Resaca.

It means hungover.

But I honestly wasn’t, I was just really, really tired.

The previous night was fantastic. Well, yesterday in general was great, and last night was the cherry on top.

Bear with me, the interesting part is coming up after this ramble.

Woke up, worked on research for my article. Deadlines are coming up, and the collaboration for this magazine is fantastic. We’ve had two meetings this week so far, during which we sat around the coffee table and discussed culture, politics, and people. We decided upon “Roots” as the next theme for our magazine, a theme that I came up with (woo!), as we’ll all be focusing on the beauty of origination in Bolivia, mine being the farming and organic movement, which I should be researching right now.

Ryle’s writing about Pachamama (the doctrine of mother earth in the andes, enacted by Indigenous president Evo Morales). She’ll be speaking with local anthropologists and said that I can come along for the interview. I’m going to try to go with others for their interviews so that I can glean as much as possible from this Bolivian experience.

Alexandra is covering the winter solstice, which I’ll be attending in Tiahuanaku as I freeze my ass off for good measure, and Catey will be doing a coming of age story, in which she travels to Oruro, her city of birth, to unearth her ‘roots.’ Finally, Maricielo (who is obsessed with asian culture) will be investigating the Asian communities in Bolivia.

We have an incredible housekeeper, Virgenia, who cleans up after us (we five girls and frequent guests are apparently horribly messy) and makes us INCREDIBLE authentic Bolivian food on the weekdays. Probably the best home cooked food I’ve ever eaten (sorry ma). She makes extremely flavorful soup with tons of grains and vegetables for the first course, as lunch is a huge, multi-course meal here, then some sort of rice, usually potato (a staple food here), often vegetables in the form of a salad or other emulsion, and  meat. The other day she made some random salad with peanut sauce stuff on it, so bomb. She even acknowledges my vegetarianism and makes alternatives for me rather than simply omitting the meat. I’m being pampered over here.

I set up my Spanish classes on Monday and started yesterday. The institute is fantastic, offering not only Spanish but also Quechua, Aymara (Indigenous languages), French, Dutch, and others. The two-hour sessions are extremely productive yet somewhat awkward; my instructor seems to think I’m a heavily partying Gringa because she asks me to describe evenings out, which I do, in nearly perfect spanish, but also in great detail.

I’ve learned a great amount from our sessions, which are mostly two-hour chats about everything from religion to coffee in our respective countries. I can imagine that I will be much closer to fluent, if not fluent, by the time I leave on August 14th.

Now here’s the fun part, thanks for hanging in there.

I’ve found a latin lover. Damnit, I didn’t want this to happen, but it did.

I’m not going to describe him in too much detail, because that would violate confidentiality.

But I will say that he has charmed me completely, with his sultry latino eyes and penetrating stare.

He told me that he couldn’t go out, but he surprised me and pulled me on the dance floor at Mangos, where we salsa danced for free.

The other men there were surprised at my level of dance, which in the United States is quite mediocre and under development . They said that I could move very well for being from The United States. Their styles were different, a regional difference that one could not find in the U.S, and they were all very skilled.

He didn’t whip me around or spin me or dip me, but he whispered the lyrics to the songs that the live band played in my ear, our cheeks pressed together, hands roaming from shoulders to arms to backs. Maybe it was the Pacena Cerveza that made me brave, but our eyes were always locked when our cheeks separated.

A random bar-goer that neither of us knew approached him and said that we looked good together.

We caught a cab to the next club, Tteko’s, officially my favorite place. Unlike the majority of the bars and clubs in the United states, this one had a personality of it’s own; and most of the British say that it’s full of “dirty hippies.” In my words, I’d say it’s full of beautiful people.

The music was playing quiet enough so that we could converse with each other but just loud enough so that we would consistently be swaying to the Reggaeton beats. Matamba, one of the most famous reggae musicians in Bolivia performed, and his music was absolutely wonderful. My latin lover showed me this song the day previous, and to my complete surprise, Matamba was the performing artist.

There was lots of hugging, beer and happiness. Although not authentically Bolivian and full of more English speakers than anything, last night I experienced an aspect of travel-encountering people from all corners of the room and all passions in one room. I met a person in my neighboring city, and I met men from Brazil and Israel. I held hands with a Bolivian girl while we danced in the bathroom. I group-hugged with travelers of all walks of life.

We followed a couple of our new friends to a place called Route 36, an actual cocaine-bar. What a trip. Like I said, there are no rules in Bolivia. I definitely didn’t enjoy the atmosphere of this place on the third floor of what looked from the outside like an abandoned building, but it was a new experience nonetheless. Nervous-looking waiters served nervous-looking people plates of lines of cocaine. The menu, interestingly enough, didn’t actually have the cocaine listed, so I was curious as to how the bar-goers ordered. We left pretty quickly after that.

We had no more Bolivianos for the taxi driver (I spent 60 Bolivianos on 4 beers, the equivalent to about 10 dollars, but it does add up) so I threw him a five dollar bill bonus (which equated to 10B more than the 25B fare) and we went home.