Back to Cochabamba tonight

We're leaving for the airport soon but I'm going to try to write about the last few days as quickly as I can!

So we arrived in the city of La Paz on Monday and had the afternoon to explore before we were supposed to meet in the evening at Cafe Carcajada (Cackle Cafe), a cafe run by a feminist anarchist group here called Mujeres Creando (Women Creating). We were supposed to meet at 7 but we got there and the woman we were meeting with wasn't there. Ismael called her and we couldn't get ahold of her so after waiting for about a half hour, we just left. It was a bummer but Julieta (the woman who was going to meet with us) called Ismael back the next morning and we made plans to go back on Tuesday night to meet her. So Monday night we didn't have any classes or meetings or anything, we just hung out. Luis and I went to this cafe run by an LGBT advocacy group to see what the organization was about, but they were closing, so we just got a quick rundown of what the organization does. Luis is going to do his project about LGBT/queer issues in Bolivia so I think it will be a really great resource for him. Then it was kind of late so he and I just bought 20 bolivianos (the currency here) worth of chocolate bars and watched The Parent Trap (the Lindsay Lohan one) in Spanish in the hotel room. Sometimes you just need nights like that. It was great.

Tuesday we went to see a filming of Chuquiago, which is a film about social class in La Paz. Chuquiago is the Aymara (the main indigenous group around this city) name for La Paz, the original name for the city before the Spaniards founded it as La Paz. We watched it in the Cinemateca Boliviana, which is really cool and has a lot of local films showing, and we got to talk to the director afterwards, which was awesome. It made me wish I were doing a documentary for my final project. Then we grabbed lunch at a Thai place near the theater and it was really delicious. The ambiance was really relaxing and it was a nice break from the bustle of the city. Then we went to meet with an artist who is also a close friend of Ismael (and was tortured and exiled during the dictatorships, as was Ismael) and he showed us some of his work and its relation to Bolivian culture and politics. I love how much we learn about Bolivian history through the arts on this program. It makes it really engaging and it's cool to have a variety of media displaying how society has changed over the years.

Afterwards, we had our rain date with the Mujeres Creando, and it was really awesome. Julieta was so cool; she was really intense but really kind as well. She told us about the things that the Mujeres Creando do (one of those things is strategically placed, tongue in cheek graffiti, written in cursive, about the rights of women and indigenous people) and the events they were having this week and we made plans to come back.

Wednesday morning we went to the World Bank, which was interesting but also kind of frustrating, since we talked with a high-up representative and he didn't give strong opinions either way about anything we asked (surprise). Then we had the afternoon free so I did some shopping, and then we went to the premiere of two of Ismael's documentaries at the cinemateca. They were both cool, although the first one was less structured and made me kind of dizzy with a lot of shots fading into one another throughout the whole thing. The second one was about the Plan 3000, which was when there were terrible floods outside Santa Cruz (a region/city in the east of the country), and the government relocated 3000 people essentially to the wilderness, where they built shantytowns and developed into a city that still exists today. It was really interesting, especially since I hardly knew anything about the Plan 3000. I liked seeing Ismael's work, since he's the adviser for the film students on the program and we hear advice and criticism from him but hadn't seen anything he'd made yet.

Yesterday we went to El Alto, a city immediately next to La Paz that gets its name ("the high up" or "the tall") because it's almost 1000 meters higher than the center of the city. It's interesting because the geographical location of people here inversely reflects their social standing, so the people who live the lowest (in the most temperate areas) are the wealthiest and whitest, and those on the mountain are much poorer and typically indigenous. El Alto is a rapidly growing city (I can't remember the population right now but it's several million, a big difference from a few decades ago when it was barely a few thousand). Because of that, however, public services such as water and electricity can't expand as fast as the city is growing, and many of the residents don't have basic services. It was really interesting to see the difference between the cosmopolitan La Paz and it's next door neighbor, where most of the streets aren't even paved and much of the economy is "informal"--people selling fruits, candy, and other things on the street. In the afternoon we got to have our coca leaves read, which was really cool (although mine was vague--everything I asked, the answer was "está bien": "it's fine"). Ali, your trip is going to go well because you're very lucky, according to my fortune teller.

Okay we're leaving for the airport now so I'll write from Cochabamba!