8 days a week...

right now, i´m sitting in an internet cafe in santa cruz, bolivia with 7 hours ahead of me, waiting for my next bus to the border of bolivia and brasil that will take no less than 16-18hrs. it´s hot. the kid playing video games next to me is humming like a racecar. i think he just crashed. it´s humid. i´m sweating. i must smell like a peach....

last night, i grabbed the bus from la paz, bolivia. it took 16hrs to swivel down from the high altitude to this more tropical side of the country. at hour 12, the bus became so hot, humid, and wet (it´s pouring outside...and so, subsequently, its also pouring all over my entire right side, of course it ís, why wouldn´t it be??), that i considered letting the indigenous woman sleeping in the aisle have my seat. (i´m such a generous person... wait until the seat is a proper puddle THEN offer it up. better late than never??) i peered over luisa, the teacher who just got separated from her husband of 10 years because she wants to switch jobs but her husband thinks she´s cheating on him´(???), so they had to separate b/c he was getting increasingly more loco - (all told to me in spanish) snoring softly next to me, and lightly tapped the woman wearing her customary top hat (which acording to luisa, helps to keep the grey hairs away) but she only rolled over slightly and ignored me. her colorful sack of goods crackled under her weight. i sat back in my soggy seat. drip, drip, drip. this is not helping the fried onion smell that is permeating the bus. it´s like soggy fried onions mixed with vinegar. drip, drip, drip.... only 4 more hours to go...

2 nights ago i was on a boat returning from the isla del sol on lake titicaca. yes, that´s the real name of it. lake titicaca. where if you try and take a dip in the lake, you will freeze your titi and your caca off. it´s the highest altitude inhabitated lake in the world. it´s breath-takingly, literally, gorgeous. the clouds are so close you can practically pick some off, eat it and let it melt in your mouth like cotton candy.

3 nights ago i found myself dancing in the streets of puno, peru with HUNDEREDS of electric and eclectic groups of costumed dancers from fuzzy white bears, to sparkly-space cadet soldiers, to vegas-style-feathered mistresses... it was a rainy mess, but that didn´t stop them from celebrating until the wee hours of the night, drunkenly stumbling with half their costumes hanging off their bodies like an over-stuffed coat rack. it is a very strange sight to have an enebriated half fuzzy, now brown bear almost fall on top of you in the middle of a cobblestone street. very strange. and yet, at 8am the band struck up that same ól tune again, and there they went stomping through the puddles towards the cathedral to offer up their dance in prayer and celebration.

4 nights ago i found myself huffing and puffing up the steep alleyways of the witches market in la paz, bolivia staring at dried llama fetuses on sale. dried. llama. fetuses. apparantly, if you bury it in the ground in front of your house, it wards off evil spirits or brings good luck to your house and family. um, okay.

5 nights ago i found myself dancing with local bolivians to both traditional music and their version of dance-club hip-hop cumbia cumbia.... to be honest, the moves were the same. the music just changed frantically.

6 nights ago i found myself in sucre, bolivia dodging pre-carnaval water balloons thrown by adolescent boys that would ear-graze passed my head in whizzing speed in the center square where the indigenous people were holding a protest in front of the government house. ear-splitting booming dynamite was going off every 20 minutes or so to call all the villages together to protest. i watched as a man tried to cross the protest line on his scooter and he was literally pushed and pulled OFF his scooter and onto the ground. within moments he was hovered by the angry shouting protesters. a friend told me that a bus recently crossed a protest line in bolivia and the driver was dragged out and beaten, and some of the passengers hurt too. you just don´t cross protest lines in bolivia. the passion and need to be heard is both staggering... and humbling. some might find it scary, but i find it rather intriguing. when a friend educated me a bit on the plight of the indigenous people, it gave me goosebumps and filled me with compassion. so much history. so much oppression. then i got tagged by a red waterballon on my left leg. score.

7 nights ago i found myself on a yet another bus from uyuni, bolivia to sucre with a new friend who decided that i was going to be his human pillow for the entirety of the 9 hour trip. really, dude? really? YOUR space... MY space.... but i forgave him his ´´too quick to cuddle´´ ways as he DID help to stop the bus when i couldn´t get to my backpack because the travel agency had locked it away and decided to disappear for an hour as i waited, sweating bullets, outside. wouldn´t you know it, just as the bus took off, the lady came slowly waddling down the street. ´´no understanding of personal space´´ guy ran and stopped the bus for us. so i guess it´s okay that he crushed my lungs for a good 5 hours... only to have to transfer from bus to sedan ´´taxi´´ car at 1:30AM for another 3 hours with his head rolling back and forth on my left shoulder and the backside of the old bolivian man´s hand tapping on my right thigh to music so blaringly LOUD that i felt like i was going to throw up from the pounding bass. i didn´t have the nerve to ask the driver to turn it down for fear he would fall asleep at the wheel and drive us straight off the cliff into the deep, grey mining town of potosi.

8 days ago i found myself dancing in the otherworldly, blank white canvas of the salar de uyuni in bolivia... where the sky and the ground is such a pure white that you can´t distinguish between where the ground ends and the sky starts... there are no words, metaphors, analogies to describe the incomprehensible feeling and beauty of this place... so i grabbed my ipod... ran towards that blank bleak beautiful canvas and just started to DANCE DANCE DANCE... WAAAAHOOOOOO!!!! painting it with my breath.... my smiles, my laughter... after a good thirty minutes of this... i turned to the sun, did 3 sun salutations to give gratitude for my family, my friends, and my life... thank you, thank you, thank you.... then i skipped my way all the way back to the jeep.

ready to paint my life along....