SÜDAMERIKA

After beeing constantly on the move and having the first real negative experience during my travels, I asked myself, for the first time in two and a half months, why the hell am I doing this. I felt like I would like to go home for the very first time. But I decided to give myself some rest and settle down for a bit, because I didn’t wanted to make this decision out of a temporal temper.
I ended up spending two weeks in Sucre, the tiny capital with just 300.000 inhabitants. I had a room just for myself in the house of my lovely lovely host Javier. Went to Spanish classes every day where learned a lot, not only the language, my teacher Grover told me so many interesting stories about Bolivia, the culture and the people and his childhood in the Andean mountains. I had a routine, went to the gym every single day and couldn’t have enjoyed it more (except of the fact that the training on 2800m is quite exhausting!), it felt so good to be back on track for a while. Furthermore I went to the Mercado Central to buy fresh fruits and veggies, which all come from nearby or at least from anywhere in Bolivia. I didn’t ate a lot of local dishes since I enjoyed cooking so much. But I went to my first salsa class which was more fun than expected, but I just don’t have any sense of rhythm, never had, never will.
The city itself is nice, lots of white buildings in the center with an beautiful university - the second oldest in Southamerica. I felt safe everywhere I was, been strolling around the city a lot, but of course I wasn’t wandering around alone at night.
I don’t like carnival a lot back home, so I didn’t liked it in Sucre either. People were going crazy for one week, I have no idea where they’ve got the energy from. There were heaps of parades in the streets every single day, playing the same three songs all the time, all day long until 1 or 2am, right in front of my house. Not only children liked to throw waterbombs at you, probably out of a car that’s passing by or just casually from the rooftop of their houses, or way worse: spray a white foam on you, no matter if you just tried to go home asap or you‘ve actually been participating the party.
Nevertheless I enjoyed my time in Sucre, it flew by so fast since my days were kinda busy, beeing able to volunteer in an orphanage for the last days made it an quite challenging but outstanding experience!
Bolivia is the first country I had something like a cultural shock, hm no that’s not the right expression since I wasn’t actually shocked. But in comparison to Uruguay, Argentinia and Chile it felt for the first time like a place that’s really far away from home, totally different than everything that I‘m used to. People over here look so different than I do, I met people that were only as tall as my hips are. Way more people are - even in the cities - dressed traditionally, and the women are carrying everything in big colourful cloths on their backs: children, food, chairs.
Everything smells different. People do different things, there are so so many people who are actually doing nothing. Bolivia is one of the poorest /countries in Southamerica, not having access to the coastline is not helping at all.
Once more I was taught how incredibly blessed I am, how lucky I was that I was born under this circumstances, into this society, that I was raised by this family.
The hygienic standard dropped enormously by crossing the border, the ones who know me could might imagine how I feel about that, but I‘m improving every day, telling myself that it’s not going to kill me over and over again.Lue lisää