I never learned how to sing "Happy Birthday" all the way in Spanish. I just faked the last couple of lines every time we sang it to a staff member at school. I always hoped that nobody was watching my mouth. I was probably being overly narcissistic, and so I'm guessing nobody ever noticed.
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When I first moved to Bolivia, I lived with my friend Sarah, a girl who owned The Beast, a 1979 Toyota Land Cruiser. I thought that she was cool and brave because she would weave in and out of the La Paz traffic, yelling at the bad drivers and cutting people off. Sure, the Beast was bumpy, but it got Sarah to where she wanted to go. I was lucky enough to go on a couple of South American trips with Sarah, our friends, and The Beast. For our Thanksgiving vacation in 2011 we went to Arica, Chile. The Beast didn’t like it too much, so he broke down a BILLION times (trust me, I counted). This year we went to the same place, but we had a rather different adventure, bumping along the desert in Peru. Oh, lovely Peru. Because of the Bolivian census, we could not travel on Wednesday in Bolivia. The government insisted that we be inside of our homes. Since we didn’t want to waste a day of our Thanksgiving vacation sitting at our casas, we decided to leave for Arica, Chile on Tuesday after school and head first to Peru and then down to Chile. We made it pretty quickly to the Desaguadero border crossing and stayed the night in a funny hostel (we all had to share these little beds with each other). However, the next day was when the real adventure began. We packed up The Beast and headed out towards the desert. The first part of the trip wasn’t so bad. We had some nice roads and some pretty Peruvian landscapes. But then we ended up in the dessert, and the roads looked a lot like this: Lucky for Lucas, he got to enjoy lots of dust on his birthday. There were multiple times where the road split off into four different directions, and we had no idea where to go because there were no road signs; I mean, there really weren’t even roads! So Scott got out the compass and drove in the general direction of Chile. Not sure how we made it. If I’d been in charge of the compass, I’m pretty sure we would’ve ended up in China. The following video shows you just how bumpy the ride really was. They aren't exaggerating; it really was quite bouncy! After we made it back to a paved road (notice how smooth the ride was), I interviewed the participants.Here are their comments on the bumpy road: Here are some more photos from our trip! Steph and Meg are the two middle school | Random Info About Me...Old Blog Link
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