The reason you never hear anyone say, "Hey, let's go out for Bolivian food tonight!"

Happy New Year, everyone. New Years here was pretty uneventful - mostly I just wandered around looking for food. Celebrations seemed family-based, and I don't have a family here. I watched some people set off fireworks, went to bed around 2am, and then was awoken by the 6am parade through the streets that I didn't want to get up for. Lots of stuff was closed December 31st, and even more stuff was closed January 1st. I was really disappointed, because I went into this vegetarian restaurant for dinner on December 30th, and while they didn't have lasagna, pasta, or pizza that night (basically, they had no dinner entrees), I did see that they had fruit and yogurt musli. That got me pretty excited, because that's a tasty, healthy breakfast, and it's not even fried! And then the restaurant was shut for two days. That's one of my beefs with Bolivian food, is that it's all fried. And bland. And employs meats that I'm not interested in eating. For example: lunch on the 30th, in a typical Bolivian lunch joint that I chose at random, was a small green salad of limp lettuce that I didn't eat (lettuce being the scariest of the raw vegetables in terms of food-borne illness), a noodle soup with a chunk of llama meat (actually the soups are usually the best part of almuerzo), and the main dish was mealy white rice on one half of the plate with fried, peeled potatoes mixed with some really fatty hamburger meat. I wouldn't have thought you could screw up white rice, but all of it here feels mealy in your mouth. At least it's not squirming, I guess. They always peel their potatoes here, too, which bugs me. The skin is where all the flavor, texture and nutrients are!

Things don't get much better when you go upscale. Dinner on the 30th was in what my guidebook called "the best restaurant in town," a fancy place with a waiter in a black and white suit, and prices 10 times higher than I paid for my aforementioned lunch. I got a half leg of lamb, which came with white bread, mealy white rice, a whole, peeled, boiled potato, and a side of vegetables, of which I ate the one slice of peeled cucumber, the carrots (which had been peeled, and then for some reason boiled and chilled), and the beets. I almost didn't eat any of it, since the mix was suspiciously similar to the salad I had at the chicken place in Cusco that got me really sick. The best part was the lamb, mostly because I have no idea how to eat lamb off the bone, and I made a big mess trying to figure out how to cut it up. I thought that was pretty funny. But generally, almost every meal I have here I feel like I'm eating fried, simple carbs and some sort of meat, generally not of the best quality.

Things just got worse for the New Year, when everything closed - which is what inspired me to write this tirade. I ate saltenas for lunch, which are pretty tasty actually; sort of a sweet, orange colored bread stuffed with potatoes, meat, peas, onions and cilantro, and baked. But at night the only street vendors around were salchipapas (thin slices of hot dog fried with chunks of peeled potatoes), fried lengua (tongue) and potatoes, and kabobs of some sort of meat with potatoes cooked who knows how long ago (I don't know what these are called, but they're all over Bolivia, and I don't trust them). There were two restaurants open, one which served salchipapas and variations on, and one that served fried chicken and burgers. If your intuition suspected that all this fried food results in Bolivians carrying a few extra pounds, you're right. They do, especially older Bolivians. Peruvians, by comparison, are quite svelte.

The big shame of all this is that definitely one of the top five aspects of travel for me is food: eating from street vendors or in the market (experiences we generally don't get in the US), the pleasant surprise of trying something new and really liking it, and the humor of ordering something and not realizing it's pork fetus or something. But the bad stuff is only funny when it's interspersed between having good stuff, and so far I haven't had a single dish in Bolivia that has made me say "this is really good!"

Dinner New Years Eve was figs and chips; on the 1st I had saltenas for lunch again and broke down and went to the burger place for dinner, which was a story in itself. Like I explained with purchasing before, first you go to the cashier and pay for what you want, and get a ticket. Then you go over to the mob of people at the order counter and try and assert yourself to get your ticket taken by the guy finishing the orders, hopefully without too many people cutting in front of you. Then you hang out in the mob, as other people try and get their ticket taken, while you wait for your order. Once you get your order, you move down the line to dress your burger, while the people behind you push you to get you to hurry up (the bright side of this was I got to take a whole cucumbers worth of slices to eat, since it was self-serve). Then you take your drink ticket to the drink counter to get your drink, which in my case was banana juice (another bright side of of the meal, you can get fresh juice instead of soda), while you repeat the process of the food counter while everyone waits for their drink while other try and get their ticket taken. The whole thing is pretty chaotic, and leaves you feeling like you might never get to eat.

So with the food; constant near-misses from cars hitting me because no one wants to use turn signals, headlights, or slow down for pedestrians; lackluster holidays without any family or friends; and the refusal of Bolivians to even smile back at me, let alone engage me in any sort of conversation; I'm not super enthusiastic about traveling right now. So yeah, this is a gripe fest. I know that this is why it's good to travel to foreign places, to experience the contrast between cultures and learn to appreciate them, and I know Bolivian's have no obligation to take any interest in me, and I think I'll learn to accept these things. But for now, all I want is a good halibut filet, a nice fresh salad with some blue cheese, and some non-mealy rice on the side.