So in the three and a half days we’ve been here in Montero, we’ve spent almost all our time trying to get our long-term Visas finalized.  Things are going relatively smoothly, but it still is a slow process with lots to do.  The last two days we’ve been down in Santa Cruz (the really big city…2 million people vs. ~100k in Montero) in and out of government offices, and we have at least two more days to go.

Apart from Visas I got in to my first class today, I was helping out the teacher of a computer class for kindergardeners.  About half of them were playing around in Microsoft Paint, the other half used some simple educational games.  Tomorrow I’ll spend a bit with my first young adult class, which promises to be a bit more challenging.

Also, I’ve got the picture of our house that I promised in the last post:

The window to the left of the door is our bedroom, and the window to the right is our kitchen and living room (which you enter through a door just outside the right of the picture).  The next door down is an empty bedroom, visitors welcome!

I just wanted to write a quick post and let everyone know we made it safely to the house in Montero.  Its nice, we have a bedroom with a bathroom, and then we can walk outside to get to our kitchen/living room.

I have a couple pictures, but don’t have time to upload them now….I’ll post them soon though.

Today is the day we finally head to Montero, after our three weeks studying spanish in Sucre.  I have to say, I don’t think my spanish is quite up to snuff yet…learning languages is hard! (except for Laura, who is quite the natural)

Anyway, I’m really looking forward to getting to the Hogar and meeting all the people I’ll be working and living with.  Look for another update as soon as I can find internet there

Here’s one for all the aerospace people following along on the blog.  We went through a market this morning and I saw this toy airplane at one of the stands.  It struck me as something so horrifically wrong (with all the rivalry between Boeing and Airbus) that I just had to take a picture.

For those who aren’t aero people…Airbus’s new big airplane is the A380, while this model is clearly the very recognizable Boeing 747.

So here’s a picture of (what I think is) a typical Bolivian shower.  Notice there’s a few things missing….like a curtain.   I’m not sure why they don’t have shower curtains here, but they don’t.  Instead you have to try to keep the water in the basin (watch out for streams that come off your elbows), and any water that gets out needs to be squeegeed up when your done…I think a curtain is much easier.  Also notice, there is only one knob to control the volume of water, that’s because there is no hot water in the house.  Fear not though, we haven’t been taking (totally) cold showers!  If you look at that over-sized shower head, that actually contains an electric heating element that heats the water as it goes through, but its not very strong.  So, you control the temperature by controlling how much water is coming out. The less water that comes out, the hotter it will get.  This works great, just too bad for people who like strong/hot showers

Shaving is a whole ‘nother issue.  As I mentioned before, there’s no hot water in the house, so shaving at the sink doesn’t work because the totally cold water makes the skin pucker up.  That leaves two options (plus the super-combination option): boil water and put it in a basin for shaving, or shave in the shower under the warm water.  Its kinda annoying to go to the stove and heat water just to shave, and I tried taking a little mirror into the shower and shaving with that…but I missed a few spots.  Instead, I’m going for the super-combined option…filling up a basin when I get done with the shower (and its coming out warm), and using that in front of the real mirror.

All in all the bathroom experience in bolivia isn’t that bad (I didn’t mention that you can’t flush toilet paper though…maybe another day on that subject), just a couple things that are oddly different from what I’m used to

So I have to vent a bit…the conversion rate between Bolivianos (Bs) and US Dollars is annoying…. 7:1. That math never ends up nice. The biggest bills we have had so far is Bs 100…which is like 14.2 dollars. On the low end, we have 1 (a bus ride) & 2 (a bottle of water) Bs coins…which are $0.14 and $0.30. Typically though, I end up saying…oh we paid 25Bs for that, that’s what like $3.50 plus? Nothing ever is even!

To make matters worse, lots of people use dollars, so I can’t really just wholesale convert to Bs and forget about dollars. We were at a cafe with two Bolivians we met saturday night and when we went to pay the bill, we were fiddling around with our share, to try and get the right amount of Bs out, and they just drop a US$ 10 bill on the table! We all had a bit of a laugh at that.

So it turns out in Bolivia, they have the equivalent of valentines day on the first day of spring…I think it was a setup by Laura to get chocolate.   They also had a parade that came down the street where our spanish school is.

Later in the day, we got to meet one of the people we’ll be working with (Melia) and hang out around town.  When we got back to our house, our family was having a small party to celebrate, with a ton of very tasty steak.  This was surprising to us, because usually they eat very little after dinner.

I’m also including a couple pictures from our family’s house, they have a very wrinkly dog named Poncho and a couple parrots.

We’ve made it to Bolivia! (Safe and sound)

Yesterday we flew overnight from Miami to La Paz, were we first saw the andes.

Then on our flight from La Paz to Santa Cruz we saw them even better:

Flying in to Santa Cruz, we got to see a bit of the countryside. When we get to Montero, we’ll actually be working in a city (>100,000 people), but it was interesting to see what the nearby countryside looked like.

When we landed in Santa Cruz, we met with two of the sisters we’ll be working with in Montero, Sr. Anna and Sr. Clara. We got to sit around with them for a few hours and eat some pastries for brunch. We left them with some of our luggage, then we got on another airplane to head up to Sucre for our language school.

We landed in Sucre after a 35min plane ride (it would have been an 8hr bus ride though, because of the Andes) and met Omar who runs the language school. He drove us into town, and to the family that we’ll be staying with for the next four weeks. The house is very nice and on a bit of a hill so we have a pretty good view of around the neighborhood.

We were on our own for dinner that night, so we went down to a plaza that was having an art fair, and we bought some fried balls about the size of a baseball. We weren’t sure what they were at first, we were debating between doughnut-like and something potato based, they turned out to be fried potatoes with a hard-boiled egg in the middle. They were pretty tasty On the way back we found a church that had a 7:30pm mass, which was great because we hadn’t been able to go to church as we were in transit all morning. I didn’t understand a ton of it (Laura was better), but it was a good time to reflect on the trip so far.

For the next four weeks, we’ll be at the immersive language school in Sucre, learning spanish. Then its off to Montero to start the work.