July in Cochabamba

After deeming my attempt at spirituality in La Planeta de la Luz an utter failure, I returned to civilization, Cochabamba that is, its cafes and pubs and my love of watching the real world, in all its beauty and ugliness. With about one month until a long awaited visit from my family, I decided to just stay put there, gorge myself on picante cheese empenadas and seek out more classes in Español. For one month I proceeded to live a life that can really only be summed up by the word "easy", yup, purely easy. After hugging farewell to my wonderful Brasilian counterpart, I moved to a hostel en el centro where my very basic room cost me the grand total of about $3 nightly. Our previous abode, in what I could tragically refer to all the glue sniffer part of town, was a local not quite up to even my single-woman-traveler standards.

I woke daily for spanish classes from 8:30am until noon, until that got too pricey and I cut the lectures to a couple times weekly. Afternoons were spent on homework, coffee and enjoying the myriad of life displayed in La Plaza Principal. Its impossible to not fall in love with a plaza like Cochabamba´s; full of joke tellers who have a charming knack of making me, the gringa, the but of their jokes if I hang around listening too long, jello vendors (Bolivians LOVE jello), indigenous women cloaked in traditional garb and funny hats pushing carts of oranges destined to be whipped up into fresh juice right before your eyes, hippies selling thier artisan works for enough dough to move on to the next stop, Evangelists, and hip young couples in tight western jeans sucking on each others faces. I developed lovely routines of returning day after day to consume enormous fruit salads boasting all colors of the rainbow in the 25 de Mayo market and gladly paying the woman standing on the corner with the perpetually hot basket tamales 2.50bs (30 cents) for the best tamales know to man. I became a frequent visitor of CoCafe, a hip little number on Calle España, and grew to become friends with its owners and regular clientele. My personal favorites, two traveling musician from Argentina, constantly pleased the crowd with their folksy duos and typically rowdy and boisterous Argentinian flare. Leaving Cochabamba meant leaving this life of leisure and luxury...but the time had come. I had a family that would be arriving very soon to La Paz, and there´s only so long you can justify living like a princess in the "underdeveloped world".