Caught in the San Juan Crossfire

If I didn´t know that this weekend marked the Fiesta de San Juan, I would have thought that La Paz was under attack. I learned at a dinner party on Friday night that the celebratin used to be marked by huge bonfires in the streets, but luckily, some sort of Smokey-the-Bear typed movement to ban bonfires got pretty active. So now the preferred method of celebrating is by shooting off massive amounts of fireworks (probably of the variety found at South of the Border, but definietly not of the variety found in suburban northern VA!) all over the city until late into the night. What this results in is lots of explosion-type sounds filling the air, along with the scent of gunpowdery-smoke. You can see why it would have been a little scary if I hadn´t known about San Juan. Even so, every so often something would explode so close by, I had these images of having a bottle rocket come right through my bedroom window. It´s not the same as being bombed, obviously, but still, when you are curled up in bed trying to stay warm and sleep, the last thing you want is a firework projectiling through your window.

Though it´s kind of cool looking out my window at the outlying areas of La Paz and up into El Atlto and just seeing random fireworks go off all over the place.

Other than that, I went to a really fun dinner party on Friday night, and then I went to the National Art Museum yesterday. The art museum took about 45 minutes to get through. But they had some cool stuff and they allowed picture taking, so some of the pictures I´m posting are of some of my favs in the gallery. So it has been a pretty productive weekend for me, despite the fact that I didn´t get out of bed until about 1pm both yesterday and today.

Anyway, I´m in an internet cafe today trying to upload pictures. I think the internet connection here is even slower than the one in my office, which is kind of a bummer. Plus the keyboard sucks and it´s laid out spanish-style, so lots of the characters are in places I´m not used to.

So check out my pictures, link to the right - password is my last name. Hope everyone had a great weekend.

Oh, and lastly, I was feeling super-snarky about the sale of hotdogs at the Ketal the other day when I posted, but yesterday I stopped there to pick up some stuff, and everywhere I looked, folks were buyin´up those dogs. That´s the last time (well, maybe) that I´ll be snarky about something like that.