to know about it. They always have an opnion and are ready to convey it, which is great. So I get a lot of questions about life elsewhere and I love chatting about life here with them.

Sunday was (aside from Chris Cundy and Aoife Lynch´s birthdays) Mothers day in Bolivia, or dias de la madre. So I gave host mum Angelica a little note of thanks, in Spanish, and a tiny gift of some seeds of the Australian bottlebrush (in blood red) which I hope she´ll plant and see flower and think of her crazy english visitor when I´m gone. We (that is me, Angelica, Andrea, Andrea´s dad Sebastien and the dog, Negrito) went on a day trip, or more of a Bolivian style eat-a-thon, a pub crawl but with food. We drove into the countryside to Tarata, a town an hour or so away, and stopped for some food in a small place, and visitied a church which contains the shrunken head (compleye with perfect bullet hole) of the guy who liberated CBBA ages back, in a glass box. Then we drove on to Cliza, a tiny village with a huge market and fod stalls alongside it. We stopped again for a second lunch, this time of barbequed whole pigeon and vegetables. I always think of myself as someone who will try any food and think that I´m bascially quite hard, but I´m obviously not because I was really unsure about trying the pigeon. I have eaten pigeon before, at posh bankers´eatery St John´s Food and Wine in Clerkenwell, and it was gorgeous. So I dont have any issue with the food, but this one had its head and all bits and bobs intact, claws and all. And the streetside cooking ladies were transporting our pigeons from the huge wok style bowl it was cooking in to our plates by hand, like, bare hands. So I was unsure. But I tucked in anyway. What meat I could muster from it was good, but it was a challenge: then I turned the carcass round and my eyes fell onto a tiny little heart, complete with ventricles poking out and looking at me. I stopped dinner to do a biology lesson, dissecting it with audible coos as Andrea stared into my work with equal amazement, and Angelica waited patiently for me to like grow up and eat like a 27 year old girl! Sebastien got into the swing of it and posed for a photo with one of his pigeon´s fried claws between his teeth.
We drove on a little to find a chicha stall. Chicha is a very famous drink here made I think from maize corn. I was told by several people to try it in CBBA. So we stopped at a tiny shop with loads of little grubby faced kids in knock-off adidas or little white school smocks running around, or hiding behind their campesino mummies, and I sipped a bit of the chicha (which is made by chewing corn and fermenting it in the spit). It was ok but nothing special! Later we drove further out to a gorgeous lake, supposedly where the first CBBA settlers lived, for yet more food...but I admit I was completo (full) and couldnt touch anything else. So Andrea and I left mama y papa there and hired a pedalo on the lake for an hour, trying to get to Peru and hoping an Anaconda wouldnt come out of the water and try to suck our heads off.

Later today I will meet my English chums Johanna and Dal for lunch before they head on north, and tonight is another mother´s day dinner. What I hope to get out of this week is another story for LT to be published, and maybe even a chat with Luz Marina. I also hope to help Ximena get C-B to press and by the end of the week I hope I can use in-Design.

Aha. Maria Julia is here and tells me that my story was pushed off page this weekend by an explosion of some other unexpected news. It will be published this week and she thought it was really good, she says. I hope she isnt just being nice! I have also been given another story to file shortly, about the world bank for which I did a mad dash to a last minute press conference about two hours ago, wrote the story, and am waiting for my good friend Carmen H. to transcribe it into Spanish... without everyone´s help with the translation of my articles here at TAPA I would be totally up shit creek.

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Photos

A large raw steak and a cold Coke please
Dinner with the TAPA crew after work

Comments

[Daniel Semper]

Y0
mmm... Alicia is correct, but pharmacist is not. She wants to be a Plastic Surgeon :P OZ = Australia, why? Oh, we will talk about your pigeons meal this Friday ;)