bolivia, and the final weeks of peru

Well here I am blogging again. Liz sitting next to me starting at me making sure I type things into the computer. She is such a slave driver... no, that was a joke. Seriously though. :)

Bolivia was awesome. My favorite thing about Bolivia is that a super high class meal will cost around $10 dollars US. We took advantage of this and did not spend much during the day on non neccessity items and decided to splurge a little on food. We ended up going to so many nice restuarants - european, local bolivian, japeneese sushi, and pizza. All these resturants would cost at least $100 dollars in the US but in Bolivia we were getting away with $20 bill. It was awesome. The food, deliscious. The service, extrodinary. The beer, tasty. The company I was with, medium. Ok, the company was great.

La Paz was definitelly my favorite city. So many fun things to do. The main plaza contained more pigeons that I had ever seen before. I decided to take advantage of Liz´s fear of birds and get some birdseed and then have my pigeon minions attack! I have some great pictures of Liz being ¨pigeon bombed¨ where I threw some birdseed at her feet and my pigeon friends followed. For a visual, think of 100 smelly, dirty birds flying at you out of nowhere to land all over your body. It was so so much fun. Pictures will follow but I will have to sneak them on the blog.

South America loves their parades. Due to perfect timing on the genius trip planners part... COUGH. We ended up seeing both the Peruvian independance day and the Bolivian independance day, along with Arequipas biggest festival of the year. During Bolivia´s independance day, we witnessed 8 parades and much partying and bands playing in the streets. These were fun to watch and we spent a few hours watching marching bands and dancing. However, at the time we did not realize the blatent awesomeness of the parade that we would soon see in Arequipa.

Two words for this such parade - Wicked Sick. There is a story here so bear with me.

We started the day in Arequipa as normal. Waking up and touring a few local places downtown around the central plaza de armas in the middle of the city. We saw the old Santa Catalina monastary in Arequipa, it was colorful, fun and the tour was very informative. We then booked a tour the next day for the nearby Colca canyon and decided to get some lunch. On the way to lunch, I noticed things had changed from a few hours earlier. The first thing I noticed was that there were more people... many many more people. They were lining the streets along the parade route that I was unaware of before. The problem was the parade route went directly between us and our hostel, the other museums we wanted to visit and the resturant we were trying to get for lunch. We were cut off. Alone. Scared. Ok, maybe not scared.

We attempted for about an hour to try to get through the parade. Our first attempt ended up in an epic fail as we walked parrallel to the parade to try to find the beginning and cut through. That attempt ended up getting us stuck near a dead end wall with a sea of people on both sides of us blocking us in. I was accosted by many drunk peruvians and even a few westerners tried to pick a fight with me.

Our second attempt turned out to be a little more successful as in terrible spanish we asked some police how to get to the plaza. The police argued for a few minutes then gave us a ¨strategic´route to get there. This turned out to be moderatly successful. We first pushed through a sea of people and then crossed the parade in the middle of a float. Then we navigated through local drunk peruvians, viscious packs of wild dogs roaming the city, and scary mime robot men to get to the plaza. (Liz was scared, erm) The parade was centered around the plaza so it was packed with people. By packed I mean packed like fitting my giant self into the back seat of a small vehicle. Liz at that time was very hungry and when Liz gets hungry, you feed her right away, or bad things happen, very bad things.

We started looking for a restuarant around the plaza on the second level so we could watch the parade. We found out soon everywhere was filled up. We then hit a jackpot. Finding a corner right by the cameras and the epicenter of the entire parade we found a little resteraunt with a reserved balcony where we could sit and watch the parade in peace. We payed about $20 (so worth it) for a perfect table right about the parade. We then spent four glorious hours watching the parade go by. We have hundreds of pictures of the parade and there is so much to talk about so I will highlight my favorite floats in strategic countdown order below.

5 - The ecudorian dancing brigade. Colors. Dancing. Awesome music.

4 - Any Brazililan float. I love the feather headresses and the upbeat music.

3 - The massive bubble float. Shotting millions of bubbles into the air.

2 -Inka Cola vs Coca Cola. Owned by the same people, and throwing out large bottles of coke.

1 - The local Pisco mobile. Why you ask? Because they sprayed liqour at the crowd out of a long firehose. They did not only spray the crowed, they covered thousands of people with liquor. Blatent awesomeness.

It was so much fun to watch the parade for hours. Never in my life have I seen so many colors, dancing or fun. It was a good day.

The end