I want to start off this week’s blog by saying that I am truly thankful for each and every one of you out there that has supported us financially, in prayer, and in the many other ways that are too numerous to mention. We are truly blessed to have any single one of you, let alone all of you.

     This past week, our home church, St Andrews, celebrated Shrove Tuesday with its annual Shrove Tuesday pancake feed put on by the men, for the lady folk in our lives.  This culinary event has been performed for decades, if not longer.  In solidarity with the men who cooked, served, and cleaned up, I too delivered piping hot hot cakes to Susan and Delaney. There is a reason that it is also called “Fat Tuesday,” and that is because we all make such good pancakes!

     Also this week, I passed a milestone. My father recently posted on Facebook that “If you hadn’t grown up by age 50, that you didn’t have to.” Yesterday I turned 50, and I don’t view myself as “not grown up”, so, by default, I don’t have to! Celebrating my birthday was a quiet affair. A simple meal of chicken and rice was served, but it felt like a gourmet meal. Susan and Delaney wrote a poem and gave it to me. The poem states “There once was a man from Waverly, Whose hat always tilted crazily, He went to the South, Lost teeth from his mouth, And turned 50 while singing terribly.” I want to be the first one to say that I think they are just jealous of my “joyful noise unto the Lord.” My oldest daughter, Hope, gave me a present too. She found out this week that she is having another boy, so I will be a grandfather again in June. But, I feel that the greatest present ever was to be here in Carmen Pampa, serving God’s people, and hearing God’s calling clearer and clearer.

     We are finally on the downhill side of our year in Bolivia. Planning is started (at least on paper!), and thoughts are turning toward home. The students here will be missed (at least most of themJ). I just wanted to remind everyone that we would not have been able to undertake this year of mission without each and every one of you. So I will close for now, but know that you are all in our hearts, our thoughts, and our prayers.

Peace,

Jeff

Feliz Carnaval!

This week there were three things that shouted at me to be shared with everyone following us:

     First, we are living in the Cloud Forest. This means that we will see animals, birds, snakes, and insects that just aren’t seen at home. This was pointed out to me yesterday by the visit of a giant beetle with really long antennae. I will post a still image of the beast, but make sure that you also watch the video here: http://youtu.be/pBz56uXTw2Q. A German shepherd pup approached, but was smart enough to not tangle with it. Yes, that is a normal-sized popsicle stick under his belly for size comparison.

     On a more somber note, I had to go into Coroico for some grocery shopping on Wednesday and I saw something that I thought I would pass along to everyone following us. On the way into town, we passed a funeral procession. That isn't so strange. What was different from funerals back home was that most of the people in the procession were on foot. From little children with squirt guns (it is Carnival here) to ancient Bolivianos bent with age. The coffin was carried in the open back of a minivan, wrapped in white muslin fabric and then surrounded with flowers and two gentlemen to hold it in the back. Everyone that was walking had already walked up from the valley floor around 2500 feet down in the sunny and 80 degree weather. The women were wearing their finest shawls and their bowler hats, and the men were in their fedoras and Sunday best. There were a few people crying, but for the most part, everyone was stoic. At first I thought that they were burying a child, and then I remembered the size difference, and realized it was probably an adult. I was just really touched by the physical approach to a funeral. Back home, people bundle into cars and run the a/c or heat (depending on season). Only the people coming from out of town arrived in vehicles, and even they got out and waited in the heat to pay final respects. I was just really touched by the fact that they put themselves through harsh conditions to say farewell, when their entire lives have been in harsh conditions. Life here has not been, and is not easy. People live, and people die, and still life goes on. I pray that each and every one of us live lives as fully as these people do.

     Finally, the English Department uses CD players to play audio clips for class and tests.  Each campus has 1 working CD player.  These are the same CD players that I cobbled together from non-working ones, to make the working CD players they do have. These CD players run anywhere from 299 b’s to 450 b’s.  We have been looking into alternative ways to deliver the audio and have come up with a workable solution. USB players are VERY big here. On average, these players run around 140 b’s, and can be used with a simple flash drive. These USB flash drives cost around 70 b’s, for a grand total of 210 b’s (enjoy the math Charles!) What we are looking for now is funding to get at the minimum 1 player for each campus. We will gladly get more if the funds are there. Please let us know If you can help, and thanks for your support!

       Happy Carnaval everyone! We hope you enjoy the pictures we took of the parade and the crowd today in La Paz. Sorry there aren't more, but we were afraid for our camera under the constant bombardment of water guns, water balloons, spray foam and spray confetti! Here’s a link to some great pictures of La Paz and a couple of Carnaval: http://tinyurl.com/nayoxmc

      It’s a bit insane here, kind of like Mardi Gras on steroids, or maybe a combination of Halloween, the 4^th of July and a really wild wedding reception… We have heard that Oruro is the place to be, and have been able to watch some of the festivities on TV at a couple of places today. We are there in spirit. Steph and Judith stay out of the kitchen on Tuesday. Brian and all of the men folk, I will be with you in spirit, and cooking pancakes for my ladies down here. Have some sausage for me!

La Paz ,

Jeff

English Department News

Greetings to all!

     Apparently prayers have been answered – it has stopped raining all day, every day, and just in time for Carnival! It is sunny to cloudy most days now, although it is still raining some of every night. It is the rainy season, after all. But the sunnier days are allowing things to dry out between rainstorms now, so the roads are MUCH better. Thanks be to God!

     Major changes have been in the air the past few weeks here at the UAC, both in staffing and in processes, so it has been a stressful start to the semester. Thankfully, things seem to be settling down a bit now, and the students and staff are finally able to settle into the work of the semester. It looks like I will end up with about 25 students in two classes, similar to last semester. We are still in need of some supplies, which I will shop for in La Paz next weekend, then I think we will be all settled.

     Our English department has been going through some changes as well, but we are on course now. We have decided to use an Earth stewardship theme for this semester, so our joint activities for all English students will be in that theme, and each class will do an Earth-themed project too. This allows us the opportunity to integrate cultural exchange conversations, community awareness activities and fun for the students. Watch for more about this as the semester progresses – I have already begun my first related unit as I am reading The Giving Tree by Shel Silverstein in English and Spanish to my classes, then they will have to do some analytical thinking about the themes in the book and the resulting commentary on the relationship between people and the natural environment. Other activities in my classes will include a couple of vocabulary and awareness-building nature walks in and around campus, an Earth-day skit for the whole upper campus, and more. Our first English club activity will be a movie night featuring Avatar, a movie with heavy environmental stewardship themes. If anyone out there has some ideas for activities, please share them, they would be very welcome.

     I should mention at this point that the stewardship theme will very much be an exchange of ideas, because there are some things that Bolivians do VERY well as far as respecting the environment, and we Americans certainly have some things to learn from them. There are also things that I have learned and will share with my students, too. The most fun will be watching them come up with their own solutions!

     I will leave you this time with a recipe that readers from last semester will recognize – this is the Bolivian version of banana bread. If you like it a little less sweet, or need a reduced-sugar recipe, this would be a good choice for you.

BOLIVAN BANANA CAKE (Queque de platano)

¼ cup or 100 grams butter

½ cup or 200 grams sugar

3 large eggs

1 teaspoon salt

¾ cup or 250 grams flour

2 teaspoons baking powder

3 ripe bananas, mashed

Preheat oven to 160 C or 320 F. Beat together butter and sugar until foamy, then add eggs and salt and mix well. Add baking powder and flour, mix well. Stir in mashed bananas and pour into a greased loaf pan. Bake for 1 hour, check with a toothpick, bake up to 15 minutes more until the toothpick checks clean.

     The last few days, it has rained in the early afternoon after being partly sunny in the morning. Today, it was so pleasant after my 2nd class was over at 1:45 that I left the door to our apartment open to welcome the breeze. Cookie was happily asleep on our bed, so I didn't need to worry about him running out. It sounded as though it was raining very hard, and I looked outside, but it was only sprinkling. Then, the rainstorm marched down the mountain and it started pouring very abruptly, sort of like the sudden downpour in a thunderstorm at home. Unusually, the wind was blowing the rain in the windows and onto the balcony. Bella, the pretty red-gold shepherd mix who had been napping on the welcome mat, appeared in the doorway with an obvious question on her face - could she come in out of the rain, please?

     Like all other dogs here, Bella is an outside dog, but her polite request was so sweet, we told her okay, and she tentatively stepped in a few feet. Thus began Cookie's education. The two of them spent the next 10 minutes alternately ignoring each other, sniffing along behind each other, and, finally, interacting. He snuck around under the table, batting at her tail as she passed by. She looked at him with great puzzlement, clearly thinking, "What are you, and why are you messing with my tail?" He continued to mess with her, seeming to push the limits of acceptable behavior, and she good-naturedly played along, poking her nose at him and snuffing, ducking in and out of his reach, like she'd lived indoors with a cat all her life. Sort of strange for an outside dog who lives where there are almost no cats (there are some in the village, but only one other here on the upper campus). Anyway, the rain began to let up, and she must have heard something outside, because she went rushing over to the doorway to look out, then stepped out. Cookie followed along behind, right on her tail, messing with her, and stopped in the doorway to glare at her when she left. It was so funny! If he had hands, they would have been on his hips as he shouted, "And STAY OUT!" Clearly, in Cookie's mind, dogs belong outside. Fortunately for him, Bella seems to agree.

     On the topic of maintenance, Jeff has some thoughts to share:

     Riding to Coroico the other day, I noticed a group of Bolivians hacking at the jungle to keep the sides of the road from encroaching the lanes. This happens about every 3 months. It is amazing how fast the jungle attempts to begin reclaiming what it believes still belongs to it. Sinom, our guide in the Amazon jungle had to hack his way through trails that his father taught him when he was little. He uses these paths anywhere from 2-8 times a week, every week, and still he must force back the jungle. Even though these people have been here for a VERY long time, the struggle to maintain their hard won infrastructure remains constant. The road to Coroico has had several large trees that have had to be cut up to clear the road. Several smaller trees just get run over until only splinters remain. The road had been taking a beating with all of the extra run-off from the rains. The road side has lost that battle in several places now. Bus drivers are staying to the cliff side as much as possible (sometimes too far!) and then ending up in the cliff side ditch. These slumps are taking half a lane or more from the already narrow road. Recently, we also have had a mud slide, resulting in another half lane loss. This mud slide was about 25 feet across, and about 2 feet deep. It wouldn't necessarily throw your car off the cliff, but it could ruin your whole day.

     I will close for now with a request. I would ask that each of you keep the people of Bolivia in your prayers. With the flooding and mudslides in Rurrenabaque, and the heavy rains washing mountain roads away all over Bolivia, many people are dead, and many more still missing. Pray that we get only the rain we need to sustain the people and economy, and no more.

La Paz to all! 

Fiesta de Las Alasitas, Las Cascadas and Registration

     Our friends and neighbors here on upper campus had one last blast before school started… we all loaded up the kids and went to Coroico for Las Alasitas – the Aymara festival of miniatures, where they all buy tiny reproductions of what they want for the year, then take them and make little shrine to the good-luck god, Ekeko. After the fiesta, we went to the waterfalls (Las Cascadas), two of which are large enough that they have cemented in the pools at the bottoms for swimming (and to prevent the road from eroding away!) See our photos for some great shots!

     This week, first semester classes started here at the UAC. This is quite the production, as I’m sure you can imagine. Carmen Pampa is a tiny speck of a village, and Coroico is not all that big either (about 5,000 people). The crowd that descends on the area for registration weekend is truly an awesome sight. Many parents come along, and you will see pictures of some whole families if you follow the link to this week’s photos. http://tinyurl.com/p3wnlhj

     Never mind the traffic! At one point over the weekend, Jeff and I observed with amusement while about 25 people tried to get into a microbus headed back to Coroico. The bus had come from the village below, so there were already probably a dozen people on it. Here’s the fun part: these are 15-passenger vans with a luggage rack on top and a little extra space behind the front seats because that’s where the edge of the engine compartment is. It was like watching clowns crowd into a Volkswagen!

     This time our job at registration was to check-in the students. There is a behavior covenant they had to sign, then more paperwork if they were new, or a check-off form to take along to the next station for existing students. This means we got to see the face of every student who registered. We really enjoyed the chance to meet all of them, even though the place got pretty crowded a few times. We just kept our heads and worked the best we could. It was a lot of fun! I wish we could be here for that weekend every semester.

     So, a new semester means new classes, and lots of new faces and names to learn. My two classes are both English 1 this time, so they have a few words they have picked up here and there, but for the most part they are brand new. Most of my students this semester are in their third year of studies, although there a few who have been here more or less. Both classes meet during the 11am – 2pm lunch break, and we may end up combining them once the registration finalizes next week. Currently there are about 22 students total, so one class would be manageable, and it would allow us to do some things that the two classes are too small to do alone (for example, maybe another baseball game project??) We will have to see how it all shakes out. New this semester is a survey that I have given to all of my students to fill out. It asks them in English and Spanish about their home and family, what they are studying, what they would like to learn this semester, the ways they learn best, other ways they have learned English (if they have), etc. I am very much looking forward to reading these and getting some insight into my students much earlier in the semester than last time. (Last time I was halfway through the semester before the interviews where I learned more about my students than what I had learned in the classroom. The good news is that they had enough English by then to tell me all about themselves in English!)

     We have not yet made the trip to La Paz for school supplies and to finish up the tool shopping from the collection the St. Andrew’s Godly Play kids gathered in December, so if anyone would like to contribute to the fund for notebook paper, poster supplies, Scotch tape, and a new music player/USB drives for the upper campus, we (and the students) would certainly be appreciative. Thanks in advance to anyone who can do that.

     Jeff has taken a LOT of pictures of the flora here. We don’t know what most of them are, so if you do, comment on our blog and then everyone can know! http://tinyurl.com/p3wnlhj

     I will leave you this week with my kitchen-tested recipe for one of our favorite Bolivian foods: chicken salad sandwiches! Chicken salad is VERY different here, and so is bread. For an authentic sandwich, buy a big (Quarter-Pounder-sized) hamburger bun and squash it a bit and let it dry out so it’s a slight bit stale, then layer about ¼ cup or so of the salad inside the cold bun while the salad is still warm from the stove. Betcha can’t eat just one!

Blessings,

Susan, Jeff and Delaney

Bolivian Chicken Salad for Sandwiches

2 cups leftover roasted chicken, preferably white, shredded small (de-boned, but a little skin is OK)

4-6 medium carrots, peeled and grated (use the ¼” side of your box grater)

1 medium yellow onion, peeled and grated (use the ¼” side of your box grater)

2 large garlic cloves, minced

OPTIONAL: 2 small beets or 1 medium, also peeled, grated ¼” WARNING: SALAD WILL BE RED/ORANGE

1T chicken bouillion granules + 2 cups water OR 2 cups homemade chicken broth

¼ cup canola/soya oil

Salt to taste

Combine chicken, carrots, onion, garlic and beets (if using) in a large saucepan with water/bouillion or broth. Bring to a boil and simmer, stirring occasionally, 10 minutes or until all veggies are soft. Remove from heat, drain. (I save this flavorful broth to make yummy rice later in the week. It will keep for 7-10 days in the fridge if well-sealed.) Return drained mixture to saucepan, add oil, and heat to medium. Saute 5-10 minutes until mixture is a little drier and more separated. Remove from heat, salt to taste. Serve immediately on a sturdy bun or toasted slices of French or Italian bread.

Add-ons:

Toasted sunflower nuts

Melted cheddar cheese on the toast (doesn’t work so well with the bun!)

Fresh-ground pepper

Rings of uncooked sweet bell pepper, one per sandwich

Our trip to the Bolivian Amazon and the end of summer break

     In the last couple of weeks, we have seen many wondrous things, and learned some too! First, if your windshield is fogging up and your defroster isn’t working, put shampoo on a damp cloth and wipe down the window. A spot the size of a quarter will do the trick, and it lasts more than 3 hours! We learned this when we were heading to La Paz to go see Tiwanaku, the pre-Incan temple site on the Altiplano. These ruins are not as old as were originally thought when Susan and Jeff saw it the first time. We were told 13 years ago that they were maybe 20,000 years old. Recent theory now puts them at around 5,000 years old. The excavation at this site has now exposed more of the pyramid, and even more artifacts. We took a BUNCH of pictures, so be sure and look at the picture album! (Click on this link or copy and paste into your browser’s address bar:  http://tinyurl.com/p2pvjhl Double-click on the first photo on the top left to see a click-through slideshow. Captions will be to the right.) One photo that sticks in my mind is the one that shows a dirt altar in the middle of the raised temple. The reason this is memorable that I didn’t know that the Aymara people still use the site for their holy days. The picture shows ashes on the altar from their Summer Solstice ceremony held in December. We also learned that Delaney enjoys mocking 5,000 year old stone faces! Really don’t know where she gets her sense of humor…

     Our trip to the Bolivian Amazon earlier this month was definitely a QBE. Let us start by thanking the people of St. Andrew’s Episcopal Church in Waverly, Iowa, for sending us on the trip of a lifetime. The three of us started our journey in a cab to Yolosita. Yolosita is the town that sprung up at the intersection of the existing valley floor road and the new road from La Paz. This is where you can catch the bus that continues onto Caranavi, and beyond. We were informed that the trip was around 16 hours. If the trip had gone according to plan, it would have been right on the money. Unfortunately, first, the bus was over an hour late, then we experienced an two-hour traffic delay 10 minutes into the trip, an hour delay for a flat tire 6 hours into the trip, and an over 3 hour delay due to a bad detour onto a one lane road that resulted in getting stuck twice. When we finally pulled into Rurrenabaque, we were more than 6 hours later than planned and had missed our tour departure. Luckily, they allowed us to go the next day (they didn’t have to!) The next morning, we were on time and saw us arriving on the banks of the Beni River to begin our Amazon adventure! We met the crew and loaded onto the 30 foot canoe to head up river to the camp. Along the way we saw towns and villages near the river and children playing along the banks. Canoes similar to ours were pulled up in front of thatched huts or trailheads, just like we would park our car in our driveway. We also saw families headed to town in their boats, presumably for market day. Some boats were heavily loaded with freshly cut bananas and/or plantains.

     An hour into our trip upstream, we entered Madidi National Park, the largest protected area in the Amazon.  We saw a stow away lizard, several macaws (red parrots), a caiman (alligator), a capybara (a type of rodent similar in looks to a small furry hippo), and some truly awesome scenery. Please check out our photos here: http://tinyurl.com/p2pvjhl

     Two hours farther upstream, after following a smaller tributary river for a while, our canoe pulled up to a half-submerged sandbar, we jumped out into shallow (piranha-infested!) water, grabbed our gear, and followed our boatman on a 30-minute hike into the jungle to our camp. Our feet received a lovely spa treatment courtesy of the warm, knee-deep mud that greeted us at every low spot on the trail. Suddenly our guide’s bare feet made sense, and after the first mudhole, we followed suit, slopping through the goop in bare feet, covered in slippery red mud. It was DEFINITELY an experience to remember!

     Once we arrived at our camp, we cleaned up while the camp cook fixed a totally excellent lunch, then we all rested for a while. Later that afternoon, we went on a 45-minute hike across the jungle to a nice deep fishing hole, where Jeff caught the first, and largest, red piranha of the day! Many fairly large sardines were caught by members of the group, plus a few smaller yellow piranhas. Our guide tossed them all in his pack and hauled them home for supper. They were delicious, gutted with the heads and skins still on and gently fried. YUM! Our cook was no slacker, all the food she prepared us was absolutely delicious. On the way home, we stopped and watched the troop of capuchin monkeys that was following us through the canopy. It was dusk, so none of our pictures came out very well, sadly, but there were at least a dozen of them, and we could clearly see and hear them, even if the cameras could not!

     That night, it rained all night, but we were snug as a bug in a rug in our thatched, stilted hut. J

In the morning, it was still raining. We all decided to go shoeless, as the camp was now a muddy, puddly swamp. It was warm, so this wasn’t as unpleasant as it sounds! At breakfast, we decided, with our guide, that it was too muddy to go out into the jungle, so we would take a break and just hang out for the morning. This was nice, as we all sat and chatted in the dining cabin for awhile, then napped or read in our sleeping cabin until lunch. After lunch, it was still raining. So, we all went over to the cabin with a front porch, and made jungle-based jewelry from nuts, dried berries, some cotton string and some nifty weaving and knots that our guide showed us. His name was Sinom, by the way, and we really got to know him much better during our jewelry-making. He had a wonderful sense of humor, and took great delight in Delaney, giving her a hard time and spoiling her rotten. She bought right into it and was a good sport, and it was obvious she liked Sinom, too. She kept bugging him about wanting to go swimming, and it finally stopped raining while we were working away on necklaces, so he caved in and we all changed into swimsuits and hiked off to the swimming hole. (Or, actually, just the wide area in the stream under the log bridge of the trail out to the river. Whatever. It was fun! There were sardines and tiny piranhas swimming too, and they kept nibbling on us as we swam. It tickled, but they weren’t big enough to actually bite us!) Then we had supper, and decided not to go on a night hike because it was still too wet and dangerously slippery to go out in the dark. On the way back to our cabins, Sinom showed us the tarantula that lives in the tree in the middle of camp (he’s nocturnal, so we had to wait till after dark to see him hanging out, looking for his breakfast), and then he stopped stock-still in surprise as we passed an old stump, also in the middle of camp, and he saw a snake wriggling in there. It turned out to be a poisonous one, and so he sent us skittering off to our cabin with unhappy thoughts about the fact that we were barefoot! LOL! Jeff got some good pictures after he slipped his shoes on and he and Sinom went back over to take a better look.

      The morning of our third day was sunny and hot and we took off after breakfast for a three-hour hike. It turned into four hours, though no one minded because we got onto the trail of a herd of wild boar after only about 15 minutes, and we followed them into the jungle for a couple of hours before they circled back around to within only about 200 yards of our camp! A few times, we were so close we were able to see them clearly, although their stench carried for probably a quarter mile through even the thickest vegetation. Ugh! Seeing them up close, and then spotting the troop of howler monkeys on the way back in, three hours of slogging through the mud, water, bugs, and another poisonous snake (we were wearing shoes this time!!), plus Sinom having to hack his way into the bush with a machete, made for a completely authentic and satisfying trip to the Amazon jungle. It was awesome!

      We had lunch, slogged back out to the river landing barefoot (having learned by now to carry our shoes over the knee-deep mudholes), loaded up, and zoomed down the now rain-swollen river back to Rurrenabaque, where our hostal had not reserved our room, but the tour operator , who could not have been more helpful, got us great rooms in another hostal and free passes to the swimming pool at the first one (it’s the only one in town during the rainy season, and they have a tame parrot named Polly and a tame toucan named Tuki), so we relaxed poolside. We had a nice dinner, played some pool, and collapsed in our beds for the night.

     Our bus trip home was uneventful, and 8 hours shorter. It did NOT include the detour, and it didn’t really rain most of the way, which helped a lot.

We have more to share with you all about things that have happened since we returned. All of us got back sick, of course. Summer colds suck in the jungle, too! Jeff went to La Paz, and got stuck there. He spent the entire night vomiting, then had to wait on a street corner with a shoe-shine boy for company, while we figured how to get him home. Thanks to the angel who rescued him!!  Good times!

      This coming week is the last week of break before registration on Saturday, February 1. Those of you who feel moved to donate for school supplies, they will be needed again soon. Susan has a faculty meeting in La Paz this Tuesday, so she could do some shopping then. Jeff will be along as well, doing some research for his design to remodel the upper campus library. Needs for students/classes include notebook paper, poster-making supplies like colored paper and markers, white-board markers, Post-it pages, and a new CD/USB music player for the upper campus, plus at least one flash drive. Total funds needed should be about $25. Since the English department does not have funds now, Susan will also need to pay for copies, so if anyone is interested in starting a copier fund, it cost roughly $30 last semester to make all the copies needed (many of the activities in the textbook are reproducible activity sheets).

     Finally, we have begun exploring our trip home. As many of you know, when we purchased our round-trip tickets last May, we could only purchase them out through mid-April, even though we need to stay until at least June 17. So, we will have to pay a $230 fee per ticket to change them, plus whatever the difference in airfare is. Right now, the total for the three of us is around $1400, although we will be working to find the same sort of great deal that got us here, so it may be less when the time comes. We have about three months to get that organized, but we thought it might be good to let everyone know that now, in case anyone has any ability to help with that. Much as we love it here, we do want to come home, so getting our tickets changed will be an important focus in the coming weeks.

     For now, we love you all, we miss you all, and we will be praying for you all. Please pray for us, too! J

Blessings,

The Cornforths

Happy New Year!!

Hi everyone!

We hope you are all having a wonderful new year, and that your holidays were delightful. We will be thinking of our St. Andrew's family as we have our Epiphany celebration Sunday evening.

Our New Year's celebration was a lot of fun. Jeff and I went into Coroico to get some last-minute groceries and we kept seeing bright red, yellow and pink underwear for sale EVERYWHERE. We later learned that these are traditional for luck - for luck, wealth and love in the new year. Also, we saw many people we knew in town, and they clued us in that it is traditional to eat pork, so we bought some pork chops for our dinner, a luxury in which we do not usually indulge (they are quite expensive and very fatty here). It was nice to have a treat!

We also bought some small fireworks to set off at midnight (fireworks are part of EVERY celebration here, so at least some noisemakers are sort of obligatory). We had some 3-snap firecrackers, bumblebees and small bottle rockets, which all three of us enjoyed immensely. The campus dogs, not so much...

Jeff made some homemade Bailey's, so we toasted the new year with that over ice, and ate some dark chocolate to top the evening off. By the way, it was a balmy 65 degrees or so, and every star in the sky was out at midnight when we went outside to set of our fireworks. It was very pleasant not to have to bundle up!

This weekend we are in La Paz for two reasons. Today, we went to Tiwanaku, the ancient pre-Incan religious site out on the Altiplano. Here is a link to our Facebook Photo Album:

Tiwanaku Photo Album

It was a nice day -- the Altiplano is at over 12,000 feet, so it is cold and rainy there most of the time (especially in the rainy season, as we are right now), and when the sun is out you burn VERY fast because of the thin air. Today it was cloudy and about 60 degrees - very pleasant and no sunburn!

Tomorrow we will head to the market in El Alto -- this is the HUGE outdoor market we told you about a couple of months ago. It is one of the largest in the world, and is the perfect place for us to find a few items we need for our trip to the Amazon jungle coming up on Wednesday.