La Paz day 2

Most of my morning was spent writing my paper for Spanish 204 because I left for Bolivia during finals week. So after I finally finished drafting that I went out to find myself some lunch. I ended up in the lovely little spot below called Restaurante Lanza where I had a delicious Milanesa de Pollo, which is basically one giant delicious chicken nugget over some rice (for all of $2 US)

After that I once again began wandering around. It's sort of weird to encounter the fact that Christmas is a summer holiday here (that giant green thing is ostensibly a christmas tree)

I walked a lot in search of a Sim card to put in my cellphone, which I did eventually find and cut down to size with scissors in order to shove it into my iphone so I can have data and phone service. But in my travels I also found some more great murals!

I believe that they sell these dead llamas/llama fetuses so people can buy them and bury them under their house for good luck when they build it. Regardless I was not particularly pleased to see these all while I wandered the Mercado Negro. 

The market was a seemingly endless series of cart lined streets selling everything from sweaters to electrical equipment to toilet paper and cornflakes. 

I also learned that around the world people just really love to play DDR. 

I really want to know more about this "Martin Luther King group" that put up this sign that was outside what seemed to be a school. 

While walking around I eventually entered a large park that had a christmas fair going on it. At the top was a carnival. While it had normal carnival games, it had an overwhelming number of foosball tables that people were enthusiastically playing at. 

Another great site from the christmas fair was this bike rink (seemingly this is what you do if you can't ice skate at christmas)

Then I walked along a skyway to get this great view overlooking the mountains to the south of La Paz. 

I liked this mural of an indigenous woman. There are a lot of indigenous women all over the city that dress in this traditional way with the multi-colored blanket cape and the bowler hat. What was interesting though was to see their children with them, some of whom had very modern western clothes. Globalism strikes again. Now with a working cell phone hopefully I can actually begin doing some of the BA research I came here to do.