Cate gets her bird

I wanted a bird as soon as I got here, but with all our travelling, thought I'd wait till we slowed down a bit. I scoped out all the possibilities, even visiting a friend of a friend who has 70 birds as pets. The pet isle in the huge market is a little sad. You have to have a strong stomach. Crates with turkeys, chickens, kittens, puppies and even two little kestrel hawks. The smell is not the worst, but pretty bad. I spotted these loroitos (parakeets) that looked really healthy and decided to get one. It is officially a Canary-winged parakeet, even though we think of parakeets as the "budgies" from Australia. Parakeets are slimmer and have a long tail compared to real parrots. Their native range is about 1/2 of South America.
I named him/her Vientioch. Which is short for the number 28 in Spanish. In the market, the venders are so cute in that they shorten the words of numbers. For example, if something is 5 bolivianos, which are also called pesos, a vendor may say: "Solo cinco pesites". Like, its not that much! only 5 "small" pesos! Once the gal said vientioch instead of vientiocho. Shortening the word. So that's what I call my bird as it cost about that much. (which is $4. this same bird would cost $300 in the states.)So his name is pronounced, phonetically; benty-och. Here is the nice cage I got. He really likes mangos and bananas. We are trying to get him tamed up and he will eat out of our hands and soon will sit on our fingers.