Cream of Tartar: it puts the "snicker" into "snickerdoodle"

I had some pretty good snickerdoodles while I was in Oruro, from a bakery right near my hotel. The cool thing about Bolivian baked goods is that they're dirt cheap (these cookies were about a nickle apiece, and big too) and sometimes they're pretty good, the downside is that they're usually six days old and not all that great.

So I made the decison that I'm ready to get out of Bolivia. I don't like the food and don't much care for the people, and that's like 2 of the top three reasons to travel (the other being natural scenery or doing drugs and getting laid, depending on what kind of traveller you are). The country is starting to get to me - I haven't been the compliant traveler lately (my usual persona), instead I'm becoming the hot-head traveller. I got into this thing with my hotel when I left about them telling me I would have a key and not getting one: I asked for a discount on my first night, and they offered Bs. 5, a discount I could have gotten on every night if I had known I was going to stay five days. So I insisted on Bs. 10 for the first night, and offered Bs. 140 for my whole stay (which was all the money I had, actually, besides Bs. 5 for a taxi), and reminded him about lying to me several times about the key. They said no way about the discount (didn't say anything about the accusation), and after some bickering I went to leave without paying anything. The kid behind the counter grabbed me by my backpack, and I swung around and must have looked pretty mad, because he backed off in a hurry. I asked if Bs. 140 was OK, and he said it was. Once again, it wasn't about the money, it was about admitting fault (this was the kid who kept lying to me about the key, lest I try and go to another hotel I'm sure) , which they obviously didn't want to do - they just thought they'd try and placate me and get rid of me. So after a stop at an ATM, I grabbed a cab, and the cabbie tried to charge me three times what the fare should have been. I got an appropriate fair (which is usually easy if you know what it should be), and then got to the bus station, where I was in luck: a bus was about to leave, and it looked fairly comfortable. There was a man trying to find fares to fill the bus, and I asked the price. He said Bs. 23. Now, I knew the local fair was Bs. 15, and I had paid Bs. 20 on my last La Paz-Oruro trip, and when the bus is about to leave you can usually ask for a discount if they need to fill seats. So I asked if Bs. 20 was OK, figuring I could get the price I had paid last time, and he said sure. Then I saw in his ledger he was writing my ticket number and a price of Bs. 23. I asked again if Bs. 20 was OK, and again he said that it was. I only had a 50 from the ATM, so I gave him that, then he walked off to try and fiill more seats. So I stood right next to him for maybe 5 minutes until he started to dig out change for me - change on a Bs. 23 fare. I protested, and he said "no, it's a Bs. 23 fare", as he hunched over his hand looking for the rest of my change. I didn't feel like arguing, so I smacked him on the sholder and told him to give me my money. I was pretty angry. The past couple weeks I've just been getting this feeling like people here think they can treat me any way they want just because I'm a tourist. I don't need my ass kissed, but I would like to be treated with the respect I think everyone deserves to be treated with. I mean in Peru wanted your money, but at least they were polite about it on the whole.

So when I got off the bus in La Paz, I was just wating for the other shoe to drop: someone to try and steal my backpack, or for my bag to have "walked" at one of the stops. But it didn't. La Paz has treated me fine so far, as it has the past couple times I've been here. Thank God I'm back in the big city, where people treat each other right.

So I've been treating myself since I've been here, eating lots of ice cream, and going to movies. I'm going to see "Borat" tonight, which should be interesting to see how Bolivians react to the humor. I bought a bottle of my favorite wine, and some soap that has "moisturizers and sophisitcated white orchid" in it (actually, every soap here has somthing fancy in it, like rose petals). I also bought the most expensive, softest toilet paper I could find (my old stuff was sandpaper. Not the best. In fact, I'm convinced the stuff that is supplied in hotels - if there's anything, you've lucky if there's a toilet seat - is made from recycled sand and pink dye). I also impulse-bought a clock from a watch repair guy that had this little crany with a couple clocks for sale just down an ally from the main road I just happened down (what is it about watch repair that makes those guys want to work in the smallest space possible? I guess it might be unnerving to repair a little watch in a big, lofty room). It looks like a clock from an era when they put tailfins on all the cars. It was made in Shanghai (no date though), and is the old wind-up kind. I thought it was kind of cool, and it was only a couple bucks, so I thought what the hell. Then I got it back to my room and noticed how loudly it ticks. It's funny, we become accustomed to so much noise with modern living, but something like that might really drive me crazy. Time will tell (come on, that's a clever pun!).

So I'm putting together some other things: I set up the opportuniy to see a Solar Electric Light Fund (SELF, see entry on "going green for Christmas") solar power project in the Amazon. The project is in a nature reserve, 40 hours by boat from the nearest town, in the north-west corner of Brasil. There's a boat from Manaus about once a month, and right now I'm shooting for April (I have some friends coming to Peru in March). I don't think I can make the February 2nd sailing, since I don't have a visa for Brasil and from what I've read there's a huge amount of red tape to jump through. I have to have proof of travel, both into and out of Brasil, which will be the biggest hassle, and even if I had that now it'd probably take a week to get the visa. On the plus side, I read on this guy's blog that you can just get an itinerary from any online travel site (without actually buying a ticket) and print it off, and it will probably work. It's not like they're going to call the airline from the embassy or anything. Sounds like fun, and way simpler than actually booking flights into and out of Brasil. Did these places actually have to deport a lot of broke travellers before these rules were in place or something?

Apparently Bolivia is going to implement the same "reciprocal" visa fees that Brasil has (It's $100 for a Brasilian to apply for a US visa, so it's $100 for a US citizen to apply for a Brasilian visa). The problem is, no one know when this might happen. The Bolivian government says March (sometime or other, no specific date), but who knows. The tourist and business representatives, plus the US government, are lobbying for the visa rules to not go into effect at all. But it will definately be a pain if they do, since I'll probably be someplace besides Bolivia in March, but wanting to transit through the country again. Maybe they'll let me get a transit stamp, like in a lot of other places. Cross your fingers for me.

One thing I've noticed I do a lot is going into the voice recording program that comes with Windows to check if the microphone on whatever computer I'm on actually works. To get to this program, you go into the "accessories" folder, and then into the "entertainment" folder. Well I'd just like to tell Microsoft that I don't get much of a kick out of recording my own voice. In fact, this should be on one of those new Apple commercials where they make fun of PC's: Apple computers come with games, PC's come with... something to record your own voice with. Cool. Does anyone know any Apple ad execs so they can get moving on this idea, and then give me a bunch of money?