Cool Infrastructure Evo

Ok. While we're being honest with each other, Laura came up with that blog title. Currently, I'm too lazy to think of something clever. I was going to use, "A Landslide Epidemic Has Hit Bolivia" but we really only got stuck on the outskirts of the aftermath of one landslide and saw about 4.5 paint buckets worth of mud slide down the side of a pretty small hill so....I just felt it was a bit of an exaggeration.

Here's what's not an exaggeration: Laura and my's frustration levels hit maximum Tuesday night during our overnight bus ride from Sucre to Cochabamba. I don't even know where to begin....I could start with the ever present B.O. (body odor, for those unaccustomed to acronyms) or the fact that NOTHING WORKS LIKE IT SHOULD! BAAAAAAH! On the real, Bolivia's awesome but if another unaddressed landslide causes a 17 bus backup for 3.5 hours I will lose it. Get Nextel walkie talkie's, report the slide and get that ish handled. There is no reason we should all be festering, sans information about the situation, for hours in the middle of the night watching the mountains slowly collapsing around us. Rant done.

After the initial terror of unstable hills sliding down around us, the terrain flattened out and we headed into the valleys of Cochabamba and slept for the rest of the bus ride. When we awoke, we were in a city that looked shockingly similar to Fife, WA. We checked into the nastiest hostel on accident. The beds were not....temperpedic, per say. Nor were they as comfortable as the llama hair mattresses we slept on in the mountains of southern Bolivia. They were in fact, super old, thin and covered in boogers and semen. Sorry family and grown up friends, but that is the factual truth. And I'm not talking a Hartung Fact, for those of you familiar with the overconfident, underverified statements made by some members of the Hartung family...

Anyhoo, Cochabamba has turned out to be pretty fun! We took a sweet Gondola up to see the Christo of Chochabamba our fisrt day. After that everything was pretty much closed for New Year's weekend so we just chilled, learned about spiritual/supersticious burnings to ward off evil spirits in the new year aaaaaaand watched a lot of Pixar films geared towards 11 year olds. All in all a success!

I take that back. Laura lost her jacket to the sheistyness of two Colombian hood rats who didn't have the moral wearwithall to return her accidentally-left-in-haste-to-leave-the-grossest-hostel-ever NorthFace jacket and sweatshirt to the front desk of that stupid hostel. This recent situation has been the breaking point of our tolerance with 3rd world countries. I'm sure tomorrow, we'll wake up and be sunnyside up, but for tonight we are tired of no toilet paper, no drainage systems, people who aren't aware of other people on the sidewalks, food that causes momentary tasteful bliss and then diarrhea and dumbass teenagers and stray dogs running rampant in the streets. Here's what I'm not tired of: Tupak on the radio at this restaurant. This is awesome.