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.