August 9th Cate

Well, we are beginning to get our feet under us, but we are still in a hotel and only have until Tuesday to find a place to rent, unless we want to move to another Hotel. It is really hard to get a place to rent with furniture, so we are considering buying furniture and then selling it when we leave. Today we went to “La Cancha” (the market) which is a giant kind of outdoor market that is probably 10x10 blocks in size. We priced furniture to see how much it would cost to outfit a place at least bare bones. It was quite interesting trying to find the parts of the market with mattresses, and then kitchen appliances and then living room furniture. They are all in different corners of the market, and if you do find something you like, are you ever going to find that particular stall again? Tom said it would be a great place to use a GPS, next time I’ll bring ours. It will probably the only GPS that will have Sofas and Refrigerators for waypoints. That gave me the idea to create a GeoCache somewhere in the market. Hmmmm….
The girls have missed out on our escapades with our real estate agent, Gloria, as they have been in school. (Gloria is facinating. She is about 1/3 the size of me, takes steps only about 8” long, has the most delicate spikey high heels and is continually sheilding her face from the sun with her date book held to her forehead. She is very cosmo and can hail a taxi and roll her eyes more stylishly than any I’ve seen so far.) So today right after school, we took the girls downtown to see an apartment and let them get the feel for the neighborhood. Instead of a glassy apartment on the fifth floor, which this one was, I’d really like the second story of a house behind a gate with tipica wooden windows and bouganvilla blooming in the window box with a nice garden in the courtyard a couple blocks off a main plaza. We saw something almost perfect except it is too far out of town and we would like to have our location more central so we can walk most places. Hopefully Gloria will come through for us.
Public transportation is wild here. There are radio taxis you order by phone that hve a set price depending on where you go, regular taxis you hail on the street, people impersonating taxis you mistakenly hail on the street, Trufis which have certain routes designated by a route number on top of the car, and then small buses which also have routes. In La Paz they had vans with a driver and a “caller”. The caller yells out the window anytime he sees a person standing by the side of the road a bunch of street names all rolled together very fast. If the person doesn’t respond, the van driver keeps going. I haven’t seen those in Cochabamba however. We have to ask the cost everytime before we get in a cab, as they always charge way too much as we are gringos. Most rides are about a dollar for 4 people in a taxi. Trufis are about .20 cents if you can learn which route numbers go where. We haven’t tried the buses yet. I need to work on getting all six feet of me in and out of very small taxis more gracefully. I hope to look like a giant Gloria by April.