The group of five has made it safely to Cochabamba, Bolivia!
We started out our almost 40 hours of travel on the best note possible...Dancing to music at 5:30 am on the way to the airport! We tried to get Javi (the only guy out of the five of us) to join us in the amazing car dancing consisting mostly of the best car moves possible...fist pumps and head bobs!
The first couple flights went very smoothly-even the 9 hour flight, which was actually very nice because we each got our own little TV screen that allowed us to watch movies and play games. I ended up playing a language learning game where I learned the two most important questions possible "Donde este el bano" and "Le llevara neustra fotografia?" By the time we disembarked from the 9 hour flight into Lima it was about Midnight and we had a ten hour lay over until our next fight. We were all pretty exhausted and tried to sleep on chair beds (make shift beds out of three airport chairs "super comfortable") which I think succeeded in giving each of us about 2-4 hours of sleep.
Towards the end of our lay over in Lima we actually saw the contestants from the show The Amazing Race disembark and even though I have never watched the show a day in my life I thought it was pretty cool. By the last flight of the night, from Santa Cruz to Cochabamba, it was about 37 hours since the beginning of the trip and we had dissolved into extreme excitement to get there, slight delirium and complete silliness.
We arrived in Cochabamba (WITH all of our luggage PTL) and Paul greets us "Welcome...ok we have to hurry Megan has been stung by a scorpion and we need to hurry and get the car back so we can take her to the hospital."......Welcome to Bolivia.... She ended up being ok, it apparently wasn't a super poisonous kind and she was able to just get a shot for it. The short story of what had happened was while she was taking her laundry off of the line it stung her but she didn't see what it was so she just assumed it was a bee but she didn't see any stinger in her finger which was confusing. So while she was putting her clothes away in her room she saw a scorpion run across her clothing...mystery solved.
We have spent a couple days in Cochabamba now and there are a lot of things that I did not really expect. It is interesting to see that there are so many areas where there will be a super nice building right next to a really run down building. There are also a lot more American products than I expected, Coca Cola is everywhere!! Also in the higher end areas there is also a lot more of a western influence in the dress than I would have expected. I also didn't expect to see as many dogs as we have, I mean I expected to see some but they are EVERYWHERE! The Catholic church is also very prominent here and there are a lot of big beautiful Catholic churches. One really cool experience was going to the market to buy food for both breakfast and dinner, it was fun to see all the different types of food and all the many many kinds of potatoes. It was challenging to be able to get what you wanted when you have very limited spanish but I was able to successfully order four onions :)
~Becca
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