Happy Birthday Bolivia

Just a quickie, penned in a lovely little gringo haunt while I waited for my bus home to Argentina. As a result of this article I got dessecated coconut on my arm so please don´t be too harsh. Also forgot to take my camera to the night in question. Smoooooth.
This un needs a little more tying together and work... and a spell checker.

-----

As luck would´ve had it we arrived in Sucre just in time for the Bolivian Bicentenial. The sparkling and thoroughly un-Bolivian city had decked out it´s colonial to Washington looking buildings in luminescant blues, reds and yellows boasting food festivals, puppet shows and drunken frivolity, covering the usual no to the constitution grafiti.

It was the friday night we arranged to meet somewhere along the food festival. Turned out to be an impossible plan though I´m well aware he tried. From a vantage point on some poor generous fool´s table I managed to see the bleach blond and ripped denim vanish from the crowd half an hour after i was meant to have arrived. Sometimes I medically depend on a milkshake, whatever my plans. Especially in Dulce de Leche country.

I decided I couldn´t possibly catch him so treated myself to some more tiny tamal and fake marzipan and tried to work out what else was going on.

I found a bBolivian folk band and a puppet show; exactly what i needed in the old capital it seemed. The show seemed to be a combination of Bolivian independence and original and uncensored Punch and Judy, complete with high voices, casual violence and a Spanish-Colonial crocodile-looking creature.

The real problem with Latin American cities is it´s almost impossible to differenciate between a firework and a gunshot, especially if you´re a nervous gringo. Before I knew it the number of people in the plaza had doubled. Banners waved and someone was talking through a megaphone about workers and constitutions and unity. I was too tired to get involved in this one, political tourist as I may be. I watched another flare hit the sky and the mad dash of parents dragging children into cafes and puppeteers dragging their theatres into buildings.

A crazy left and dearly loved friend of mine asked me the general consensus on Evo before I left La Paz. I´m guessing outside the propaganda and chilled protests of the new capital he´s not well loved.

I took the nearest side street and headed back to my labyrinthian hostel in some old colonial villa.

I sat on the balcony for a while listening to the shouting and banging drifting on the mountain breeze. After a while of playing guess what made the bang the music and the chatter came back and tipsy party goers, excited children and tired protestors wandered back down the street. I hit th hay and watched CNN world for a while, lamenting the lack of Latin American coverage and of the John Stewart story. Fan girls never die. They just go backpacking.