Sucre- la primera semana

Just finished my first week of classes here in Sucre. It´s a terrific place to study! The town is a good size, not too big or too small- about 200,000 people. It is a colonial city and the controversial capital of Bolivia (Evo wants to move it to La Paz and two of the branches of government are currently located there, but to anyone from Sucre, this is still the capital...). There are loads of lovely churches and museums and everything in the town is white, hence the nickname "The White City". Sucre is at 2700 meters so not as high as La Paz and Copacabana but still decent elevation. The weather is moderate year round so even though it is winter we have sunny afternoons where t-shirts are fine, but then you have to bundle up a bit at night. I´m really enjoying my time here.

I arrived on Sunday morning and wandered around for an hour looking for a hostel. I spent the day just kind of making my way through town and later met a couple of Irish guys to have dinner and drinks with. Monday morning I started classes. I´m attending the Bolivian Spanish School which is right on a park about a 10 minute walk from my hostel. I am doing 4 hours of one on one classes 5 days a week from 8:30 to 12:30. We have a break at 10:30 and on Monday a group of us went out for salteñas (similar to empanadas) during the break which was a good way to meet some other students and teachers. After class my first day, the head of the school told me that I was more advanced than they had anticipated and they wanted to switch me to a teacher with more experience with students at my level. Unfortunately that would only be possible if I switched classes to 2:30 to 6:30 which I didn´t want to do. So next week I am switching teachers. My teacher this week, Ana, was fine though. I kind of told her what I wanted to work on and she´d put together lessons and we did a lot of conversing and some excursions. But I am hoping to really improve a lot more after next week. I guess we´ll see.

The excursions I went on with the school were to the local cemetary and to a castle south of the city. The cemetary is gorgeous. Loads of trees and flowers and huge, marble masoleums. At least for the rich. The poor are buried in the back in graves marked with simple wooden crosses and apparently the people can only afford to rent the graves. So, after a year or two, the bodies are dug up and moved and new ones put in. I´m not exactly sure where the bodies go when they are moved... Former presidents of Bolivia and many of the famous martyrs are buried in the cemetary as well. The castle is called "La Glorieta" and was built by a former prince who adopted like 40 orphans (ha and his wife had no children of their own). It was another interesting excursion.

Yesterday after classes, I went with another student, Tim, to see the Dinosaur Park. We took the local transport up instead of the tourist bus which was much more intereting and a whole lot less expensive. A cement company in Bolivia unearthed the world´s largest area of dinosaur tracks here back in the 1990´s. There are over 5000 tracks including the world´s largest single track which is more than 350 meters long. The tracks were made on flat ground but with the movement of the plates, it has become a wall on the side of a mountain (vertical). The park has an overlook so you can see the wall and also displays models, a skeleton and molds of the tracks of the different types of dinosaurs. It was pretty fascinating in my opinion.

Yesterday night, Tim and I met up with Stephen, Michael and Makala (also from school) to go watch a local futbol (soccer) match. It was fun to go, but the locals were not really into it which was somewhat surprising for Latin America. There was one group of erious fans at the end of the field that sang, danced and cheered the entire game and sporadically set off fireworks. So they were fun to watch. The local team, Universitario, won 1-0.

Tonight the students are getting together at the school for dinner and drinks and Sunday a group of us are going to a local market town. Good times all around!
More next week.