HAPPY 4TH OF JULY!

Hello again!

We apoligize for not being as consistent about updating but time is going faster than we think sometimes. Here are some pictures from the Hotel we stayed at that weekend. It was called Buganvillas and as Ben wrote in our last post we had a really good time there.
We had a nice room with this living room, a mini kitchen, and small dining area. It was very nice and a pretty cool experience.








Last week was very interesting. We had a meeting with the headquarters of ASCEND, and are hoping to actually improve the work ethic around here as Ben mentioned also. We went on several visits and taught our classes three times that week as usual. On Wednesday Ben and the rest of the staff went to check out this really nice hotel where the expedition is staying when they come in August. He took pictures and managed to arrange for us to stay there that week too! Fortunately it's right before we leave to go back to the states and will be a great way to end our long trip in Bolivia. Here's what it looks like. It's in the mountains close to an area called La Guardia where we teach our Wednesday classes. Ben says it was amazingly quiet and had some breathtaking views.














Ben and I are very excited to stay here. It'll also be wickedly cheap for us just like the other hotel was.

The next day we went on our usual visits and had our class at the office that evening. We intended to make several more visits in La Guardia the next day but it didn't quite go as planned. Our first stop was to help a woman from our class install a door on her daughters room. Everything went wrong with that door that possibly could've gone wrong. It was too big, made of extremely hard wood, our power tools ran out of batteries, and we accidently smoked up the recharger pack in the wall outlet. Even though we eventually got the door up, it was hardly usable, and would only close when kicked. We're hoping to go by today to fix it, but it took us so long that day that we had to make it work and get on our way. However, that wasn't the most interesting part of that day.

As we have found, if you are at a visit for a long time, the person you are visiting will usually give you something to drink and sometimes even something to drink, depending on the time of day. We went to this woman's house right before lunch, as we weren't anticipating the door taking so long. We had planned to fix the door and go to the hotel for lunch so I could get a look at it. However, she insisted on feeding us enough food to feed her whole family for another day. I still don't know what I ate, but I can describe it. We were first giving what looked like beef soup with a bone in it with a bit of beef still attatched. When we ate it, it was really thick and had little bits of potato that gave the soup the consistency of little pieces of fat floating around in a nasty more liquidy fat. It tasted like bones and fat of a cow. Erwin asked me if I liked it and of course I had to say "Si! Mi gusta!" or something to indicate that I liked it. After the soup she gave us a potato salad and rice sort of dish that was a huge improvement from the fat soup, but definitley not good for me and Ben. We had to eat it anyway. The worst part was the beverage.
When we go to visits and get beverages from the people we are visiting we almost always get coca cola or that cinnamony drink we had our first day here. We think this was an attempt at the homemade cinnamony drink, but we still aren't sure. It had rice in the bottom, that floated up when you drank it, giving it the consistency of vomit. I don't know how to describe the liquid part of the drink but it really made me feel like I was on Fear Factor. The scary part was not knowing what we were drinking. Needless to say, Ben and I had interesting comments from our stomachs all weekend.
We taught our english class to a mighty 2 children that Saturday and discovered that it is pretty hard to keep 2 kids entertained in the forms of "to be" when one of them already knows it and the other has discovered a pencil sharpener.
The rest of Saturday we spent relaxing and lounging around. I caught a bit of a cold that weekend and did not go to church on Sunday because of it. We slept right through church actually because we were both not feeling too hot.
This week has been good so far. Monday was some kind of holiday so we didn't have class that evening. We went on visits that morning and afternoon and one visit that morning was particularly interesting. We ended up in this part of town and at what looked like an American storage facility with the rows of alluminium slide down doors, numbers over the top of each, and cement floors with rather narrow hallways. These were not used for storage. They were people's homes and they were selling things too. I have no clue what they sold, or what the guy we visited even did, but it was very interesting to see a desk in a storage unit with two chairs on each side for the clients to sit in. There were venders going around selling jello in plastic cups, and drinks in plastic cups just like a popcorn man at a baseball game would. It was really dirty and sketchy but Ben said the business part of the visit went well.

Yesterday was Tuesday and Bolivia had a soccer game last night. It was comforting to know that the reason for the gunshot noises was really just firecrackers celebrating a goal. Ben went with some of the guys from the office to play soccer last night. We went on our visits in the morning and afternoon, and rode in the back of a pickup truck (my first time doing that!) from the machanics back to the office.

Today we are going to spend a lot of time in La Guardia again, as we have our class there this evening.

Ben and I are determined to eat nothing but hot dogs today in honor of the Fourth of July and wish we could barbeque something or make a flag cake to go along with it. We wish everyone a happy Independence Day and wish we were there watching the parades too! We have almost exactly a month left and it's going to go fast. Best wishes to everyone and again, HAPPY 4TH OF JULY!!

Ben and Marian