Well, we’re here for 4 weeks already and we are getting used to everything. No more illness, we have find out where you can eat nice dishes, ranging from chicken tandoori in one place to gnocchi with nice roquefort or tomato sauce at another place. We have also learned that we can better not order a lasagna and when you are at the market and you ask if the bread is freshly baked and they say yes, that you can still get a bread which has the structure of concrete. Fortunately we have solved that particular little problem because we have discovered a very good bakery from a French guy. He makes delicious croissants, fresh small breads with apple, cheese or sesame seeds on it. It is freshly baked and you can smell the bread on the street already. That means that the bread is of such a good quality that we turn to our old Dutch habits again; eating bread twice a day instead of the Bolivian way of eating two or three warm meals a day.
The juices are delicious and very cheap. For 0,80-1,40 euro we can sit at a market stall and drink half a liter each of orange/ banana/ papaya/ kiwi or other fruit of the season with milk.
We have also found out which laundry shop not to use. Although the clothes smelled nicer when visiting laundry shop Garfield, Dolf’s t-shirts have become noticeably smaller and his linen belt we forgot to remove from his pant turned out 5 cm too short during the next use (and no he did not gain weight). Our laundry shop is called Number 1 (nice names).
We discovered that when people tell you the boat leaves at 8.30h, you actually have to be there at 7.45h, because you could otherwise miss the boat. It is also possible that the boat will leave 9.45h, but you have to take that for granted.
We have met the elder American men you seem to have in every village in South America who just live here of their American pension. This particular guy sells banana bread on the road side and is very friendly. In Honduras we met similar Americans, who for instance married a local wife and run a bed and breakfast and produced his own beer, or just blow all day while using the internet with a satellite dish on your roof.
Football is very important here. Most bars and restaurants have the tv on, and often football is on. In San Miguel we saw a boy walking around with an Ajax shirt of Charisteas (second hand clothes are very popular as well I guess).We even saw PSV playing. But the Spanish competition is of course most popular. Sometimes you get distracted when a goal is scored as most people know who have listened to Spanish comments, because they react quiet enthusiastic with gooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooal for sometimes over 30 seconds. Second best is the Argentinian soap series which look and sound horrible (but so does every soap series in a different language) and third best The Simpsons and the smurfs in Spanish for the kids.
Most traffic occurs by motorbike. Most cars look a bit dilapidated, but the motorbikes are very enthusiastic drivers. Fortunately they don’t drive very fast. Some even turn of the engine when do go downhill a bit (cars tend to do the same). Some have no lights which makes it a bit dangerous at night sine most of the traffic light contains of soft lamps (spaarlampen in Dutch). They like to honk a lot, some of them have removed part of their exhaust to make it sound really nice, while others use their throttle so often they are hard to miss when driving by. But we have also found a solution for that during hot nights: keep the ventilator on. The ventilator makes so much noise that it draws out the surrounding noise. It helps that it is a continuous noise as well, so we haven’t used our earplugs very often.
Each morning when we go to the market or to the bakery (or anyplace actually) we pass the local butcher. Every day she hacks a complete cow into small pieces. There are one or more dogs waiting at the entrance, hoping to get a small piece. Since we don't have a kitchen we have never bought anything, but we always get a nice view on what she is doing when we walk by. Usually in the beginning of the evening, the head of the cow is lying on the pavement. Always good for your appetite if you pass it on your way to dinner.
Next blog I will make some pictures and comments of some peculiarities you see in this city.
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