On Internet and Feeling Old

The internet access in my apartment, sadly, is one of the most important things in my life in La Paz right now. It’s been caput for the last few days, and I’ve been in a bit of a frenzy, more anxious and sad, if you will. It’s not even that I end up using the darn thing all that often, it’s just important that I feel connected to the part of the world that I know best in some way, even if it does involve a lot of electronics and binary code. I finally got sick of using the oh-so-slow connections at the local internet cafes, and I decided to give the service provider a call and see if I could get it fixed. After calling the company 3 times and explaining to them over and over again where I live (my Spanish accent becomes very forced when I’m nervous), they finally sent someone over to check it out. Turns out the other night when I blew a circuit breaker I messed up the settings in the modem, so the technician played around with my computer for about an hour and fixed it. I feel that this marks a turning point in my ability to navigate this city – I can now communicate with Bolivian customer service, que bueno.

Having sat around my house for 3 hours, waiting for the people to fix my internet, I decided that a night out on the town didn’t sound like such a bad idea. I walked up and down the Prado, and then met a friend for dinner/drinks at a nice little lounge restaurant. I’ve discovered that altitude really does have an effect on tolerance - let’s just say I was “happy” on two glasses of wine spaced out over 3 hours. Also, a guy who looks like Spike from Buffy the Vampire Slayer (picture bleach blonde spiky hair) tried to pick me up with a poem written on a page ripped out of an E. E. Cummings book. While he gets points for creativity, I’ll let you judge the quality of the work…here it is for your reading pleasure:

“Relentless sky, river of crystal, rain of life, tease the sick, cure the rotten, flow of light, carriage of old red hair, beast of a deranged, and happy lives, cream of prosperity, seed of wealth and sand, crop over the machine, dance with the naked, destroy all cannon (word?), live with cracked walls and heavenly cockroaches spinning heads of mad holy magicians, into a path of thick forests and orgies with an abundance of wine and taste of sweat, bleak- scorn, bliss, laughter of chaotic disasters all in a beautiful mess.”

After dinner I met up with some other friends who had invited me to go to a “bolinche”, which I think is the word here for dance club/bar. It was already pretty late at that point, but I was really curious to see what a club might be like on the Wednesday night of school vacation. After wandering around Sopocachi in the freezing weather, we finally came to the place. It was supposedly “full of people”, but when we got inside there was a very disappointing lack of people dancing to the blaring techno. But after a while they started playing reggaeton, and my little group of five girls started to dance (as fun as sitting on a couch can be) while everyone else, which at that point was primarily 18 year old boys, sat around and stared at the wall. I have never felt so old in my life. Contrast a classy dinner with a club full teenagers…and then I get really confused when I remember that most of them are around my age.

So to that, add getting told that I couldn’t volunteer for a Spanish NGO, and talking to a dermatologist in the Hospital Militar, and that was my day. Also, I think I may have had a minor, minor, minor reaction to some “queso del campo” (farmer’s cheese, which tastes a bit like feta but is more salty and more rubbery) that I bought on the street the other day, but nothing that could keep me down (clearly).