Roll up your britches and wade through the rain!

I'm back in La Paz, where it rained so hard today the streets had 6 inches of water in places! Running water too, not just low places with puddles. Fernando really wants me to come back in January so I can run the internet while he's on vacation, in addition to remodeling rooms. I told him I'd think about it.

It's Christmas time in La Paz, and the streets are awash with vendors of nativity scenes, lights, candy canes, etc. Santa's ho-ho-ho-ing with all their might in the street, Christmas-tree vendors, public holiday displays. At night some of the streets are so full of people shopping that they essentially become closed to cars. It's downright Christmasie. And there's lots and lots of fruitcakes for sale. Entire stores dedicated to fruitcake! I mean britches.

I don't know if the shopping madness is the reason, but I noticed yesterday morning that you can easily spot a bank coming up by the reams of people in line waiting for it to open. I went out in the morning to go to the immigration office, and noticed that every single bank I passed had scores of people waiting outside, and that these lines persist to the end of the day. I have no idea what's going on, but I have noticed that everyone is clutching copies of their ID's. Bolivia is kind of paper-crazy; you need multiple copies of your passport to do anything official (like get your visa renewed, I found out). Even something simple, like buying ice cream, involves a paper trail: first, go to the register and tell them what you want, eg. single or double scoop, and pay. They give you a receipt, which you give to the person at the counter, who takes your receipt, stamps, and files it. Then a third person gets you your ice cream. The process is similar buying popcorn at the theater, even though the cashier and server are literally about two feet away from each other. Pay, get your receipt, turn and extend your arm to hand your receipt to the server, who stamps it and serves you popcorn.

Another thing I hadn't noticed before is how many gold buyers there are in La Paz. Scores of them, most of which are just people with a table and scale in the street. Is there a lot of gold floating around in La Paz? There is in people's teeth, which caused me to have the eerie thought that if people get hard up, they sell their fillings. Sort of a particularly perverse predatory lending.

So while I was in Coroico I met some girls who were volunteering at an outreach center for sex workers in El Alto called "La Casa de Esperanza" (The House of Hope). I got in touch with some of them when I got back to La Paz, to learn more about what they do and to see if it might be a possible project for a documentary (I think I've settled on wanting to try and make a documentary about oil and gas nationalization in Bolivia, but I'd like to get my feet wet first with something a little less ambitious, practice interviewing, get some experience with my equipment, etc.). But my conversation with Heather and Kara didn't exactly go as I had hoped. Kara basically said my idea was exploitive (although I think that's a LITTLE unfair). They don't think any of the women they work with are far enough along dealing with their problems to be doing anything like telling their story to a stranger and a camera. They actually had someone produce a promotional tape for them, and I guess there was a lot of fallout from that; the girls having anxiety over not knowing who would see it, whether they said the right thing, etc. They ended up not using the video (and it didn't even really have interviews in it, which is what I want the backbone of my video to be). Heather was a lot nicer and took the attitude of "we'd have to be really careful about how it was done," but not that it couldn't be done, and she supported the idea of exploring the issue via video. But after talking with them for a while I don't think it is the right idea. In retrospect, it might have been naive of me to think that sex workers from a really poor area of a poor country who are regularly exploited would want to talk to some guy from the US. So I'm kind of in limbo in La Paz now. I paid for my hostel through Tuesday, and everything kind of shuts down for Christmas anyways. I might head to Cochabamba or Ururo after the week if I can get a bus (I think they're pretty full around the holidays), but it might be more fun in La Paz for New Years anyways. I don't have the urge to be doing anything touristy right now, and I definitely want to do a smaller project prior to oil/gas/politics. A couple ideas I have: salt harvesters on Salar de Uyuni (the largest, highest salt flat on earth), silver miners in Potosi, illegal logging in the east, and water privatization in Cochabamba. Of those, I think I like the idea of the salt harvesters most (partly because it takes place in such a cool environment). Whatever I settle on, I want the video to focus on ordinary Bolivians telling their stories.

But right now I'm thinking a lot of it will have to do with how much people want to talk to me wherever I end up. I might need to work on my Spanish more before I can really talk, too. I'll probably just go someplace and see what happens, although I'm looking into more Spanish lessons. If I do take more Spanish lessons I really want to do them in a group, which means I'd probably have to be in La Paz, or maybe Cochabamba (which would be nicer I think - the "city of eternal spring" they call it). I'm also thinking about the idea of finding someone (a student maybe) that would want to translate for me. I think this might be necessary, although ideally I could find someone locally. The problem with that is I don't know if that's possible. Uyuni, for example, only has about 10,000 people in it.

I took a long walk to the other end of the city today to see embassies and go to a supermarket. Kind of just for the hell of it, since I don't have a lot to do right now. I tried to sleep in, but they decided to drill through steel or something above my room today (cool, I paid for a week and the second day they start heavy construction work on the floor above. Ah, the joys of travel). At the market a girl holding various yogurt products let out a rapid stream of Spanish for about 30 seconds that I understood not one word of. Was I supposed to taste these products? Buy them? I have no idea - I just smiled. Later I smiled at a girl holding a fruitcake, without noticing that she was an employee. That was all the invitation she needed to try and convince me I wanted to buy that fruitcake, which she spent several minutes doing. Other than aggressive marketing, there wasn't anything all that fun really. There was a refridgerated aisle of fresh cream pies with no covers - no doors on the shelves, nothing over the pies. I really wanted to stick my fingers in them, and there wouldn't have been anything stopping me. There was also $6 Stoli vodka, but I settled on some $2 wine (same brand that I'd been drinking in Coroico. Guess I'm hooked).

After leaving the supermercado, I kept walking down embassy lane: Spain, Brazil, Paraguay, and of course the US. I think I read that the US embassy in Bolivia is the second-largest in South America (Columbia takes the cake). All the embassies are in buildings that are interesting in their own way: Brazil has a very modern, sleek, all-glass building with some modern art in front; Spain has a sort of Colonial-villa style house with lots of hard-wood; Paraguay has an curious, silver, Russian-style spire dominating the facade; and then there is the US embassy, a huge, scary, concrete skyscraper, with narrow little windows, set far back from the surrounding blast-wall. It looks like they expect to come under attack at any moment (given US drug policies, I wouldn't be surprised). It actually gave me the same impression I had the first time I saw the administrative headquarters of the Mormon Church: it seemed to portray this attitude that "we will rule everything. It's only a mater of time. And no, we're not interested in negotiating."