¿ so what is that that i really do in bolivia ?

Villazon - is the border town, where i started my bolivian adventure. it gave me an impression of just a one huge market, which only gets stronger with every bolivian city i visit. at the beginning i was terrified of bolivia, and leaving the border town, going further inland made me keep thinking that it will be harder to escape. old good argentina felt like a refuge.
Tupiza - was really tiny and cute, surrounded by gorgeous colorful mountains. but i met Emilio and Clare and wanted to join them on the tour to the Salar, so i said farewell to Tupiza...
Salar of Uyuni - is tha largest salt plain in the world. we paid a 105$ US, loaded ourselves into the jeep, Clare from Ireland, Emilio her argentinian boyfriend, Franky and Rose - an elderly couple from Hong Kong and I. Franky and Rose turned out to be a whole lot of fun! such hillarious characters. Franky of course had to film everything on his video camera and take a photo of every stone and every hill with Rose posing infront of it. In Hong Kong, they told us, you have to work like a dog to reach a status, and finally at the age of 50 they both asked from their bosses a year off to go traveling around South America. Clare was a lot of fun, speaking her weird northern irish dialect i understood only about 50% of what she said, it feels really weird, cause you know english is spoken but your brain refuses to recognize the words. but she still was fun! Emilio's agenda was a conspiracy theory about a few rich that rule the whole world; a great awe of the indigenous cultures of the andies, that we all should learn from them not to consume, polute and generally destroy our planet; and just beeing a good hearted, cheerful fellow. his job was a living statue, one of those that paint their face in white and stand motionless in the middle of the street. and he was traveling and working around the world for the past 8 years. quite some character. than there was Lucia, our cook, a good soul, and Adelio, our driver who was really proud of himself being a direct descendent of the Incas, and was mercelessly trying to get me, an only single femail in our company, saying that i cant be walking around bolivia not accompanied by an inca boy friend. but i bravely withstood his courtship.
on the first day of the trip we stopped in a few local villages which had a really strong impact on me, and i decided that i gotta find me one of those villages to live their for a few weeks, looking after lamas, or babies, or onions and carrots. we got to communicate a little with the local kids, giving away our candies, pens and anything else we found in our pockets and trying to stop them from killing each other while dividing 5 candies and 3 pens between 20 snotty, dirty, yelling children. it was one piece of a local experience!
than went trhough about 5 thousands different lagoons with or without flamingoes. in reallity there were only about 5 lagoons, but i found it so boring, after the profound village experince that i had, that i managed to advance about a 100 pages in my book.
the Salar itself is just a huge white plain, as far as you can see, with lots of tourist jeeps going back and forth. the best thing about it is those cool photos you can take, because there are no perspective clues so you get your friend to look like he's standing on the palm of your hand.
Uyuni itself is a nasty little town, but we met quite a funny bunch of guys riding through south america on their motorbikes, and this only an hour after we met a group that ride through south america on their bikes. some interesting stories...
Potosí - was brilliant! we went to watch a football match, in a pouring rain (and this after i havent watched a single game of the world cup, and didnt even know that israel is not in it), i bought a "Real Potosí" flag, only to use it as a head cover when the rain started, and we ate a lot of ice cream, peanuts, pizzas and other snacks. Real Potosí won. but they say its not because of us, but because no one else can compete with them playing football on an altitude of 4,000 m.
in Potosí i made my first bolivian friends and for some peculiar layout of the town streets i kept bumping into the 5 people i knew there, over and over again, so it was a lot of fun. also it was the culture week, so they had open air concerts every night, and street processions of traditionally dressed people doing the local dance moves. i thought to myself that it's so nice that they can just throw this city party without further ado, where as in israel they would have to arrange about 20,000 cops and the party would not even be pulled through in the end cause every one would be stuck in a traffic to get there, and once he's there will not find a parking for his car so he would have to leave.
besides, we went to see the mines in the mountain once practically covered with silver on the outside, but since then dug all through by the spaniards and everyone else, and now a sad testimony to child labour and desperate poverty. our tour guide said her dad was a miner but she went out to study computer science, and now she's guiding tours and gives a free show of dinamite explosion from what her dady has tought her.
Sucre - it was a luxorious bus ride because the road was paived for a change. it's a white colonial style town, which for me doesnt look much different than Salta in Argentina, after all it was the same colonizers. only that everything is 2 times cheeper, you dont get toilet paper in the toilets (be greateful to even get a toilet, and dont expect the water system to cover for your dirty deeds), your showers will not be more than warm, it's really hard to be lost in the crowd cause there's only 15% whites, and they're all in Santa Cruz leaving off cocaine trade, and they still look spanish and you dont, and then people here seem to forget that socializing with foregners broadens your personal horizones and promotes world peace - there is no time to think about world peace and antiglobalization movements when you have all these hungry little babies your hubby made you before he left and the minimum sallary amounts to 65$ US a month. so there are many beggars on the streets, and only a few people who're interested to start a conversation with you. i miss argentina, did i already say that?...
i´m doing some volunteering in an orphanage. the kids are really clean, well dressed and well behaved. but then you enter a room with 20 crying babies, that calm down instantly when you lift them up, and there is only one of you and they all want to just be held and you think to yourself why did all these people make all these babies for you to lift up, what the hell where they thinking?! and by the end of the day you go home and you forget all about them, and you realize that the whole world has forgotten all about them, and that's how their life is. but than you look in the eyes of those other kids that make a sad face for you to give them a penny on the street, and you think, maybe those babies are better off where they are...