An entirely different world: Shopping for toilets and thoughts on Evo

This first week has flown by and yet I feel so far away it is as though I have been here forever. It is incredible how time passes differently while traveling, each moment is full of something - amazing Andean vistas, beautiful festive music, angry taxi drivers, confusing and sometimes frightening miscommunications at the mercados, shops, in class and even at the dinner table. No matter how strong my Spanish may have been before I got here it is rar that one feels as humbled on a minute to minute basis as when immersed in a new language, an entirely different world.Needless to say my heads hits the pillow hard every night (please excuse any misused sayings...í´m in the middle of this language learning process where I can´t quite speak Spanish with fluency and I already have forgotten my English).
Yesterday morning mi madre boliviana, Ligia, woke me up quite early for a quick breakfast of tea and coconut yogurt (heaven on earth...really!). Afterwards we walked a ways down the hill from our casita to a catch a micro (public bus) to ¨La Concha¨, the biggest outdoor market in Cochabamba and most certainly the biggest, most colorful, beautiful and craziest market (and quite the contender for the biggest, most colorful, beautiful and craziezt place) I have ever been to! My family here has a small building behind their house that they want to rebuild so our first mission was to find a toilet for their new bathroom. For this reason we entered La Concha by way of the contraband venders. We walked quickly by piles and piles of scrap metal where men dug for car parts, door hinges, and tools, by stands of plastic toys until we found the perfect toilet sitting by the side of the road. We each took a turn surveying this toilet for any chips or broken edges because as Marcelo (my Bolivian padre) told me, ¨We don´t know exactly where this toilet has come from¨. It seemed to be in good shape so we sent Marcelo home in a taxi, with the toilet to beign installing. Carmen, Ligia nd I continued on.
At the bottom of the street began the vegetable stands that muist have been blocks and blocks long.Each campesino stood behind bags and bags packed full of spoices, corn,potatoes. In the streets lay piles and piles of garlic, oranges, carrots, pineapples, avocadoes, twers of bread and so much more. Somewhere I read that the population here in Cochabamba is 850,000 but including the barrios outisde the city people here say it is more like 2 million. I´m pretty sure that all 2 million inhabitants of this part of Bolivia were at the narket yesterday. We walked for hours essentially moving in one big mass with thousands and thousands of otheres. Whenever the movement stopped the venders would offer a taste of whatever they were selling - guava,grapes, peanuts, pig liver, quinoa and so on. Young children wrapped in textiles slept, their heads buried in their mother´s laps if not right in the dirt, the floor of the market. What a different life it must be for these little ones growing up just outside the ciyt, just outsied the education system and healthcare, just outside of people´s awareness, frighteningly underfoot. Apparently this i all chagning though with Evo Morales in power. Morales (or Evo as he is popularly referred to here), being from the coutnry and full indigneous blood is beginning to reclaim the land, culture etc. for the Qechuan, Aymaran and 40 plus other indigenous cultures that call Bolivia home. Some people aren´t as happy with this as you might think (or as I thought before coming here) because they he has just turned the tables, gone from one extreme to the other - instead of finding a solution fot the profoundly potent racism, classism and corruption - he has just given power to the opressed and in turn is taking away rights from the more comfortable elite classes who feel very strongly about having earned thier places in soceity.All that I have been able to offer so far to these extrememly passionate and challenging conversations is that perhaps it is more important for the pendulum to swing fromt he historically conservative and money hungry side to the other extreme to eventually land somehwere in between corruption and radical reaction. Like they say quite often here, vamos a ver. We´ll see.
today I fulfilled a long desired goal of mine - that is I wnet hiking in the Andes. Surprisingly, or maybe not so, a few hours of hiking doesn´t quite get you very far or to hardly any of the summits. Even though Cochabamba is at about 8-9,000 ft, the Andes are just enormous beasts! Beeen the natural enorphines one experiences and the added feeling of 10-12,000 ft, it really is quite magnificent and surreal up here! I scaled the side of on summit and came upon a small waterfall-cascading icey cold water. It tunrs ou that the winter here is in fact quite cold, even though we are closer to the equator than I´ve ever been, no snow but dry chilly winds that are hard to combat. Unfortunately I brought extra sandals and not enough wool socks. Tomorrow I´ll go looking for some extra layers. I hope you all are enjoying the hot summer sun. I suppose I´ll just skip summer this year. It is vertainly worth it to be here in this mysterious place. One week down, many more stories to come.
Besitos y amor!

ps-also excuse the distracting spelling errors...the key sare in very funny places on these computers.