I blame it on the altitude

So, last night was very eventful.

After an unsuccessful venture for a Yarn Store (there is one here and people here do, in fact, knit) I decided to try to take a bus home rather than a taxi. (Zareen, with whom I usually ride home with and rely upon to communicate with the driver had opted out of the yarn store).

I asked Prof. Nick where the nearest place to catch MicroBus G or 35 was.

"go straight down here, and it´ll open up into this big space. Go in the far right hand corner and go 5ish blocks down that street. Then you´ll turn right and go 1.5 blocks and it will open up into that big plaza. Then you go on the right hand side of the street and you should be able to catch the bus there."

hah. hah.

Needless to say, I ended up on the side (was it the right hand side? sure, of the direction I was looking...) of some large street with lots of buses on it. After I saw the A and 3v go by twice with no G or 35, I decided that I was perhaps not exactly 6.5ish blocks in the right-ish direction from where I was just a little before. Plus, now, it was dark.

Alone, dark, and in a country that does not speak my language. Bueno.

And, for you practical ones, now is not the time for me to whip out a map and figure out where I am. No. The Gringita on the side of the road with blonde hair and a map is like a flashing neon sign for "please take advantage of me. I don´t know where I am. and I´m not from here." So, in a whacky kind of answered prayer the woman who was standing next to me, presumably waiting for a bus as well, mumbled a question to me in spanish. I´m glad people at least assume I know some spanish. But in a whacky kind of Spanglish (which I watched on tv last night) we communicated that I was not, in fact, where I thought I was and she suggested I take a taxi at this point.

Ok. sure. So, finding a taxi is not the hard part. In fact, my neon sign seems to be on always, though not always flashing. Taxi drivers here honk at pedestrians whom they think might possibly want a taxi. I get a lot of honks. At first I thought it was a tacky pick-up attempt. In fact, it is a practical pick-up (but in a much different way) attempt.

So I wave at the next one, who, just by chance has "CHRISTIAN" plastered on the side of his cab. While tacky, I had to smile at the way God answers desperate prayers that need not be desperate.

With much effort, I got the taxi driver headed in the right direction. As the ride was kind of long, I became brave and decided to practice some spanish on this unsuspecting Maestro. (yes, they call taxi drivers maestros here. kinda cool)

In a butchering of the Spanish language, I told him I didn´t speak much but was studying Spanihsh, history, and politics here until the 5 of May. I asked him if he was a Christian (or false advertising, eh?) and he said, yes, catholic, "more or less".

Now, I´m no catholic, but I´m pretty sure it´s against a lot of what Catholics stand for to be ¨more or less¨a catholic. But at any rate, the only other thing I could get across was that I was a Christian too, but not Catholic. And, in an attempt to continue the conversation, I said the only other thing pertaining to religion that I could think of.

El Christo es grande, no?

Well I am so very glad I proved to him that I had great knowledge of both the Spanish language and common sense.

To top my night off, I popped open a can of Queso Pringles I bought yesterday afternoon. (fyi, American brands are very expensive here, as I mentioned about Burger King before. Pringles are quite an event to eat. They cost about 15 bolivianos, a little more than 2 dollars. And Pop Tarts? Shoot, they cost more than my steak dinner. I´ll wait until I get home to eat those again. ) And when I say popped them open, I mean popped. The lid was buldging with air pressure. I think I got a little cheese powder in my DNA now.