Days 41 & 42 - Are weekends still weekends when you're on a permanent holiday?

Sucre is also know as the "white city", and it's not because of the colour of the residents

Day 41 was a Saturday, and we spent the morning sorting out a couple of very important things: 

1. We hadn’t cleaned our clothes for about 2 weeks, so we tracked down a laundry. We had 9kgs worth of dirty clothes. Gross.
2. Find a Spanish school - the reason we were staying in 1 place for a whole fortnight was to try and cram some Spanish skills into our thick skulls so that we were slightly less clueless all the time

Sucre is a nice little city, conveniently located at 2800m, which is low enough that I don’t feel like dying every time I have to walk up the slightest incline. It is also pretty clean and safe as Bolivia goes, with a lot of essential businesses located within a radius of about 3 blocks or so from the central plaza. Our apartment was about 5 blocks away from the plaza, in a nice quiet residential street. It didn’t take us long at all to get our shit sorted, and we were off to wander the city streets after stopping off at Mercado Central (the central market) for lunch. 

view from a staircase near our apartment


Epic government building at the central plaza


Another nice white building


The cathedral looking all dramatic and stuff at night


This dude probably did something serious and important, and as a reward, he now gets to be a fantastic receptacle for bird poop



There's this weird mini Eiffel Tower (actually designed by Eiffel himself!) in one of the parks in the city


So many pretty buildings, no wonder Sucre is a UNESCO world heritage site

I love markets with questionable hygiene standards, as they are usually very interesting and have the best foodstuffs. Mercado Central, was no different. The streets around the market are lined with stalls selling random homewares and cleaning products. The bottom level of the market features a courtyard where many juice stand ladies zap fresh fruit into delicious juices and smoothies to order, while huge arrays of vegetables, fruits, spices, dried carbs, etc are sold further indoors along with many stands hung with unrefrigerated whole animal carcasses (apparently this is where to get the freshest meat, but we were way too scared to deal with this and just cooked vegetarian meals whenever we did cook). The upper level features the dining area where traditional Bolivian dishes issue forth from huge steaming pots, where $3AUD will get you a huge meal. I’ll do a separate food post a later on. 

We were pretty exhausted after dying of food poisoning and then straight away becoming desiccated on the salt flats, so we spent the rest of the weekend relaxing in our nice apartment after failing to get to the Mercado Negro (market where clothes and such are sold) before most of the stalls closed.

A charango (traditional Andean instrument) we found in a market. We had a hard time convincing the owner that there was no way this was getting through NZ customs