After a good 12 hours of sleep, we we’re
all ready to do some more exploring in La Paz. We woke up with the sound of
fireworks exploding. We later realized it was a continuation of the miner’s
protest that has been going on now for about 3 weeks. Apparently, very few
stores open before 10AM, so we couldn’t really go to any of the markets. No
worries, because Gabe was on his way to meet us for breakfast number 2. We ate
saltañas, which are basically like hot beef pot pies, but you can eat them with
your hands. Very delicious. And we drank Fanta! The Fanta here uses real sugar,
so it has a different kind of pleasant sweetness to it.
Walking in the Plaza de San Francisco
The empty markets
Una salteña de carne! Es muy deliciosa
Afterwards, we continued our city
exploration and browsed through different vendors. Things we saw were textiles
(super colorful, like the rainbow woven all together into pants, tapestry,
wallets, and much more), charangas (small, high pitched guitars), and lots and
lots of llama fetuses. Eeeks! We made our way over to a quaint colonial street
called Calle Jaen. It was a lot less populated and was filled with artisan
shops. Our main goal was to go to a folklore and ethnography museum, but it was
closed at that time. Instead, we went to a museum showcasing the musical instruments of Bolivia. It was an absolute blast since
we got to play with some of their instruments. The folklore and ethnography
museum was a very nice and modern display of Bolivia’s history.
A local shop owner showing off her 100% alpaca textiles
Calle Jaen - A restored colonial era street with many artisan shops
Grabbing lunch on Calle Jaen
A display of drums and Ben playing an interesting combination of washtub bass and bass drum
Ben and Wes exploring the musical instrumet displays
The group posing in the museum´s premier Charanga concert hall
The main entrance to the ethnography museum, located in a restored colonial house
By this time, we were all pretty much
exhausted and ready to sleep. After resting for a bit, Gabe brought us to a
nice local Bolivian restaurant for dinner where we had lots of meat. The
serving size was huge that it could feed three people rather than one! We
finished off the day with a nice game of cards and rested for our road trip to
Cochabamba the following morning.
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