My Wife is Crazy!!!

Not much happened today, partly because it took way longer to wander around the city than I thought it would. I was going to go to some museums the first half of the day, and then to the Cultural Center in the afternoon, but by the time I actually found the museums they had closed for lunch (they close for two and a half hours), so I went and had lunch and decided to head for the cultural center, since it isn't open on the weekends (the museums are, but only for 2 and a half hours. I guess they're making up for their lunch breaks). But let me explain something: maps are drawn on paper. Paper is flat. The maps are flat. It makes the ground look flat. The ground in La Paz is not flat. On my map, I could take a left, the first right, then go straight, and I should be there. After I took the right I was facing a huge ridge where I could see some interesting-looking buildings up on the top. "Man, it would suck if that was where I was going," I thought. Of course I double-check my map and can't escape the fact that that is indeed where I'm trying to go. So I haul my way through what is either an under-construction or never-finished fitness park (It's so hard to tell here), where there was always a six foot wall I had to scale before the next set of stairs. At one point I saw some people playing music on a landing, so I went over to check it out, but what I found was five people with instruments pretending to play while a boombox played a CD and a guy videotaped. I came up from behind and inadvertently got in the video, and got some dirty looks. It was kind of strange. So I finally got to the top to find a closed cultural center and an open kids playground area. I might have gone to play but I had to pay to get so I decided to try and call home instead.

This proved more difficult than I imagined, though, because I couldn't find an internet cafe with Skype. An hour and 45 minutes and 19 internet cafes later, I finally found a place that had both a microphone and would let me use Skype - many of the places that have microphones are also call centers, and they won't let you put Skype on the computer because they want you to pay them ten times as much to use their phones; most places didn't have microphones at all. One place would let me download Skype and had a microphone, but the download speed was so slow I would have had to sit for an hour just to install it; another place would let me download Skype, but when I asked where the microphone was after sitting down they said "What microphone?" (the first thing I did was ask if they had a microphone, to which they said "yes, sit down please") So that was a frustrating experience. I mean it's not like I'm someplace without electricity or computers and I can just accept that I can't call home. In this case I can see the computer and the microphone, but they won't let me use Skype. I kept figuring the next place would be the one, just from a matter of odds, so I kept going.

Today on the street I saw a man with leprosy and one hand playing the trumpet. It was really cool - and he was quite good. He seemed to be getting a lot of money, which is nice to see. There aren't that many street performers in this part of SA it seems, and a lot of them are lame. Like one guy was just beating a big plastic drum and had some sign around his neck that amounted to "give me money." He could keep a beat though, I'll give him that.

The only other thing I have to say about today is that the Borat movie will be "here soon" at the theater, and it would be funny to see how Bolivians react to that. Would that movie translate at all? I saw a movie tonight which had a scene where a woman showed her ultrasound to her boyfriend (this was the first time the audience finds out she's pregnant). The whole audience gasped at once.

Also, Bolivian men have no qualms about peeing off the curb into the street. And check the previous two posts; one I updated and another was post-posted. And I don't know why Blogger is doing this weird formatting thing with all the space at the top. Sorry.