tara's tierra

Flying into Fall

The last three flights I have taken have been absolutely horrendous. Mainly, the last two flights I have taken from California to JFK in New York. Both times I have had to land in route to get more fuel after we had circled for hours above either Nebraska or North Carolina. Flights that were supposed to be a mere 5 hours were actually 12. Yesterday I was at least on JetBlue, so I caught up on some of the worst and best television I have ever seen. Now, I am back in suburbia, at my trusty Starbucks, just until Monday when my big red apple adventure begins! I am happy. I have made progress on my dissertation. And fall, my absolute favorite season no matter where I am on the map, is almost in the air. Life is going to be okay.

A Lost Letter

This post is not really about travel. But it recalls travel. It has traces of travel. The other day my roommate was looking for some poetry to inspire her while she was painting. So, I pulled out a book my father had given me years ago titled Poetry Like Bread. It is a compilation of international poets' thoughts on plenitude and poverty, I believe. In any event, the book is secondary to the story. The important part of the story its that I found an envelope tucked into the book. The envelope has a tiny icon on the lefthand corner that says "Hotel Arts Barcelona." I found this fitting because I am in the middle of reading a series of books for my Qualifying Exams from Barcelona and often forget that I have been there twice: first on a trip with a bunch of university students; the second time, with my grandmother in 1999. To be precise, in June of 1999, after I graduated college. My grandmother did and still does like to travel in style. And so, I got to stay at one of the nicer (or at least, more expensive) hotels I've stayed at, while I was with her in Spain. We started in Madrid where I think we spent only four days, and then went to Barcelona for about a week.

Anyway, the front of the envelope also says "Brad Miller Marietta, GA." This is what really moved me because Brad Miller was by the time I graduated college, the closest thing I had to an intellectual partner in crime. It was primarily because we both spent countless hours in the library at Richmond and both enjoyed the occasional cigarette. It was also because Brad could talk incessantly for hours about metaphor and image, in John Donne or in James Joyce or in Shakespeare, and could strum up a good theory about why a certain professor gestured this way or that. Brad was actually the first person who had obsessions with professors like I did. He would analyze them to death, and so would I. It was great fun. Of course, Brad pulled A+s whereas I pulled A-s, and Brad went to do a PhD at  Harvard's Divinity School and then disappeared from my life, whereas I wandered around for a couple of years before winding up at Berkeley. Because I think of him, because I wonder where he is, because I wonder who I was then, and because I know he wouldn't care, here's what the letter said:

Brad my love!
hello. I am right now in Spain with my grandma-ma and am getting restless since she is 73 and well, that's enough to make me restless. We were in Madrid for a few days and now we are in Barcelona. We're leaving tomorrow actually. So you get this cool Hotel Arts paper. The hotel is in the Olympic Village. I feel like a snob, actually, very Tarafina-ish [he called me Tarafina, I loved it], writing from Spain, but I need an activity and you appreciate letters and for some reason you were popping into my head. I was daydreaming about Boston and thinking how I'd go to school in Boston too and live with you and then I was thinking I'd never see you since we'd both be working and blah blah blah. So how's Georgia? Leaving college really sucked and I'm sorry we never got Mexican together. Home is rather boring. I really wish we hung out together more at college, but hopefully we will in the future. It was like the last weeks of school made me realize who the important people were, or are, I should say, and fate made me hang out with them (or maybe it was just a gift certificate to Amici's?). So, I had dinner, speaking of, at Café Botín, which was one of Hemingway's favorite hang-outs. Personally, I like Amici's or Coppola's better any day. So look, I am subconsciously writing like you, although, obiously not as perfect. I really miss you. You're the first person I am even contacting, except Sarah, because I had to organize her computer pick-up since I have it. I hope you don't care if this is especially long but I really haven't spoken to anyone but Gram and cabdrivers in over a week. My Spanish is improving. . .

So, I got accepted into the World Teach program and I'm waiting to hear from another internship program. But, definitely going to Ecuador. I've got to start working on school stuff. I am volunteering this summer at the Literacy Volunteers of America -- helping a lot of immigrants who don't know English with computers. It's actually great because I get to talk in Spanish a lot. Oh god, I sound so righteous. Oh well. I'm reading Foucault's The Order of Things. Well, sort of reading. It's so hard, but I was needing something to make me think. Here's the word of the letter, Brad. Ready? APOPHANTICS. Tell me what it is in  your response. I am not sure. I cannot find any of my graduation pictures because my mother lost them, but I have the one you gave me because it was in a separate place. Obiously I won't mix us with the lower echelons of Richomd that pepper my other pictures. Ha ha. "We're such snobs" as you say.

I am so art-ed out, don't think, oh god, that Tara, in Spain and writing to ME?! But, I've had enough of the art and museums and cathedrals and paper is one of the best entertainments. This hotel is 5 stars, but I could care less. A bunch of American assholes and me. You have to come up North and see me or else I will have to go visit you in Georgia and meet the fabulous Moxley. Impressed I remember? You better be. Okay. I'll stop my lengthy discourse. But seriously. I really do miss you and I hope all is well with you. I would love to see you some time. Write or call me:

ADDRESS

Stay smart.
Love,
Tarafina

I wrote to Brad over email a few times. I heard he left Harvard. I heard he was in Georgia. I heard he was back at Harvard. I heard he was never heard again. I don't know where he is, but I know all I have are the best memories of thinking that someone else understood who I was, inquired as to why I decided to only wear red shoes for a time, and pointed out when he could or couldn't hear my voice in my writing. That made a huge difference then, and makes an even bigger difference now.

A letter discovered in the pages of a book:  I'm going to stick it into another one now that I've found it only so that I might find it again, on a rainy, wet day, in ten years, when I am looking for nothing in particular at all.

The Bathtub Faucet

in my old, 1960s bathroom is manufactured by Standard. I imagine many faucets of that era and today are manufactured by Standard. I have lived here for a year and a half but I never noticed that word, Standard, on the drain in the bathtub.

I had a moment of heightened attention last summer. I was in a tiny town called Tarata, about 30 minutes by bus or taxi from Cochabamba. I arrived on a bus with about 12 people and we all started trapsing about the dusty village together. We had spent way too much time together all summer. There were annoying members of the party. There was a wide age-range. It was quite grating. Not to mention that I had already been to Tarata once earlier that summer with Greg. Suffice it to say that Tarata has a lot less going on in the entire town that Tara herself has going on just in her one square block. I suppose that isn't saying much lately. In any event, we made our way back to this old monastery that was actually beautiful in that indescribable decrepit way, where the old glass panes were cracked and there were random items strewn about the floor that held dust from decades past. It was actually a magical place. One friend and I broke off from the group and went out a side door to something resembling a yard where we stumbled upon corn, which is never too far away in Bolivia. But this corn was not just any corn. It was picked dry ears of corn left in a pile and a bucket full of golden corn kernels. Imagine taking your hand and pushing it through the corn to the bottom of the barrel, the soft yellow corn grains rubbing against your skin, dry and silky, and incredibly comforting to the bone. This moment was a very poignant moment. It was not the high of the trip or the low of the trip, but it was more than both of them. It just simply was. I felt corn. I was not overstimulated. I was not wowed. I was not gasping for air or screaming. I just calmly felt corn over my arm and took the time to think about what it felt like.

Later that morning, less than an hour or so, I again broke off from the group. And I was on a somewhat deserted road and again stood up against a fence next to a friend. I remember distinctly staring at a goat behind the fence. The goat was staring at me. But then, instead of staring at the goat, I looked down and I stared right at this twisted barbed wire right in front  of my very own eyeballs. I stared so hard at the twisted barbed wire and the grain of the wood. I felt myself studying the barbed wire. The little twists, the way it looked against the faded gray-toned wood, the way the dried grass was poking up and itching my ankles above my socks. The way that my body, that wire, the goat, and the wood came together in that moment of observation. I said out loud but to myself, still, "I am staring at a barbed wire. Remember this moment. You are staring at a barbed wire twist on a fence in Tarata, Bolivia."

How many days and weeks and months zip by without us ever noticing what is etched right in front of our nose. Without us ever noticing that someone needs us. Without us ever  noticing that we need us. Without us ever noticing, simply, the beauty of Standard faucets and barbed wire. I am going to think slowly tomorrow. Thinking slowly and drinking chicha makes me incredibly happy. Photos? 1st: broken window in monastery; 2nd: outside area where I felt corn; 3rd: Me, friend Rebecca, friend Josh, and friend Carolina after drinking chicha in the sun most of the day. Pachamama. I was so happy to be me in the world in the sun in Bolivia in a bus on the dust with a bump and a hug that day.

Itineraries and Lines

We are all line dwellers. _____________________________________________

Jim Clifford writes in Routes "Thinking historically is a process of locating oneself in space and time. And a location, in the perspective of this book, is an itinerary rather than a bounded site -- a series of encounters and translations"(11). Jim Clifford is one of the coolest professors I have ever had. He is brilliant, but brilliantly chill. He wears birkenstocks, jeans, and blue sweaters. He sang in class one day. Specifically, a few measures from the __________song "Oklahoma." He speaks with his spindly hands and he is so quick that he has questions formed before you have finished your thought. He is lanky and it seems like he is almost all brain, since you can almost see his brain processing, firing, synapsing in his head. He gave me a 10 minute synopsis of Gramsci in his office hours once that is the most succinct, clear, and accessible summary of someone's thinking I have ever gotten. And he just gave it to me. He didn't tell me to read this that or the other, he just explained Gramsci. I am ever grateful.

In any event, the point is, I got to thinking about my own routes and roots today and yesterday with my roommate. We started talking about the patterns in our lives, the patterns of travel and what they mean on a larger scale. She was talking about how she always moved on a horizontal: California to New Jersey to California to Philly to California to New York to Japan. Mainly a loosely diagonal horizontal. I on the other hand, have a clear triangulation pattern going on. Connecticut to Virginia to Ecuador to DC to Peru to California to DC to Ecuador to California to Bolivia to Connecticut to California. It is San Francisco, East Coast, and the Andes. I double-over the vertices a lot._________________ But I wonder what that triangle figure means in my life? It must be part of what I am and how I think. It must be part of what pulls me this way or that, these three vertices. Am I vertice of the triangle or the entire triangle itself? Are there three main vertices in my life and if there are, who, what, how, why are they? It is interesting food for thought to think about your own circuits. They are not arbitrary. They are the aura that we share.

I spent a lot of time around the water today. I was sitting on some stone steps down by the bay, by the Hyde Street Pier. There was a really old man sitting next to me in a wheelchair. I was thinking about how he was probably sitting there thinking about dying. About how he probably wanted to become part of the tide again (He was probably thinking about the 49ers game for all I know, but let's just pretend my romantic moment is real). Looking out at water has always been my anchor. In the boundless blue of waves, there is something so calming. The ebb and flow just happens. Today I felt the tide inside of me. I felt my blood washing around my veins as I was sitting there. I felt that the pulls I feel inside myself are correct. These pulls are________________ getting my own tide back in sync with the bay's; my own tide back in step with my desires; my own tide back in touch with me.

My roommate wrote a letter, on paper with a pen, and put it in an envelope. She wrote it to this guy named Aron whose autobiography she had read on a plane. He is this guy that was hiking or rock climbing (I forget) and got his arm stuck in a rock and cut off his own arm to save himself. She had seen him on Oprah or one of those saccharine sweet morning programs. Naomi told_______________ him that something in the landscape paintings she was looking at reminded her of him and how much his book had inspired her. She stuck a stamp on it and forgot about it. Yesterday, he wrote back to her. He said he had read her letter many times and that he felt like he knew her. He said he was slightly afraid to write to her because he did not know how she would respond. He said that getting her words had changed his life. And all she did was write one page. He said he hoped she'd write back. He said he thought she understood him.

I am not sure why we meet the people we meet along our routes of life. I don't question that, I just know that they come to us like the waves. There is real energy in lines. Native Americans used to walk the lines of the earth for strength and innerpeace. Andy Goldsworthy does tons with lines, most recently the one at the DeYoung in Golden Gate Park. _______________Think about the lines of your life. The patterns they make. Why are they there? What do they tell you? How do you make sense of your story?

"Because you're mine, I walk the line."

Detail of Andy Goldsworthy's "Faultline" from the DeYoung

Back in the Bay. Ahhh.

All good things must come to an end. In typical Tara fashion, I managed to lose my Wells Fargo ATM card a mere 20 hours before leaving Cochabamba. Luckily, no money was charged to the card, but, it sure did make getting home a lot more fun. I could not get a cash advance on my credit card because in typical Bolivia fashion, the banks all close at 5 or 6pm and on Saturday morning conveniently don't do cash advances. I had to catch the bus at 10am. It was not pretty. Lucky for me, I made a few friends in Cbba who were willing to help me out. Shit man. It sucked. Flights home were rather uneventful if endlessly long, and now, here I am sitting at Dolores Park Cafe enjoying a damn good cup of coffee (it actually has caffeine in it, something rather secondary in Bolivia) and the cool foggy breeze at my back.

I am also enjoying free wireless and the space surrounding my table, after emailing while bumping elbows with my neighbors for 2 months. Oh yeah, and the partner, he's good, too. We are rather displaced since we cannot go back to our apartment until the 10th or 11th of August, but hell, it's kind of fun and whitetrash to live out of the Jetta. Greg leaves tomorrow for a pre-scheduled music concert in Colorado, so as of noon on Thursday, July 27th, 2006 I am flying sola again. Ugh. I guess it'll be good, but for 2 years?! I better churn out some spectacular work. I already miss Bolivia. I wanted to stay. Oh well...next year...??

BeInTween

I hate the inbetween times. Yesterday was a switch, a definitive one, and now I am virtually living life back in the States. I don´t want to sit at the non-SucreManta anymore (insider knowledge). I don´t want to walk through the plaza anymore. I don´t want to try to learn Quechua anymore. I just want to move on to what is next. I feel itchy and dirty and grimy right now, and kind of lamely sad and nostalgic. Keep moving forward, and keep looking ahead. Soon I won´t BeInTween again, and then, I´ll wish I could roam and see and smell and hold energy in my palm.

There really are thousands and thousands of stars in the sky in Poqona, Bolivia. You can see the Milky Way. Ha. The Milky Way! I felt like I was in a planetarium. Light pollution? Air pollution? What in god´s name are we doing? I am going to find two months of the year, every year, to find a place where I can see the stars and hear my thoughts and look at sheep, like really look at them, so that I can tell the difference between one and the other, or the difference between three o´clock and five o´clock.

I know I am so sentimental, and I don´t want to be that way, and in fact, I tell myself to stop being that way, but I am. Bolivia is also a conflicted, emotionally and politically charged place to be. I think I need to keep coming back. It suits me.

Intensidad

Intensidad. Intensity. Having two months to be in a place where you do not quite fit in has lots of benefits because you end up becoming close with the few people around you that you would otherwise not probably get to know. You live in this little warp world where everything around you is about time, about how long you´ve been here and how long you´ll be here and when you´re going home. And you know that even though you are so close here, as soon as you go, you slip back into your "own" life, your "own" shit, your "own" friends and the little bubble of the travel experience stays where it is.

Am I sounding too epic? Probably. I´m probably sounding so lame and obvious. But it isn´t that way when you´re in it. You´re in this space and time and it´s so magic and over stimulating and over sensitized because it´s all new and you´re also entirely more vulnerable. You´re entirely more open to being whoever the hell you feel like because no one quite knows you or can attest to whatever history has made you. You are offered up as you are the day you arrive  and left as you are the day you leave.

Travel is also so good for honesty and trust. The other night, lying in my bed in a triple hotel room in La Paz, I was like, wow, this is great. I am with these two new friends that I met 5 weeks ago but probably know entirely better than half the friends I see at home. That was a nice feeling. That feeling of everything is so secure because the only people I have are you guys, and no matter what we do, we still have to spend 20 hours in class together a week, for better or worse. At the airport, you´re there. In the taxi, you´re there. In class, you´re there. For coffee break, you guys. Afternoon coffee, you guys. It´s so easy, and so fun, and so great because it´s so uninterrupted by other commitments.

I do sincerely wish there was more time at home for plain and simple honest conversation. I wish there was a way to turn off all of San Francisco and pretend it were just me, you, and three other people for two months. And what if I didn´t shower there or go to Urban Outfitters or drink coffee or buy pens that cost 3 dollars...you cannot live life here there, or there here. You just keep going, and the bubbles you live come back when they are supposed to and fade when they have to...soon I´ll be back in Dwinelle....and all of this will be gone. And this is not even that great. It´s just different, fresh, and a way to break up the god damn routine.

Sucre, Part 1

I don´t quite know where to start in terms of articulating the thoughts that I have had the last four or five days. I spent the last 5 days in Sucre, Bolivia attending the Association of Bolivian Studies Conference http://www.bolivianstudies.org/espanol/, where there were panels on art, literature, anthropology, history, environment, government, economics, science -- all around the nation of Bolivia. I feel like I could sit here from now until the end of the trip (July 25th), and still not capture the depth of the thought streams that have been churning in my head just because of this conference.  I wrote for hours last night, filled pages, swam in ink, and still I have floods more to process.

What affected me most personally and what affected me professionally are actually entirely intertwined. One of the most energetic, aura encircled person I met at this conference is an Aymara woman named Julieta Paredes who cofounded a feminist organization in Bolivia, Mujeres Creando http://www.mujerescreando.com. Julieta gave a speech, that I will potentially put up here once I get back to the States, to a packed auditorium as part of a panel on Gender Studies in Bolivia. Unlike the other panelists, Bolivian female academics, Julieta got up from the table, walked down to the center of the auditorium, and spoke, sang, and embodied her speech in front of a riveted audience. She spoke powerfully about the differences between feminism in theory (which the previous speakers had effectively explained) and feminism in praxis, and not just in praxis, but in praxis in Bolivia. She spoke about the need to stop the mierda. To stop the same old mierda of hombres que son "revolucionarios en la plaza y dictadores en la casa." She spoke about the need for North American academics working on feminist issues to realize the difference between what it is to theorize from books vs. theorizing from the body.

A few panels later, Julieta came up again. This time, I was watching another phenomenal panel on Bolivia in the Academy. A range of academics, including Tristan Platt from St. Andrew´s University, Norma Klan from UC Santa Cruz, and Elizabeth Montasterios from U Pittsburgh, talked about the different academies (meaning, Bolivia vs. North America) and the challenges in bridging North/South productions of knowledge around Bolivia.  I thought Elizabeth´s talk most poignantly hit the nail on the head. She talked about the 2003 LASA conference in Dallas, where Julieta and Maria (the other founder of Mujeres Creando) traveled up from Bolivia to talk about Mujeres Creando to many an elite academic of the North. Julieta and Maria showed part of a video they had made and walked into the yuppie conference (as explained to us later by Elizabeth in the Sucre airport) with their leather jackets, colored hair, and boots. The gist of Elizabeth´s talk was that these two women jarred the North American academy. Doris Sommer and Jean Franco, explained Elizabeth, were startled and struck by the work of Mujeres Creando, and as a result of Julieta and Maria´s presence at LASA space was created within the conference for "otros saberes" and a fund was set up for further investigation into social movements in South America.

BUT! Let us not be romantic and think that LASA is the end all be all of the universe. The point is, Julieta and Maria could give a rat´s ass about Doris Sommer or Jean Franco (who are probably wonderful people). They could give a rat´s ass as to whether their work is published in the states or not. They could give a rat´s ass about whether they are recognized at LASA or not. They are down here doing what they are doing in this historical moment in time, in the presence of Bolivia. They work tirelessly for gender equity in Bolivia. They breathe, embody, live Bolivia, and they do not compromise their work for the sake of a seat at the LASA table. They know their Marx, they know their Gramsci, they know their Luce Irigary and Judith Butler. But they only  know it from living it first. They are bottoms up; they teach us how tops down it can be.

Personally, whether idyllic or not, the idea of constructing a bridge is what I think Elizabeth Montasterios was trying to disseminate. She was trying to show that the work of Mujeres Creando had something to lend to the academy. She was hoping, maybe, that the academy had something to lend to them. A lot of the academics know, oh too well, everyday, that their work lacks application to the activist world that thrives in El Alto in La Paz. But that does not mean they do not know the weight and importance of the work that goes on down here in the streets and between bodies in sheets. It does not mean that there are not many of us who feel like hypocrites every day or who struggle with the choice (albeit a really lame one) between using Walter Benjamin or Silvia Rivera.  Reading one with the knowledge of the other is the best one can do, I think.

People gravitate to Julieta because she has sacrificed, in many ways, Julieta. She is willing to put "her" aside and be all that is Mujeres Creando. On Saturday morning, as the conference went on a few blocks away, a few of us went to see Julieta speak to university students in an informal courtyard. We sprawled out on the grass and the front row of students chewed coca leaves as Julieta talked her talk. When she finished her speech, five men raised their hands. They asked the first questions. They challenged what they deemed a lesbian in search of a movement because she is a lesbian. Then, after the men had been placated, a few women raised their hands. There is a long way to go. A really long way to go.

The four days in Sucre were mainly entirely humbling. I am humbled in front of women who have done much more than I have for the sake of living a message. I am humbled in front of the kindness shown to me by people who want nothing more than to share ideas, space, and time. I am humbled by all of the energizing glances I exchanged with beautiful women, the ones that leave you wondering and thinking that you, we, all of us, had really better get back to work.

Video Games and Clefa

I am sitting in a tiny internet cafe only a stone´s throw from my house in Cochabamba. The air reeks of  pubescent boys´sweat. It recalls, say, sixth or seventh-grade gym class when all the boys would have sweat dripping down their brows and not quite know what to do with the fact they were probably jerking off at night, but had no idea what sex necessarily was. Sorry to be blunt, but that is what the vibe is like.  These kids are probably too embarrassed to bring up deodorant with their parents, yet are bordering on beign offensive to the public. So, here I am, the blonde girl smack in the middle of the sweating, sex thinking,  pubescent boys.

The boys are all shouting and frantically jumping from friend to friend´s computer, watching their compadres play video games. I do not know much about the video game market, but I can see that in Cochabamba it is a major hobby. At any given hour from around 1pm until 8pm, internet cafes are teeming with deodorant needing lads who use the mouse to point their rifles and fire at enemies. The kid next to me right now cannot be more than 8 and every five seconds he is yelling own "pucha pucha", which is the spanish equivalent of  "shoot (as in, shucks)" -- presumably a softer version of "puta" which would be bitch.. Anyway...is the addiction to video games a good thing or a bad thing?

As I mentioned earlier, the other big youth-addiction here is clefa, an industrial strength cement glue that youngsters sniff until the point of passing out. There are plenty of parents in Bolivia, like in any country, who are not around, out of sight, unable to support even themselves, let alone their kids. And so the forgotten ones wander out to the street in search of their next sniff. For a look at more information on this problem, check out :  http://www.lostiempos.com/noticias/17-02-05/17_02_05_loc3.php (for Spanish readers only, sorry).

Next to clefa, the amount of time kids spend in internet cafes, even if they are virtually shooting things, looks rather positive. They are engaging their motor skills, spending time with other youth in a safe environment, and developing their independence. Of course, I wish they were all sitting next to me and stinking up my afternoon with educational programs like 2nd language acquistion or National Geographic. But, I suppose in the grand scheme of things, maybe the video games are better than the parks. Pucha, pucha. I have got to get some fresh air.

Ay Senora, Ay Senora

Live and never learn. That is one of the best Daly traits there is. Every time I stay with a host family I say,  THIS oh THIS is the last time I do this! I have been having a rocky few stomach days, waking up in the middle of the night with a cramping stomach but no digestive movement, if you know what I mean. Sorry for the details.  Today, though, having slept through my alarm and awakened by Viviana, my thirty-something sister, I awoke and decided  I was feeling better and set out walking my half hour walk to Quechua class with a vim in my step. Four endless hours later, I sauntered home with my compadres and settled in to the kitchen table for lunch.

A brimming bowl of overcooked noodles swimming in orange soup awaited me, a lone chicken bone floating in the middle like a pathetic island. I could not tell if this was the main course or the starter, so cautiously began slurping it down, wondering if something (PLEASE!) better was to come. Instead, the Senora of the household said after I was about half way through, rather out of the blue, that she was SICK OF COOKING! sick of cooking? Like Mom going on strike? She told me she would prefer it if I would buy my own food and feel free to use her kitchen but she did not want the pressure of making food for me everyday! Who knew! I had not once complained of what she made or anything, but I could tell she was stressing everyday about what to make for her guests.

I was initially kind of taken aback, but then realized this was probably better all around. After 2 weeks of chicken bones, potatoes, and greasy hamburg patties, I am kind of ready for my culinary autonomy! So, free from my guilt of pretending to like everything put in front of me, I rocked it out this afternoon at the IC Norte, Bolivia´s answer to Safeway or Stop and Shop. I careened the aisles with my cart, popping wheelies and picking up cereal, milk in a bag (weird!), peanut butter, pop tarts, chicken nuggets, chocolate, instant coffee, bread, a razor, and produce! green things! I bought spinach and carrots and peppers and tomatoes and olive oil and soups and even macaroni and cheese! I realized what a wonderful blessing in disguise this whole cooking strike has bestowed upon me and am so psyched to go home and make what I want for dinner instead of sufferng through another piece of PAN with Dulce (this thick, goopy, caramel crap that Bolivians are obsessed with). Frankly, I have had my host family experiences galore. I have oohed over oil globule soup and grisly meat sandwiches. I have picked away at the purple chicken meat on the bone. I have savored the twenty varities of potatoes. Now, into my 29th year, it is time to fry up my own grub.

Thank you Senora, thank you. You are relieved of your duties and I can eat what I want. Ah. Bliss. Home for a chicken burrito!