cochabamba may be my favourite place in bolivia so far.

granted, it doesn´t have as many fascinating geographical qualities as a lot of other parts of bolivia, but it has something much more near and dear to me: political diversity.

cara and i got on the bus around six in the evening. it was supposed to be a bus cama, which is something you can almost sleep on, but it turned out to be a normal bus. no matter now.
half an hour into the trip my mother called me with a letter from mcgill. i was surprised to hear from her in the middle of nowhere because international calls rarely reach me, even in sucre.
it was a rejection. i don´t mind about mcgill but this means i won´t be living in montreal anymore.
montreal is like a home and a mother to me.
my thoughts were diverted from this pretty quickly: we stopped for twenty minutes, the interior light was on, and looking across the aisle i cringed as i saw a cockroach on someone's bag.
ugh, i thought, someone brought a cockroach onto the bus..
but no, actually cockroaches were part of the package.. they were everywhere. i got bored and took pictures of them. one particularly brave one lingered on cara's seat to finish eating a crumb of some kind while she loomed over it menacingly. finally it picked up the crumb and disappeared over the edge of the seat.
they weren´t very big cockroaches, at least there´s that.
we slept on the bus, sort of.
i put my shoes back on at four thirty in the morning waiting for the inevitable crunch, but apparently no cockroaches had crawled into them.
we got into cochabamba at five in the morning, asked a police officer for directions to the hotel. he followed us there to make sure we got there. there were big piles of garbage on street corners, with dogs having ecstatic dinner parties in them.
we talked to the guy at the desk, talked him into giving us this half night for free if we paid for the next night, talked down the price of the next night, and then crawled into bed to sleep for a few hours.

cochabamba is beautiful by day.
it´s a bigger city, more diverse, more alive.
i wandered alone, found breakfast, found cien años de soledad which is the book i most want to read in spanish right now (well, now i am reading it. slowly.)
wandered the streets. there was grafitti.
to be more specific, there was beautiful, positive, socially aware grafitti. as opposed to sucre´s graffiti, which is generally negative and revolves around themes of delivering schoolyard insults at evo morales.
i met up with cara, eric, josee, francois. we went for breakfast again (for their benefit, not mine, although i had an ice cream) and then francois and i went to an antifascist art show.
it was a really nice expo, not only was the art interesting but there were a bunch of local artists there (poets, jewelry, books, photos...) and everyone coming in to see it seemed really interesting.
it was a really refreshing environment to be in.
there we learned about a theatre festival that was going on, and decided to check that out later in the day.
we bought our return bus tickets. we ate. we got to the theatre place five minutes late and they said we´d missed the start but there was another one at nine thirty.
we bought tickets. we wandered and found some kind of outdoor fundraiser with live music. we wandered and had a drink and played checkers. we went back to the theatre.
the piece we saw circulated around themes of racism and hypocrisy in public participation in politics in bolivia. it was stark and simple and direct, really well done. it offerred a really nice critique of the greed and ill will behind politics right now.
the next day eric and josee and francois went to climb the world´s tallest christ. cara and i discovered the world´s tallest stork phonebooth.
i found an anarchist journal written in cochabamba, really professional. i was really impressed. i photographed a few stencils.
i stopped in a park to read news that had been posted by the tinku red, an info centre for the left, it was the mainstream news, but it was replete with critiques written in red pen. i was really impressed. i watched a crowd of people, pretty diverse people, reading these deliciously critical interpretations of the mainstream news and felt more hopeful about bolivian politics than i have for a while.
the bus back to sucre actually was a bus-cama, and didn´t have cockroaches. i managed to sleep on it and came home happy.