My room is infested with koala bears... It's the cutest infestation ever

OK, so there's no koala bears in Bolivia, but yesterday at lunch termites migrated past/through my table outside. It wasn't as gross as it sounds. There weren't that many of them, and they were small. It was kinda cool, actually.

It's rained REALLY hard earlier... conversations in the dining room were drowned out by the rapping of rain against corrugated steel. Thunder was BOOMING all around the hotel like artillery shells... it was really intense, but I loved it! Last night the rain was so hard against the concrete outside my room that I couldn't sleep. Now the hotel is wrapped in a thick layer of clouds. I snapped this picture when the fog cleared a bit:
You know how if you use the internet in the states you get all these pop-ups for things like "you're our 1,000,000 customer, you win $1,000,000!" or "Click here for your free I-Pod!" or "Big Beautiful Black Singles!" Well in South America, every pop-up and banner ad is about one thing: getting to the US. "Click here for your Green Card!" "Live and work in the USA!!! a) Me b) Myself and my spouse c) My whole family." I guess in America, we dream of something for nothing, and in South America, they hope "please, pretty please, let me come to the US to work 16 hour days for minimum wage in a slaughterhouse."

Today in town I watched two dogs get in a fight while a lady savagely beat one of them with a steel rod (the one that was hers, to get it to stop killing someone else's dog? The one that wasn't hers to get it to stop killing her dog? I couldn't tell at first). It didn't really work. A teenage boy had to come out and pry the jaws apart of one of them (which turned out to be their dog, the one being beat). Then the lady picked the dog up (maybe a 50 pound dog) by its ears and took it inside. The dog showed absolutely no sign of any aggression toward either person, totally passive, but it definitely had a death-lock on the other dog.

I was on my way into town to look for Milky Way candy bars. For those of you who have traveled abroad much, you probably understand developing an addiction to a taste back home, even if its something you never eat at home. Milky Way candy bars have become that for me in Coroico (since the ice cream is frozen water with some cinnamon flavoring and red food dye). Anyways, I've developed a ritual around eating a Milky Way each night (as embarrassing as it is to report), and I had run out. But the problem is, I've bought all the Milky Ways in town. All of them. There's lots of Snickers, and some Twix, but no more Milky Ways. I don't know how often these places re-stock, but my guess is not very often. In the meantime, I tried some locally-produced cheesy poof things, which tasted like they were made 6000 months ago. Even in their shrink-wrap they were stale. Ironically (a word that gets a lot of use here, I've noticed), there's a calendar stamped onto the side of the bag, which presumably would indicate when the food was made. But it was unmarked. I bet if they used it, no one would buy the cheesy poofs, because invariably they would all be at least 6000 months old. Although there wasn't a year, just month and day, so maybe they'd be safe...

But I guess I'm out of here soon anyways. I'm going back to La Paz on Monday with Fernando. I told him today, and he tried to convince me to come back after the New Year, since I guess I wouldn't be able to work over the holidays (so why did he hire me just before the holidays, and why is he so dismayed that I'm leaving?). I told him I would think about it. I tried to tell him how uncomfortable his wife had made me feel, and that if I'm not comfortable, there's really no point in my staying, since I'm just working for wine, but I'm not sure if he heard it. I said that, and he said, "well, you should come back after the New Year." OK, Fernando, block it out. I guess that's what you have to do in a country without divorce. Once I'm back in La Paz I guess I'll have to write him and let him know in no uncertain terms that I wouldn't come back because his wife was incredibly, consistently rude to me. I told guests at the hotel that I'd made friends with what she said to me, and they couldn't believe I was still here. And that was before she told me to work "mas rapido". I think Fernando is miffed that I'm leaving (although it's almost impossible to tell what he thinks, since mostly he seems like he's trapped in some sort of private psychedelic world most of the time, staring off into the distance. He often just walks away from conversations without saying anything) - today he keeps accusing me of things, like changing the cable stations, or turning off the computers. It's high time I leave, I think. I'm going to work tomorrow, on what is supposed to be my day off, to finish up Room 6. I think in five hours I can finish all the miscellaneous jobs that are left, and get everything cleaned up, and mask out the crappy lines that he asked me to repaint (and definitely wasn't happy about), but if I can't get to repainting the lines, oh well. Maybe Fernando's wife can repaint the lines; she was the whole impetus that made them turn out shaky in the first place.

So I still average 5 visits a day on my blog. But in my latest site report I noticed something interesting... someone decided to visit at 5am on Sunday, December 10th. Who loves me that much? A little blogging over morning coffee before work? I mean that's beyond love, that's like an addiction! Well, I'm flattered at any rate. Actually it's probably someone in Georgia (the central-European one) or something trying to spam me: "Hi, I saw your blog, and didn't quite find what I was looking for. But I found this site giving away Playstaion 3's and I thought you should know!" (I have actually had visitors from Georgia, and have gotten messages like that)