Day 3

I am now realizing the difficulty of trying to update this blog everyday without having my own computer!!! I Think we may try writing every 3 days. :)

Ok, so the first day in La Paz was pretty uneventful... We were pretty jet lagged and exhausted so we slept the rest of the day. As far as our first impression of Bolivia, it is like an entirely different planet!!! The city itself is positioned inside a sort of crater in the andes mountains. You see these multi-colored mountains on each side with extremely jagged cliffs. The city serves as a sharp contrast to the beauty of the mountains with it´s crumbling and decrepid homes. It´s hard to imagine how poor people are here without seeing it for yourself. On the other hand, we reached my family´s area in town and saw the polar opposite in wealth. Cleaner areas nice places, maids etc.

Brandy and I spent yesterday trying to take it easy and aclimate to the altitude... we feel like 90 year old asthma/COPD patients! (as you can see by the previous abreviations, brandy getting geeked with medical jargon). She is even having trouble breathing while sleeping! Altitude is around 1,200 feet at the lower points of the city and 1,500 feet at the higher points. We toured a bunch of the city yesterday. The city has progressed a great deal in the past 8 years since I´ve been here... they now have a dozen street lights, and only a few of them are manually operated by police officers! :) I´m proud to report we were booted from our first place yesterday! We were asked to leave this old church in the center of town after taking a picture of a guard who was sleeping on the job (should have turned off the flash). I´m going to blame brandy for this one! (whatever paulie ... you are the photographer .. by brandy)

One of Brandy´s highlights so far is probably having lunch with some relatives of mine. The whole family gets together every day from 12-2pm for lunch, where a three course meal is prepared by the maid. Don´t think she has ever experienced that. I know that it sucks that maids don´t make very much for all the work they do, but I have to admit... it´s really nice! In all, my family has been amazing!

Today we will tour around a bit more and prep for our trip tomorrow to Cuzco Peru. We will be taking a bus to a city on Lake Titicaca (the largest navigable lake in the world with the worlds funniest name!). From there we will catch a glorified bus (minivan) to another city on the border called Puno. And finally to Cuzco. We will try to write in a few days when we arrive in Cuzco.