Sucre Día uno

Weather (and general sentiment towards life): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bjPqsDU0j2I

Llama Count: A happy 0.

Sucre is a city for pottering around. It is too hot to move very fast, and the glare off the white washed buildings  means the city probably has the highest proportion of fake Ray Ban glasses sales per capita. If you stand on one of the many roof terraces you could think for a second you were in Andalucia in Spain then you descend to the street, and Bolivian life is suddenly summed up by the amount of business the wizened old lady sitting on the corner is getting selling super glue.

She is obviously a true believer in the religion of super glue, this is one of the cults that happily exists alongside the ubiquitous Roman Catholicism in Bolivia. Her bowler hat is mended in three places with the precious substance. Her buttons are covered in a liberal amount, as are her shoes... and really there is only one way of keeping the gold teeth from falling out. People watching gets particularly interesting when the cult of super glue collides with Roman Catholicism, it is after all the main ingredient in the plastic figurines of saints, and stiff rosary beads that some other  enterprising women sell. The cult collision reached its apotheosis this morning as one of the bowler hatted women tried to extract a rosary from the hair of plastic saint, without realising she had managed to stick a "Virgen de Guadalupe" to the end of one of her plaits.

Sucre actually has four names, one of which is La Plata (the silver) . Considering the amount of mining that is going on in this area, and the oil reserves in the Amazon regions, it is astonishing how poor the country is. Although the centre of the city is beautiful, the actual city is surrounded by slums. Politics and wealth distribution are extremely complex here. Everyone seems to have a different idea about what is actually going on. The best explanation of the country I have heard came from the German owner of the hostel I am staying in. He pointed out there are eight people employed by the Bolivian mayors office to round up the stray dogs, which are responsible for the deaths of two or three Sucre children a year from rabies. Last year the grand total the group caught was four. Considering there are almost more dogs than bowler hats in this place this is almost an Italian effort at productivity. In fact I think more than ten dogs in the past twenty four hours have stopped me in my path to beg for food.

I spent most of today searching for things to occupy me for the next four days. Have managed to find a not for profit Spanish school that will teach me Spanish in the afternoons, and in the mornings I am going to volunteer at one of the nursery projects they sponsor.

Today has been a very slow day on reflection. The biggest adventure was going to the market. The second biggest adventure was summoning the courage to eat the combination of ingredients I bought from the market. I seem to be becoming dreadfully sentimental, which means I buy whatever the woman who most evidently belongs to the cult of super glue is selling. (I am not offensively sexist there is only one male run market stall I have seen, for some reason he is selling make up.) Ányway this evenings hard task was trying to find a meal that included aubergine, cheese (which on closer inspection was definitely sheeps cheese) one kiwi, brioche, and strawberry yoghurt.