Sucre

sucre!
it´s a lot quieter here than la paz.
but still tons of pollution.

i´m in an apartment. the older parts of the city are really spanish feeling. (logically, having been built by the spanish)
the buildings are built right up to the sidewalk, the walls are whitewashed (but covered in political graffiti.. no one writes their own name in graffiti, everyone writes evo's) but the interior of each block is a really nice courtyard or series of courtyards.
so if you walk through my front door (old, dark wood, double doors, arched at the top, heavy, reminiscient of castles and fortresses) you come into a courtyard, paved in stones, with a fountain, non-functional. this is pretty standard.
stone stairs going up to the second floor, or an arched walkway under the second floor through to the second courtyard: grassy, a tree, rose bushes, a basin carved out of rock for washing clothes.
the second floor is a series of rooms (bedrooms, bathrooms, kitchen, dining room) connected by a long balcony. no interior hallways.
the view from the balcony is of part of the city, a few hills in the distance, it´s nice, and it´s being slowly blocked by the construction of some new building.
ahhhh, development.
the stove is attached to a propane tank a la barbecue. there´s no sink in the kitchen. there´s no hot water anywhere, in sucre, in general.
the shower has a large showerhead which heats the water in a similar way to those electric kettles everyone has these days. the tap for the shower is well-wrapped in electrical tape, because apparently before that was done people were getting really good shocks from touching it.

i went to the mercado campesino (farmer's market?) with my roommate feyla, and at one point she was like,
"whoa, look at that!"
and i was like, "whoa yeah, handspun alpaca wool!"
"no,beside the wool!"
"... oh, dried llama fetuses, yeah!"
i don't know how i saw the wool without seeing the dried llama fetuses but this must say something about me.

i opened a bank account here,
lots of military dudes with knee to thigh high guns at the bank.
when we were leaving the bank we realized they still had a paper we needed, and the guy who had helped us wasn´t at his desk.
so jean alex, our coordinator, just grabbed the paper off his desk, and there wasn´t any problem at all, despite how securitized the bank appears to be.

i can´t even begin to explain how amazing buying groceries is here.
if you want, there´s a supermarket, like in north america, (boooooo)
or, there´s this giant open air market full of indigenous women who are really specialized. cheese, avocadoes, mangoes, or sometimes they´ll have a big pile of various vegetables or spices.
it´s so big and mazelike and crowded, it´s insane.
you can taste stuff before you buy it.
so if you even make eye contact with a cheese seller she´ll have a slice balanced on a knife blade for you to taste before you can blink.
you can also taste spices. this is useful, but sometimes unpleasant.
you can barter, but for the most part things are already ridiculously cheap.
with small artisans and farmers i don´t really barter.
with people who are just acting as middlemen and selling stuff they bought somewhere, i do.

spanish is coming along.
i can kinda speak, usually.
like a hack, though.
i forgot what it´s like to not know how to say things like, "i would like".
i spend a lot of time walking into places and just naming things.
or at best asking, probably improperly, how much they are.