Stones and Bones

Writing from my last day in La Paz now. I really like this city! Kenj and I wandered basically to the polar opposite side of town today, and it´s really cool. No tourists, just straight up barrio. There´s this massive market (Fairway style for the NYers) with nothing but hanging carcasses of llama, cow, chicken, everything that is edible, then the next section is fish (I guess from lakes around because we´re landlocked) and then every vegetable ever invented. Upstairs is a cafeteria, so Kenj and I grabbed our first coffee in a while up there. It´s funny how damn good coffee is once you haven´t had it in a while. Habits like that will never die for me, scary. I´m kind of searching out whatever distribution center all the street vendors pick up their hand-crafted wares because I´m thinking how insanely profitable it would be to sell this stuff back home. Literally, stuff would go for 10 times the price on the street, and considering those guys get it from somewhere.... I could make a fortune and be back to Nyc in a second. Well, at least I could make some drinking money. Figure if I hang out in Little 5 Points (ATL) for a week, I can probably sell all of it and get a new tattoo. Anyway, I´m not in the position to be spending money on anything but a bed and food at this point (there´s too much to see) so all that speculation is on the back burner.

Yesterday I went to this old Inca site a couple hours outside La Paz, Tiahuanacu. The spelling varies, and that happens with a lot of words here, as they incorporate other languages with Spanish. Bolivia is really cool. I definitely want to come back here when I have more time and money to spend. A lot of things about Argentina came off as kind of goofy-the people, the attitudes sometimes, just in general. But Bolivia seems to just be. It is the way it is because that´s their way. The city, while being so crowded, is so subdued. People, for the most part, speak slowly and softly, and although we stick out like sore thumbs, we never really get stared at, even in non-touristy parts. It´s interesting because I guess Bolivia is, by numbers one of the poorest countries on the continent, and while things here are relatively basic compared to Argentina, you see a lot less poverty day-to-day. It´s hard to speculate on shit like that as a tourist, but from that perspective, that is how it looks. There aren´t the street children and families here like in Buenos Aires, and the city also lacks a lot of the silly things like pickpocketing and taxis robbing you that the Paris of the Americas was loaded with. The attitude of vendors in general is just amazingly nice, calm, never pushy, always saying nice things like ´joven´ or ´usted´ just being respectful.

At the Inca site, I had to buy a bajillion trinkets from the little artisan fair they have. Kendra was in a museum that I didn´t want to pay for, so I moseyed over there like a good little southern boy. All the stalls basically have the same things, so you really just choose who you want to buy from. There was this little old lady, napping in her chair, who snapped up as I walked past and started talking. She had a really nice face so I decided I´d buy from her. There are a ton of little animals and symbols carved out of stone, and I learned the significance of some the other day in Uyuni. So I asked her about the other ones, and figured they´d make nice souvenirs for my kid cousins and baby bro. There´s one to help you earn money, one to guard your path (maybe that´s my next tattoo, opposite the sphinx) one for a happy journey, health, love, to ward off bad things, all kinds of things. Then I bought a couple old Inca symbolic things, the same things that everyone who has been to Bolivia will undoubtedly have, because it´s all the same. Cool, nonetheless. Then I asked the lady about the hats that so many women wear and she explained that it´s just a hat, and their word for it is ______ which of course I don´t remember, but in Spanish it´s sombrero. I was hoping for some mystical significance, but I guess sometimes you just have to let your imagination go.

Then I ran to catch up with Kendra, who had passed me while I was shooting the shit with the lady. I caught up and realized that I was in a part of the site that you were supposed to pay for, but I was slick and walked past the guards. I mean, they were lazy and didn´t check my ticket. I really had no idea. Anyway, we saw an old pyramid, or what´s left of it, and some cool old statues of dieties and the puerta del sol, the door to the sun, which does something funny with the shadow on the day of the summer solstice. The symmetry on these sites is really cool-there´s a small opening in a wall made of solid rock, one stacked upon the other, perfectly straight, without mortar, and if you stand dead center in the opening, different figures line up perfectly. I´m obsessed with all this ancient stuff, and can´t get enough. I guess that was just a little teaser compared to Peru though.

Before we left the ruins, we wandered through a field. I don´t know why, but I´ve been picking up random bones that I find on the ground. They´re Llama bones or something, so I´m using them as souvenirs. Then we kept finding tiny random pieces of ceramic, like the pieces you see in museums of the Incas. The field was sort of a site that hadn´t been excavated yet, and it felt like we shouldn´t have been walking in it, but no one told us anything otherwise. So anyway, I grabbed a few pieces of ceramic, hoping that maybe they came from an old Inca relic. I mean, it´s totally possible, but I also saw a bunch of broken beer bottles too. Whatever, to me, it´s the ceramic of the Incas.

Alright, well tomorrow I go to Copacabana, which has a beach but should be nothing like the famous one. It´s our jump-off point into Lake Titicaca, this massive lake in the mountains. We´ll see the Isla del Sol (the Inca creation site) among other islands there, and this lake divides Bolivia and Peru. So it´s possible that I won´t be online again until I get to Cuzco. Oh, the street food here is decently good. Not overly greasy, there are some spicy salsas, and it´s delish. I´ve been eating these steak sandwiches with this onion-pepper-spice mix on top, with a spicy tomato salsa and fries. It´s pretty amazing, and costs about 80 cents if we´re talking US standards. Get outta town with that, Bolivia is a good place to be when the cash flow is waning.