Well, I’ve been in Bolivia for just over a week now, and have shared all the typical experiences of a recent arrival to La Paz: the thrill of a new culture, the difficulty of a new language, the warmth and friendliness of most Bolivians, the pain of altitude sickness, and naturally, good ol’ fashioned travelers’ sickness.
The city is a marvel – a study in contrasts if ever there was one. La Paz is full of office blocks and condominiums, and some areas look every bit the bustling modern metropolis. However, try to take a picture of the bustle, and you quickly discover that every snapshot of the business quarter captures the modest clay-brick houses that stretch up the hillsides surrounding the city, symbolic of a very different way of life. As a general rule, the farther up the hill, the poorer the area.
Admittedly, the term ‘bustling’ gets thrown around by people trying to blog about a new city, but I think the term is justified in this case. La Paz is a city that bustles, if any city could be said to.
The markets are a good example. They’re are a wonderful mix of the beautiful, the tempting, and the weird, all jammed together in extremely close confines. Everything’s for sale. From blankets, pottery, fruit and vegetables, toilets, llama fetuses, ‘new’ DVDs, cell phones… if you can name it, you can probably buy it.
And if you’re a newcomer like me, you can get fleeced and still feel good about it. How can you complain about a shiny new daytimer for $3.50, even if it’s twice what a local would have paid for it?
2 responses so far ↓
Manuela Armenta // 11 January 2008 at 9:39 am |
All very true…and I can say that I love my new day timer very much. What a deal!
Pat Prest // 11 January 2008 at 4:51 pm |
Great photos, they capture the “flavor” of the city very well. One can see the city contrasts in them, and the traffic! Some wide streets it looks like and then very narrow ones, and pedestrian walk-ways or malls, which are probably the market streets.