Trying To Chill

Sucre, Bolivia

When I arrived in Bolivia I had been travelling in Latin America for almost 10 months. I felt completely burnt out on sight-seeing and hostel life - especially shared dormitories. I decided I was going to spend my last couple months abroad hanging out in comfortable cities and taking it easy.

Sucre fits the bill of a comfortable city. Because of its elevation and proximity to the equator, it has one of those eternal springtime climates. Everything is incredibly cheap, and great dining options abound.

For these reasons I chose to stay a while. I booked a private room on the roof of a hostel with a fantastic view of the city. I signed up for a week of Spanish classes and decided to spend a week trying to figure out day-trading stocks.

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The day-trading did not go well. Turns out it's much easier to guess at long-term trends than short-term ones - at least for me. My second day of day-trading I lost $1,000+ mostly on a bad short of Micron.

My friend who had been coaching me on investment strategies felt bad for me and decided to just refund me my losses on Micron. Definitely the most money somebody has ever just given me. I didn't learn a lot about day-trading in my week of study, but I did learn that I had a pretty good friend out there.

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Bolivia belonged to a bloc of Latin American governments governed by a leftist populist autocrat clinging to power and unconcerned with democratic processes. In this case the autocrat was Evo Morales - an indigenous man with a military background.

There were giant billboards of Evo smiling and waving all over Bolivia. He was known for combating poverty and illiteracy in Bolivia and also for claiming that eating fried chicken made you gay. Although you could only run for re-election once in Bolivia, he was currently serving his 3rd term and was almost certain to run for a 4th in 2019.

Another trademark of Evo's presidency was that he had been pushing hard for Chile to return some coastal land to Bolivia. Bolivia had been landlocked ever since it lost a war to Chile in the latter part of the 19th century.

Evo's strategy for regaining the lost land had been to petition the United Nations and to hold military demonstrations where soldiers sang patriotic songs.

I witnessed one of these military parades. For me they were unnerving. Bolivia was nowhere near going to war. But Evo wanted military demonstrations for the same reasons Trump wanted them and the same reasons Hitler wanted them. He wanted an empowered military loyal to him and visible to the political opposition.

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The flip side of Bolivia being really cheap was that everybody was quite poor.

My Spanish teacher was a timid and sweet woman named Jackie. The classes cost me $120 for 20 hours in a week. Of that I'm sure the school took at least half, which means Jackie was making $3/hr or less before taxes. I felt pretty bad for her.

I went on couple outings into the city with Jackie. One time we played Wally with a few other students and faculty from the school. Wally was a mix between volleyball and squash and handball. You played it in an enclosed room with a volleyball and a net. It was like volleyball except you could hit the ball off the walls and kick it.

Another time Jackie took me to a popular cemetery. The caskets were all above ground and they had display cases in the front where family members placed gifts to the departed, especially small bottles of booze and cigarettes.

I saw several blind people in the cemetery selling prayers. They were seated on benches and calling out sales like farmers at a farmers market. Jackie told me that people believed the blind were closer to God and would pay them to pray for loved ones who had passed away.

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My idea had been to hang out in a city and do nothing much. I watched some golf and played a bunch of ping pong at the hostel. I drank some beers and wandered around the city. But I quickly became antsy.

So in rash move I decided to head back to Guatemala to spend the holy week before Easter with a woman I had briefly met there several months prior. We had stayed in touch and I got it into my head that we were destined to fall madly in love.

I was sick of disposable relationships and wanted to give it a shot. So I bought some plane tickets and hopped on an overnight bus to La Paz.