Sucre - Bolivia
Trip Start
Oct 30, 2007
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129
164
Trip End
Nov 20, 2009
Sucre,
Bolivia
Tuesday, April 28, 2009
We also came with the intention of spending a week here learning Spanish. While Brad´s Spanish is pretty good, and enough to hold a conversation (though not including discussions on philosophy or world politics!) the grammar was not crash hot and Karen´s Spanish was still getting there. After going round to three schools that gave us no information (or interestingly enough seemed to speak no English??) we found what we were looking for, a great new Spanish school pretty much exclusively for travellers wanting to spend a week or two to improve their Español
Traditional dress - Fiesta, Sucre
. At USD6ph for one to one classes, it was great value, with Brad´s class as full immersion (no English whatsover, ooooonnly Spanish spoken). After 18 months of travelling, with our most brain taxing duties being working out the time difference with Australia, or changing the shutter settings on the camera, 4 hrs per day plus 2-3 hours homework did not come spectacularly easy, but we made fantastic progress (though the theory of the 2 hr Bolivian siesta in the afternoon was mandatory for us!) As we had accidentally timed it right for the City´s 200 year anniversary, there weren´t many days that went by without some sort of procession, folkloric dance festival or fashion parade (a massive 150m catwalk - we're sure we saw the models' faces age and their hair go grey by the time they´d done their twirl at the end and were on their way back!)
For the last week or two we´d been really good with laying off the alcohol, but once we descended to Sucre (2700m, as opposed to Potosi's 4000m), we realised it was probably just the altitude that was keeping us on the straight and narrow, and not anything to do with our willpower, and we seemed to return to our normal ritual of wine and beer consumption at night (Bummer!). Big nights in point being after a game of Wallyball (like volleyball but in a sort of squash court, with feet and heads allowed - and awesome fun) organised by the school, and after a school-organised cooking class night (the fact they put on jug after jug of Chufflay - 40% wine based spirit with lemonade - polished us off from the word go!) Who said going back to school couldn´t be fun, and for Karen it didn´t really seem any different to being back at Findon High aged 15 and regularly drinking after class (but now with a more mature palate and less of the Summerwine and Passionpop!!!) Even though we were consuming a bit of booze, we did balance it out by flushing out our systems with the most awesome fresh fruit juices in Bolivia. The central market had dozens of these great little stands that blended up any concoction you could imagine, from fresh passionfruit, custard apple, mixed berries and even alfalfa if you felt that way inclined!
After 2 weeks spent in this lovely place, we were keen to put our new founded language skills to the test and move on to the next place, the city of Cochambamba and a detour to the little known National Park of Torotoro.
