It probably has to do with the fact that I love the chaos and disorder of developing countries, the pure life teeming on the streets. You can tell right away that Bolivia is the poorest country on the continent, with the ever expanding capital bearing these marks in the no-frills buildings and modest boulevards of the city. We arrived from an ever expanding outskirt town with unpaved roads and bare brick houses, our first glimpse of the city was that of this photo, a massive bowl-shaped valley completely covered in red-brick buildings on each side.
The bus dropped us off at the cemetary with the crematorial smokestack looming over us. The traffic is as bad (if not worse) than Hanoi, with barely any traffic lights (or cops) in the whole city the cars and micros are free to roam as they want, with hoards of pedestrians frantically crossing the street and plugging the holes between vehicles.
Our accomodation is smack in the middle of the Witches Market- an area teeming with little stalls selling llama fetuses (to bring luck and prosperity) and an array of hundreds of potency pills and potions.
What I love the most about this city is that on its streets you can buy anything and everything imaginable. They sell everything from ribbon to hair, pots to cameras, iPods, fish, towels, shoes and hairspray. We passed areas that had a balls of wool in a rainbow of colors, limes of all shapes and colors, music from all the decades and all the plumbing equipment you could possibly want.
We then walked to the center of the bowl to the modest presidential palace with neighboring bullet-riddled buildings and down the main business street - complete with skyscrapers and ski-mask shrouded shoe shine boys. We even caught a movie (Lucky Number Sleven) in English in a cozy movie theater and went to an interesting contemporary art museum located in one of the last few colonial houses on the streets.
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