Summertime and the livin´easy… sort of

So when I was writing this last week the power went out when I was at the internet cafe so the first part of this was last week.

Well yesterday (last Saturday) was the last day of Carnaval. Most of the other trainees went into Cochabamba to watch the cursos de curso (a huge parade) and they were massacred with globos, espuma and others while I was bed ridden with food posioning all day. Today I definitly feel a lot better but man does that take a toll on your body. Anyways, I finally moved in with my host family. They are Don Augustin, Doña Bertha, Cezar 16, Lezet 15, and Maribel 12. They are definitly and good group of people to be living with. Bertha definitly was worried yesterday when I was sick. Bolivians in general are very giving people you never have an empty glass when you are at the table. They are constently filling my glass up and overfeeding me which in Bolivia is a sign of love. The food is pretty much always the same. For breakfast we have bread with either butter or jam and some warm drink. The classic is called abana with is basically oat water with a ton of sugar in it. For lunch and dinner we always eat a ton of potatoes and rice. Lunch is always some sort of soup with the usual and then dinner comes along with a nice slab of meat on the side. I think every piece of meat that I have ate has been fried… they love cooking everything in lots and lots of oil. My house that I live in is actually pretty nice. It has a flushing toliet and a shower. This sounds great but when the water only runs for about half the day it is not the handy, especially when you are consistanly running to the toliet with food poisioning. One interesting thing is, that our kitchen is separte from the rest of the house and we always eat outside. They have a huge super nice table inside the house that seats about 15 people but they never use it. Instead they opt for an old table on a dirt floor outside.

It is actually pretty nice because it has been hot here. It rained for the first couple of days here and then just sun and more sun. With the higher elevation people are getting burned pretty easy… but it is definitly a nice change from the snow back home. My family has cows, chickens, ducks, pigs, dogs, cats and a whole bunch of fruits including a polmogrante, peach, mandarine orange and lemon trees. They also have a ton of vegtables that they go into the city and sell. The other day we went out to cut some cabbage for the market and someone had stolen some of them. My host mom was definitly pissed to say the least. Training is going alright. I have classes from 8:30 to 6 at night with an hour and half lunch. Half of the day is all Spanish class and the other is technical training. Hope all is well with everyone.

Finally doing it…in Bolivia.

So I decided to start a blog…obviously. Well to start off I don’t know how much I will update my blog so don’t expect much but at least this is an attempt to stay in touch with people. Well for those of you who don’t know, I left for Washington D.C. on January 26th for the Peace Corps Bolivia staging event. Basically, this is just a way to get oriented with Peace Corps a little more and meet all the people who are part of B-47 (47th group in Bolivia). We are a pretty diverse group from all around the States. It is pretty talented group who all have amazing backgrounds. There was 32 people in the group to start but we already had one person leave before we left D.C., so now we are 31 strong. Of those people there are 15 in ag. extension and agribusiness and 16 in the natural resources and environmental education group. In the agriculture group there is only one other person doing agribusiness group. After D.C. we made our way to La Paz via Miami. La Paz is the worlds highest capital city in the world at 13,169 ft so altitude sickness can definitely be a problem. Our group was fine but you can definitely feel the effects of less oxygen at that level. For the last few days we have just been plugging way at training and doing various interviews for host family, job, language, and health. They pretty much have our day planned out for us throughout our three months of training. Our training consists safety, culture, language and technical garb to name a few. Tomorrow I will meet my host family for the first time… hijola! Some of you may wonder what I have been eating. The food here is actually pretty good. They love their soups and big lunches. Today for lunch we had a soup which consisted of a mushroom soup base with french fries floating around… definitely weird. Then the main meal of fried chicken, rice, carrot type salad and a slice of cake. Right now is the carnaval season (think Brazil and Mardi Gras). This is basically a time when people do a bunch of sinning before lent. This consists of big parties in the streets and throwing water balloons at people on the streets, some times these are filled with water and other times less desirable things like urine and ink. They also throw buckets of water on people and yesterday we saw people drop buckets of water from four stories up dousing the people on the sidewalks below. It was definitely funny to watch. I have been taking more mental pictures than anything else but I will try and attach a few that I have. If you guys have any questions feel free to ask them on here. If they are more personal, e-mail me I will try and answer them as quick as I can.