Bicentennial

Tuesday was the bicentennial of Cochabamba! It was pretty cool. I didn't have class, there was a military parade, all sorts of music in the city - a lot of stuff happened over the weekend for it too (like a chocolate festival). Unfortunately I had a fever on Saturday and Sunday so I wasn't able to partake in said events much.

Another cool thing to happen this week: SIT took us to a small town outside of Cochabamba called Tarata - beautiful, peaceful place. While there, we talked to an 85 year-old man who maintains a large and gorgeous farm (with an amazing house as well). He's 6 feet tall, and is still able to do some manual labor even though he's 85! One of the interesting ideas he mentioned was that, as people have urbanized in Bolivia, they have forgotten the type of intelligence that comes along with working in the field. He said that there is an emotional, irrational connection that people develop with nature when they cultivate the fields, which involves a different type of intelligence - an ability to instinctively understand and react to nature. Along with this comes an appreciation for nature - something which many Bolivians have lost, he believes. (Or at least this is what my friend and I gathered from the Spanish we understood.)

My host mom and sister have begun to teach me the Charanga! It's a small, ukulele-type instrument, except it's double-stringed, 10 strings in all.

Another cool thing about my program: one of the academic directors on my program is also a documentary film maker, so one of the perks of my program is that, instead of writing papers, I can experiment with making videos, which has been pretty fun so far. On Sunday I'm leaving on a 10-day trip to La Paz and to do a rural village home-stay, so hopefully I can get some good video down while I'm there!

Tonight is Yom Kippur, so I will be going to services - I'll try and get a quick post tomorrow in describing what it's like going to services here.

And finally, a yo mama compliment! Some of you may know what this is, some of you may not. They're pretty much what you think - an adaptation of "yo mama" jokes in a way that compliments mothers instead. So, for instance:

Yo mama's so sweet, she gave me cavities in all of my teeth the first time I met her.

Abrazos!