Back to School in Sucre

We’ve been in Sucre, Bolivia for around two and a half weeks now, so I figured it’s time for another update to the blog. After over a month travelling around jumping from city to city and seeing quite a few interesting places, we’ve decided to settle down for a bit and concentrate on something other than being a tourist for a while.

After our nightmare bus ride into Sucre (see previous post) we arrived and immediately noticed that Sucre is the kind of place that we could potentially stay for a while. Sucre is a medium-sized city of around 300,000 people although it feels much smaller. It has a rich history and quite a lot of indigenous culture, which makes it perfect for visitors looking for a place with a relaxing atmosphere along with a fair amount of interesting sights and activities. Due to the high altitude the weather here is a little cooler, but not quite cold enough to lose the flip-flops.

After only a few hours of walking around we made the decision to stay here. The city is clean and friendly, extremely inexpensive, and there are large markets in which we can shop easily. Also there seemed to be plenty of local schools offering Spanish classes.

After a reading a few reviews of Spanish schools in the area, we settled on Sucre Spanish School (http://www.sucrespanishschool.com). We visited the school to enquire about the details and we met Klaus who happened to be the owner of the school. It turns out that Klaus (who was originally from Germany) had come to Sucre three years ago as part of his South American travels. After visiting Salar de Uyuni, he came to Sucre to learn Spanish as well. He ended up falling in love with a local he met at the school, and he decided to stay. He got married and he is now operating his own Spanish school. He was a really nice guy and he invited us to his home for lunch (one of the best meals we’ve had yet…) and he helped us look for a place to stay while we were enrolled in the school.

We ended up finding a great place to stay. We’ve got a completely private apartment with our own kitchen, bathroom, etc. It’s a bit old and run down, but it’s very large and better than most of the hostels we’ve stayed at. Also, it’s only four blocks away from school, and still close to the markets so it’s easy to go out and quickly get some food. We immediately booked it for a month. Only $250. That’s less than 9 dollars a day, which will really help us get control of our budget again after an expensive first month. It was a great feeling to be able to actually unpack our backpacks and settle down. After living in hostels, sharing bathrooms, kitchens, and having very little privacy, it was really nice. They even gave us Internet access for a few dollars extra – although the Internet here is extremely slow. Apparently it is very slow everywhere in Bolivia. We’ve really made use of the kitchen and we’ve cooked quite a few of our own meals over the last few weeks, although we are realizing that it’s not really that necessary when you can go to a restaurant here and get a great gourmet meal for less than 5 dollars. You could go cheaper and get a meal for a dollar or two, but why bother when that big steak dinner next door is only 3 dollars more.

The Spanish classes have been going well. We’ve learnt quite a bit over the last two weeks. We definitely have a lot more to learn but we can finally understand a little of what most people are talking about and we can make ourselves understood if needed. It is quite amazing how much we’ve learned, yet we still have so much more to go. There is so much vocabulary to memorize and countless verbs that need to be conjugated correctly. On top of all that there is the pronunciation. All the words need to have the correct emphasis in the correct part and if you pronounce it incorrectly, you could be saying something completely different. We have four hours of class every weekday, plus homework. It also helps to practice as much as possible. Joh is constantly catching me talking to myself like a crazy person. I have all sorts of imaginary Spanish conversations with myself while I’m walking around. I may look crazy, but I think it’s working. I imagine that after another six months or so we should be pretty comfortable with the language. Definitely not fluent, but comfortable.

We’ve received quite a few emails asking us about how we’re doing with our Bucket List. For those of you not familiar with it check out the Blog Archive – it the second oldest post. We’ve accomplished a few of the easy ones. So far we’ve accomplished the following:

5. Eat meat from an animal that you've never eaten before
Ate llama meat - first night in Bolivia
12. Learn Spanish
Doing it now
20. Rent an apartment in a foreign city for a month and live there.
Doing it now
22. Get invited to a local's home for dinner
Done in Sucre
35. Eat asado (grilled beef) in Argentina
Yep - and yes it was good
38. Drink Yerba Mate in Argentina
been there... done that
44. Collect a souvenir spoon for Jack's mom from each country we visit
So far... although we haven't found one for Bolivia yet
52. Find a traveler that has been to Burlington
Very easy. We've met quite a few travellers from Ontario
63. Completely quit smoking
Haven’t had one since February 10.

There are also a bunch more that we’re currently working on. 57 & 58 are well on their way, as is 61. Number 8 won’t be done. We found the winery, but it just too far out of the way to justify going there. There are a number of them that are being put on hold until later. All of the fitness ones are next to impossible in high altitude. I went for a run last week and I made it around 3 blocks before I quit. It’s really tough to get enough oxygen.

We’ve also been asked what it’s like being away from home and what we miss. We obviously miss our family and friends. On Sundays we often comment about how nice it would be to spend the day with the family like we usually did back home. It’s something you definitely take for granted. Nights out with friends, guys/gals nights, hockey games, etc are also highly missed. Aside from all that the number one thing we miss (other than people) is our nice king size bed. All of the mattresses we’ve used so far have paled in comparison to the one we’ve got at home. Night after night of lumpy mattresses that are either too hard or too soft and are way too small. We’ll probably need some serious chiropractic work done when we eventually come back.

Another thing we really miss is easy access to good English books. We both really enjoy reading, so it really sucks when we need to go out every few days to try find another book. The stores here do not sell English books. The only place to get them are the book-exchange shelves at youth hostels. If you're lucky they maybe have 50 books at the most. Half of them are falling apart and/or missing pages, and most of them are really crappy books that you would never want to read. If you’re lucky they might have an old murder-mystery book or some crummy John Grisham novel that you read back it 1995. It has been bad enough that we’ve decided to spend some money and order two Kindles from Amazon.com. For those of you non-techies who have no idea what a Kindle is, click on this link: http://www.amazon.com/kindle. We had debated buying one or two of these before we left but decided against it due to costs and fear of them getting stolen. Now we regret it. I have no doubt that these will be the most useful and enjoyable things ever for a trip like this. The only problem is that they’re stuck in customs at the Bolivian border and it’s been a nightmare to try to get them released and delivered. We spent all afternoon today going back and forth to the customs office and to DHL with different documentation trying to figure out what we need to do and to get permission to get them into the country. At least it’s given us a chance to practice our Spanish with the customs agents. Hopefully it’s mostly worked out now, although I expect it will be at least another week before we finally get them.

Other than all that, everything is going really well. We’ve got another two weeks left here in Sucre and then its off to somewhere else. We haven’t decided where yet. It’s a tossup between heading north up the western coast through more of Bolivia and then into Peru, Equador, and Columbia, or going to Brazil. We really want to see Brazil and then back again to those other countries, but it doesn’t really make sense to spend all this time and effort learning Spanish only to jump straight into a country that speaks Portuguese. The problem is, if we don’t go now, we’ll have to jump back down later and it would be much less convenient, and we’d probably have to spend a bit of extra money to fly there and/or back again as it would be a bit out of the way. Whatever…. We’ll figure it out.

What we do know now is that we have only around six months left to see the rest of South and Central America. It seems that for the first time now we have a time constraint added to our trip. Ashley and Tyler have gotten engaged (Congrats guys!!!) and are planning a wedding sometime in the fall. Naturally we can’t miss that wedding so we’ll be coming home. We’re already looking forward to seeing everyone again and to be there to help celebrate the big event with Tyler and Ashley. If everything goes according to plan we hope to be home for a couple weeks and spend some quality time with everyone before heading out again for the second half of our trip in Asia.

¡Buenas noches y vamos a ver ustedes en septiembre!